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If you worked at Fry’s Electronics between March ’02 and July ’07, you can participate in a newly announced class action settlement. You should be contacted directly, but you can also download the settlement and claim form from here. [FrysForum] (Thank to Luis!)
Say you want to staff your call center with friendly, high energy, intelligent people who want to help customers and who enjoy their job. How do you find them? Well, apparently you hire people, train them, then offer them $1,000 to quit.
A second Hollywood Video employee has written in to counter the claims made last week by an anonymous employee—he writes, “It sounds like whoever wrote in initially has a particularly evil district manager who is instituting his own policies,” and says that person should “go over his DM and talk to someone at corporate.” But for the rest of us, what matters is that “The EW [magazine subscription offer] never went away, they just stopped requiring employees to push it. They’re actively promoting it again. There’s no ‘silence is acceptance’ however, and we need to scan your credit card (an additional time) to activate the offer.”
Anthony paid Circuit City $1,271 for a new 40″ Samsung LN40A550, but what he received was a “scratched up, dinged to hell, beaten and abused FLOOR MODEL OPEN BOX” LN40A330. As a Circuit City employee, Anthony thought exchanging the TV or receiving a refund would be a cinch. Boy, was he wrong.
“We’re not the mean waterboarding company that people think we are,” says the general counsel for Prosper Inc., a company that sells “coaching packages” over the telephone. They’re being sued by a former employee who says he was held down as his boss emptied a gallon jug of water into his mouth and nose as part of a team-building exercise. Our tipster Rachael writes that it’s like “an episode of The Office gone horribly wrong.”
Why play solitaire when you work for the utility company and can look up the mayor’s phone number? An Associated Press investigation reveals that casual snooping is widespread among employees who have access to large customer databases. According to one utility executive, it would be “difficult, if not impossible” to ferret out employees who use sensitive data for identity theft.
Hey St. John’s Dairy Queen workers, you forgot to make your Facebook group private. Now your hilarious little videos of each other mooning the drive-thru and waging indoor snowball fights are all over Canadian television. They just don’t understand your jokes about “using meat the next day that wasn’t kept overnight in the cooler.” Neither do the health inspectors.
U.S. Airways has something of a problem when it comes to transporting their customers’ belongings. They’re just not very good at it, particularly in Philadelphia.
Surveys! Is there nothing they can’t measure? Apparently yes: the number of Americans who shop online while they’re at work. According to Spherion, 30% of workers use their computers at work to shop online during the holidays. Accountemps says the number is 21%, the Memphis Business Journal says 38%, and Shop.org says it’s 54.5%.
The odds aren’t in her favor—in recent years, only 16% of employees who filed complaints with the Labor Dept.’s Occupational Safety & Health Administration won—but OSHA has agreed to open an investigation into Chalace Lowry’s claims that after she reported suspicious activities at her Wal-Mart headquarters job as she’d been trained to do, she was outed to her boss as the whistleblower, and when she asked to be moved to a new position she was told to look for one herself and that Wal-Mart would make no guarantees about her job security.
When Chalace Lowry reported her suspicions that her boss was possibly engaged in insider trading, it set off a four-month-long ordeal where she was questioned repeatedly by various departments within the company, outed to her boss as the snitch, and—when she subsequently requested a transfer—told she had 60-90 days to find a new position on her own or get out—not the most supportive response from a company that only a few months earlier sent her to a training seminar on corporate ethics.
Walmart workers who were forced to work through breaks won an additional $62 million Wednesday. Sounds like a ton of cash, but the AP says, “The payments for lost wages are expected to range from about $50 to a few thousand dollars, depending on employment history.”
Business Week sent a couple of its own “secret shoppers” to some Wal-Mart stores to see how their new customer service initiative was faring, and found that the employees they spoke with not only didn’t care, but really wanted customers to know this. Said one employee, “If Wal-Mart doesn’t care for me, why should I care? There was this horrible smell in the store the last two days from some overnight spill. They did nothing about it. It got so bad that on the second day the fire department came by and we all had to wear masks.”
Home Deport employees didn’t feel like using the saw, so they hung a sign that claimed: “saw not working.” This offended marketing guru Seth Godin:
When I noticed this sign on the big saw, I took a picture, intending to write about how important it was to have key customer service feat ures up and running. Then, a few minutes later, a guy in an orange smock walked over, took the sign down and asked what he could cut for us.
Starting this September, all Macy’s employees will be required to wear black clothes to work. The dress code, which is designed to help customers identify apparently-elusive sales associates, is already in effect in east coast stores, but will be expanded to the 113 stores composing the midwest division. While consumer behavior specialists rave about the change, union officials have filed a grievance against Macy’s for requiring workers to purchase new clothes. Do employee uniforms improve your shopping experience? Tell us after the jump.
Walmart is changing things up with some new software that will schedule employee shifts based on traffic and not sales. This makes employees mad. Why?
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