My time at Best Buy started back in late summer 2003, just before my junior year in high school. I was taking some courses at the local technical college (instead of most of my high school classes), so my schedule was really odd. Because of the high school and college credits not aligning very well, I actually ended up with more free time than I would have just going to high school. Being that I had extra time and wanted money, the logical thing to do was apply for a job.

BC

I always thought that working at Best Buy would be more fun than any other retail store, probably because I like computers and electronics, and enjoy shopping at Best Buy. I went online and applied for a job to do one of the things I love doing – fixing computers. I surprisingly got a call a few days later, so I headed down to the Brooklyn Center Best Buy store and sat down with three different management personnel (one at a time) for my interview. After getting through all their questions, they seemed to be okay with me working there and decided to hire me on. There was just one – er, two – caveats: 1) I would be working in computer sales, not be fixing computers like I applied to do, and 2) I would have to be an operations “rep 1” (a.k.a. cashier) first so I could “learn to work a register”. It wasn’t long before I started to learn how little management actually cares about their subordinates, despite all the “your opinion counts” and “you are valued” propaganda the company spews out.

My first “disciplinary” run-in was about a week or two after I started working. I remember being pulled back into the admin room (back room where money is counted and managers hang out to be lazy) by my supervisor. I apparently was inadvertently resting my arm against the counter sometimes, so I was lectured to stop “leaning” because I was being “f***ing lazy”.

Not too long after the “leaning” incident, I was pulled back in the admin room twice – once by the same supervisor as before, and once by the operations manager – about my attitude. Let me take this time to tell you a little bit about my facial structure. It is not natural for me to smile unless I’m laughing. Even for school pictures and such, I was never able to smile without looking completely ridiculous. Well, these little lectures were about how I had to constantly have on a big fake cheesy smile if I wanted to keep my job. I was very nice to customers, I knew how to count money properly, I was pretty fast at getting people through – heck, I wasn’t even leaning anymore – but for some reason, they really wanted me to put on that big toothy grin. As stupid as it felt, I sucked it up and did it anyway.

After a while, we were given a secondary responsibility – selling magazine subscriptions for Entertainment Weekly and Sports Illustrated. The way it worked, they would give someone a number of free issues, and then automatically charge the person’s credit card for more issues unless they cancelled the trial. At first I was able to meet, and even exceed my quota without really even trying, so I got a little pat on the back for that. But then, for whatever reason (the season changing, or the alignment of the planets or something), not as many people wanted magazines, and my numbers were thinning out. That was the point where I found out how much management really cares about the customers. It started out as a command to begin misleading the customers, saying things like “With your purchase you get 8 free issues of Sports Illustrated or Entertainment Weekly. Which one do you want?” and not telling them about the fine print. I was a little leery about that, but I started to do it anyway, and I would only tell them the rest if they specifically asked about it. The point where it started to get really bad was when they wanted us to lie to our customers. They expected us to do anything to sell subscriptions, including denying the fact that they have to cancel, and even tacking on the subscription to their transaction without even telling them.

One day I asked the tech bench supervisor (even though Geek Squad was already part of Best Buy at the time, it hadn’t been rolled out to all the stores yet) if he could help me become a technician, but he just threw some obscure technical questions at me. Because I couldn’t answer all his questions perfectly right away without even thinking, he promptly turned me down and acted as if I had the IQ of a squirrel.

Throughout my seven months at Best Buy Brooklyn Center, I repeatedly asked about being moved to computer sales like I was told would happen, but every time there was one excuse or another. The last time I asked, I was told I wouldn’t be allowed to move because of my “poor performance” with the magazine subscriptions, since I refused to sell them by lying to our customers. That day in March of 2004, due to my being denied the job I was told I would have, as well as the obvious moral issues at the store, I put in my two weeks’ notice to resign from Best Buy. They didn’t schedule me to work at all during those two weeks, and I didn’t set foot in that Best Buy location for over two years after that day.

I thought that would be the end of my Best Buy journey. I also thought that would be the extent of moral problems that I would encounter there. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Counter Intelligence

After high school graduation, I had no idea what I wanted to do with myself. I thought about colleges, but nothing really seemed right for me. So I started applying for jobs. One of the places I applied was – of course – Best Buy. This time it was at the Northtown store. Needless to say, I got the job. My official title: Counter Intelligence Agent.

Everything started out great this time. My boss was awesome. My coworkers were awesome. The customers were, well, customers. I had a lot of fun while I worked at the “precinct”, and I learned a lot there too.

Working at Northtown, however, also had its problems. Let’s start with everyone’s favorite: money. Company policy dictates that after an employee is with the company for 90 days, he is given a review and, if he’s been a good boy, a raise. Pay shaft #1: Since I worked for the company before, I was “not eligible” for the 90-day review. In other words, they counted my 7 months at Brooklyn Center as part of my current employment. Well, okay then. So I’d be getting my 1-year review after 5 months instead of 12. Pay shaft #2: Wrong! Apparently I wasn’t valuable enough to the company to deserve that. So as I watched all my coworkers get raises, my loyalty and hard work for the company were rewarded with nothing.

While at Northtown, I did also run into some other things that weren’t so great. Like the painfully obvious special treatment some of the more attractive employees received from the store’s management. Or like the precinct senior (ranked just below supervisor) burning a customer’s pornography to a DVD, only to go watch it with the general manager in the back room. Or like seeing people get written up when they didn’t do anything wrong, just because the manager needed someone to blame and the person happened to be there at the time. Or because the manager just didn’t like the employee.

There were a lot of things ticking me off at Northtown, almost entirely being problems with management. One day I was looking through the job opening system, and saw something that looked pretty cool, so I applied for it, not really expecting to ever hear of it again. Well, lucky me – I was wrong.

Jonny Utah

The new job was called Black Ops, and code-named “Agent Jonny Utah” based on an inside joke involving the movie Point Break (the incorrect spelling of “Johnny” was purposeful because of a previous project with the same name, but correct spelling). The purpose of this new pilot project was to assist the precincts that had too much work to do and/or not enough labor to do it by utilizing remote-control software. Because of my prior experience with that type of software, in addition to my experience working in the store, I was hired on and became a Black Ops Specialist.

After being hired, I found out about pay shaft #3: My raise of 50¢ was much smaller than those of other former store employees, and my new wage was less than several people being hired from outside the company. Again, my loyalty was rewarded with nothing. This was followed by pay shaft #4: a 46¢ raise, and pay shaft #5: a 32¢ raise a year later. As a comparison, my brother makes more money per hour delivering pizzas than I did fixing computers remotely.

BUT – The job was fun. I enjoyed doing it, and the precinct agents certainly liked having us around to help them. That is, until the outsourcing started.

Delta Force and Victor Company

I’m not sure how, but Best Buy decided that it would be a good idea to start outsourcing Black Ops. It was obvious the whole time that it was all about money, even though we were told numerous times that there were “other reasons” for it. The first group we started outsourcing to consisted of several people at a company called Teletech, which primarily runs customer service call centers. The group, dubbed “Delta Force”, was located in Manila, Philippines, and the people we worked with there were very much like us, were very easy to talk to and understand and were very, well, geeky. They didn’t quite get it at first, and they made a lot of mistakes just like anyone would, but they caught on pretty fast and they were never afraid to ask questions. As much as I hated the idea of outsourcing, I have to admit that Delta Force wasn’t necessarily a horrible thing. However, just when they were starting to get pretty good at it, we started dealing with Accenture – the company that has been doing corporate IT for Best Buy for several years. This is where the real problems started.

The group of people that work for Accenture as part of Black Ops is called “Victor Company” and is almost entirely based in Bangalore, India. Like their Teletech counterparts in Manila, they weren’t very good at the job at first. Unlike their Teletech counterparts in Manila, however, they still aren’t very good at it. They just don’t get it. They can read a list of instructions and follow them just fine, but when something doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to, they don’t have a clue what to do about it. We’ve been told several times about how each one of them has at least a 4-year degree, and how they’re “more qualified” than us, yet none of them seem to have any experience or troubleshooting skills. They may have all the proper classroom book training, but the way I see it, that means nothing if they have no hands-on experience. If they can’t figure out something simple that I (a mere high school graduate) think is common sense, they shouldn’t be working on this stuff.

After a while of dealing with both Delta Force and Victor Company, Best Buy decided to stage a “bake off” (really just a quality-of-work competition) as a test to determine which group to drop and which to keep, since Teletech and Accenture are competitors. It was very obvious to us here that the whole thing was a farce, and no matter how well Delta Force performed, Victor Company would be the group that stays. None of us were surprised when Delta Force got thrown out the window.

As time passed, Accenture gained more and more control of the project, and lost more and more quality of work. Of the epic inventions of Accenture, the most notable are “DUDE” (don’t even remember what this ridiculously stupid acronym stands for) – an online service log tool (which serves as more of a computer repair how-to guide for the obviously unskilled workers at Victor Company), and “BOU” (Black Ops Utility) – a tool that is supposed to automate a huge part of the repair process. Neither of these tools has ever worked the way they’re supposed to, usually excreting cryptic error messages that even the developers cannot seem to solve. It seems that Accenture believes that these tools simplify the job enough that they can hire people who probably can’t even properly operate a toaster. The sad thing about it is that any time any of us sent in any kind of error reports on these things, all we got back were replies stating that it’s something they’re “working on” or excuses for why they’re not going to waste their time fixing the problem. As far as I know, a lot of the problems still haven’t been resolved.

The biggest thing I never understood about the tools that Accenture uses is that they don’t have to be approved by Best Buy in order to be used. All the tools that we Best Buy employees created had to be approved by the Geek Squad development team as well as the legal department before we were allowed to use them, but Accenture can use anything they want on Best Buy’s customers’ computers without going through any kind of approval process.

One of the most disturbing things about all of this is that the whole thing was a big secret for a long time, and still is to an extent. The outsourcing was not only being kept secret from the customers, but also from the stores themselves for a long time. We were actually instructed to lie to any stores asking the location of any of the Accenture workers.

What we ended up doing after the outsourcing was in full swing was quality assurance work. We started out checking the work of all the outsourced labor to make sure things were getting done properly. They definitely weren’t, but no one seemed to care, and as Victor Company grew we ended up phasing out most of the quality checking. Now it is almost entirely done externally, and a lot of people are allowed to post-op their own work, which completely defeats the purpose. We were told over and over again that there would be a continuing need for us and that we could count on keeping our jobs, but…

Transition

One day in November 2007, we were told that we were losing our jobs at Black Ops and being put into other positions. Our jobs had been officially outsourced. We were at first given very few details on what the new jobs were and what our options were. Later we found out that there were two places we could end up: a brand new pilot project dealing with routing analysis, or on Secret Weapon. There were 3 positions open for Secret Weapon, and we could apply and interview for the job. Secret Weapon is a group of people that support Double Agents (in-home technicians) over the phone, and they have taken on some of the Black Ops “quality control” responsibilities. The people that were hired for those positions were obviously preselected, and the interviews were conducted only as a formality. The rest of us got shoved into the new pilot.

Tetris

The new pilot program – “Project Tetris” – was created as an attempt to fix the massive problems with the way scheduling and routing is set up for Double Agents. It has absolutely 0% to do with Black Ops, fixing computers, or anything else I know how to do. The job consists of a lot of analyzing statistics like headcounts, schedules, budgets, labor, profits, and market mapping. After looking at it, you have to make sense of it, find out what the problems are, and fix them. Not my cup of tea. It reminds me of high school math class. While I was at Tetris, I spent a lot of time doing programming (something I actually do understand) to make it much easier, faster, and more accurate to pull mass quantities of schedules and profiles from STS (the scheduling system for Double Agents). I knew I couldn’t just keep doing that forever though, and I couldn’t figure out how to do the work we were supposed to be doing, so I figured I had to get out of there. Not to mention that with all this extra work came pay shaft #6: no raise.

Store 4

I ended up transferring to the Minnetonka store to be a CIA again. The basic job was just about the same as it was at Northtown. This time I didn’t have the good aspects though, like a good boss or coworkers. No one was at all helpful, and half the people that worked there didn’t appear to know what they were doing. The supervisor was less than exceptional, often blowing off responsibilities and throwing phrases like “figure it out” when asked for help with something. People left terrible notes, if any, on unfinished work, making it nearly impossible to know what was going on with anything. Having about 8 different bosses doesn’t help much either, especially when they give you conflicting orders. Transferring to the store was a royal pain as well. Apparently the system isn’t set up very well for corporate employees to transfer to stores, and it took several weeks and several calls to the helpdesk before I could log into the various store systems. The part that was really irritating about it was that the people in charge of getting the information transferred over acted very unprofessional and rude about the whole situation, acting as if it was somehow my fault that the system wasn’t working correctly.

Done With It All

I had been planning to stay at Minnetonka until June when it comes time for me to move to California for school. I just couldn’t take it anymore though, so near the end of March 2008 I decided to put in my two weeks’ notice. I was very happy to leave there, but at the same time a little disappointed that such a huge phase of my life had to end that way.

So What?

I guess the point I am trying to get across here is that even with their good reputation, Best Buy really isn’t any different from any other large corporation. For local leadership, you really just get the luck of the draw, and you might end up with great people or not-so-great people. But the corporate executive view will always be about one thing and one thing only – money. I remember at the end of this past fiscal year how much the company bragged about 2007’s net income of $1.4 billion. CEO Brad Anderson’s total compensation for 2007 was just under $5.6 million, yet the company felt it had to lay off 180 hard-working employees from the corporate campus, not to mention all the other “re-orgs” like the one that happened to Black Ops. Just 1% of Brad Anderson’s income last year could have kept 2 Black Ops agents employed for another year. For a company that brags about being “people powered” and how much they care about their employees, there sure seems to be a bit of a gap there.

Tags: Rants, Work