Is there anyone who knows less about office supplies than the employees of an office supply chain? Ask if they have computer backup tapes, and they scratch their head. Then, ask for a DLT tape cartridge, and the blank stares remind one of a lobotomized goat. Repeat your request, and you’ll realize that not only do they not know what you are talking about, they don’t even speak English.
I gave up and ordered the DLT cartridges from the Staples website, which promised to deliver today. It also admonished me to fill out a driver release form and tape it to my front door in case I wasn’t home.
Guess what? The driver didn’t leave the package. A call to an unhelpful Staples employee revealed that he “might have thought it wasn’t safe.”
I do not live in a slum, an inner city, or a high traffic apartment building. I live in a townhouse in a safe and relatively affluent suburb of Washington, DC. And I am pretty certain that people aren’t in the habit of stealing DLT tape cartridges to feed that drug habit, even though they are pretty pricey as tape goes.
I needed those tapes today. (Actually, I needed them several days ago, but they’re not carried in stores.) The practical upshot of all this is that there’s yet another delay in getting the tapes to the DVD replicator for my friend Sara’s DVD project — the first set of tapes had errors, and it proved impossible to find new tapes to replace them.
May I suggest that, if at all possible, you avoid shopping at Staples or Office Depot until they get around to hiring some employees who actually give a damn about the industry in which they work.
If Staples paid its workers a living wage, they might be able to get people who speak English and who can handle remembering the names and uses of all of the many different supplies you can find at Staples.
Yes, another completely valid issue. At $60 a pop for DLT tape cartridges, and stores that are hardly showplaces, you’ve got to wonder where Staples is spending its profits. Certainly not on their employees.
That said, when I worked at various minimum wage jobs back in the 80s, I still made an effort to know what I was doing and learned about what I was selling. It’s impossible to make a living working at a minimum wage job, that much is patently obvious. But by not being able to even do that job halfway decently, why would a company hire that person at any price? I think it’s another example of the “bare minimum” standard of American business these days.