training

#902.5: Spoogecakes 2 – Electric Boogaloo

Today’s chapter of Record Store Tales is a direct sequel to Part 35.5:  Spoogecakes!

 

RECORD STORE TALES #902.5: Spoogecakes 2 – Electric Boogaloo

LeBrain HQ has eyes and ears everywhere!   We are like Hydra:  cut off one head and two shall takes its place.

If you recall, when I launched this site in 2012, I had one anonymous hater.  Really nasty, too.  You can read the comments yourself.  This came right out of the blue.  The identity of the hater was confirmed by one of her co-workers at the Record Store:  an employee there at a location I once managed.  I had barely begun publishing my stories.  “Grow up or shut up,” went one of the kinder comments.  This only inspired me to keep writing, with more energy and frequency.  Obviously I had struck a nerve!  I actually owe this hater a huge thanks.  The drama she created catapulted me into another level, and the hits have only increased in the years since.  She provided the launchpad, so I do owe her my gratitude.  Craig Fee dubbed her with the nickname “Spoogecakes”, and I ran with that name for the Record Store Tales that followed.  I turned her hatemail into a chapter of the story.  Lemons into lemonade.

Hey, you wanna troll Record Store Tales?  Then Record Store Tales will troll you right back.  Some of my former co-workers there thought it was incredibly nasty of me exploit her vitriolic comments for views the way I did.  (What they thought of her actions — my so-called friends who were groomsmen at my wedding — they didn’t share that with me.)   I hadn’t planned on writing about her at all.  She was a non-entity and completely unimportant to my story.  She wrote herself in, as far as I was concerned.

Fast forward to the present:  she’s still at the Record Store, and just as endearing as ever.  A few months ago, I was just sitting here boppin’ through my day, when I got an email from a source bearing a tidbit of inside gossip.  My source revealed that Spoogey has been promoted to a manager of some kind, and isn’t the kind you’d want to work for.  I have obscured certain text to protect the identity of the informant, but the bones of their message are below.

“[Spoogecakes] is training someone, and that person has to leave home at 4 AM to get to the store, to suit [Spoogey’s] needs.”

Good luck with training someone after they’ve spent five hours on a bus.  Hope that worked out for ya.  Stuff like that never happened when I was training.  I drove people to and from training if I had to.  (Ask Shane.)

The training in question involves a box of used CDs that we would use to practice buying techniques.  How to check the discs for quality, how to check inventory, and how to price them.   The process of this training was previously detailed in Part 94:  Staffing.  (You can also watch a demonstration of me doing this in a live stream from last year.)  In all my time at the store, I never made anyone get up at 4 AM for this.  The story continues:

“In retaliation, the trainee wanted to leave a surprise for [Spoogey] in the box of used discs.  I got the impression it was a used sex toy.  The plan was for her to find it in the box with the other used items.”

My source said that the gist of the conversation was that “no one likes [Spoogey]. The manager of the store was in disbelief of her antics.”  The source also suggested that the conversation would have been a lot worse and more graphic if there were not customers in the store.

Some things never change!

#507: Buying School

money

GETTING MORE TALE #507: Buying School

One of my (many, many) jobs at the Record Store was running our “buying classes”.

The problem was this:  teaching new employees how to buy used CDs was a very intensive process.  It made sense for us to train multiple people at once in one session.  We wouldn’t even try to teach an employee how to buy until they’d been with us for two months.  Once they had a little bit of experience under their belts, we’d start training them on being a buyer.  One of the best features of the stores was that everybody was a buyer.  You didn’t have to wait for a specific person.  Anyone behind the counter could buy.  We had to make sure that every single person was 1) fair, 2) competent, and 3) ready for the responsibility.

The first two buying classes were done with two instructors – myself and one of the bosses.  (The first one was memorable — one guy came in with a cocaine hangover after spending the night partying too hard with the Dandy Warhols.)  Subsequently, I handled the classes solo.  We would generally have three to four new employees in each class, all from different stores.

We had a dedicated computer just for these classes, and of course it was an old outdated one.  We couldn’t afford to buy a computer just for these training classes, obviously.  Do you remember how huge an old computer was?  I’d check in early and begin setting up the monstrous hardware which consisted of a PC, a titanic heavy monitor, keyboard, mouse and receipt printer.  Or, if the class was being held in another city, I’d pick up the equipment at our home office and drive it (and sometimes employees too) to the class.  If I was lucky, about two months later I’d see a mileage cheque.

We also had several large boxes of “training CDs” to help with learning scenarios.

For example:

  • CDs that were scratched, but repairable.
  • Discs that were top-scratched or pinholed, and not repairable.
  • CDs that were in mint condition.
  • CDs that were missing a component, such as a back cover, or one of multiple discs.
  • CDs that were so common that we always had them in stock.
  • Box sets.
  • Promo discs.
  • Classical music (we used a different buying structure for classical albums, based more on record label and series than artist and title).
  • Discs from every section of the store.
  • DVDs and video games too.
example of pinholes

example of pinholes

There was a lot to teach, and I tried to make it fun, even though much of it was very tedious.  A lot of repeat, a lot of doing the same thing over again, and a lot of waiting around as people took their turns going through buying scenarios.  The classes were a chance for me to unbutton a bit and step out of the box.  I had fun with the scenarios.  I would play different characters.  The white trash dude who watches everything you do and won’t shut up and let you think.  The crackhead looking for a their next rock.  The down-on-my-luck guy with a sob story that may or may not be true, who just needs enough money for the bus.  And of course regular, every day, normal polite people.  Because those are the exact situations they were going to experience in the front lines of the Record Store.

Not to mention (and we’ve been through this in more detail before, in Part 92: Staffing) there are many different versions of CDs.  They can be similar, but have different tracks.  It was crucially important to buy and enter these things accurately.  If you didn’t, a customer would say, “I was looking on the internet and I saw you had the 1995 remastered version of Diary of a Madman,” and find that you just entered it wrong.  It’s not the 1995; it’s the remixed 2002 one that nobody wants!  Somebody made a trip in to get that CD, and you fucked it up.  We tried to avoid that!  But there’s only so much you can teach.

Then, to finish the buying procedures, I had to teach them about the bi-laws regarding buying used goods in the province, and how to take ID from customers.  They had to know what ID’s were accepted, how to properly enter the info into the computer, and also how to deal with difficult customers who didn’t want to show their ID at all.

It was actually a pretty good system.  Whoever came up with it (probably the same higher-up that sat in the first two classes) did a good job setting it up.  Giving credit where credit is due, it worked.  But also giving credit where credit is due, I worked my ass off in these classes, and made them my thing, while it lasted.

Training can be made fun.  I think playing out scenarios is a great way to learn.  Let’s face it, there is a lot of pressure on new employees during training.  Doing my best to make it fresh and enjoyable was my strategy, and I think the results speak for themselves.  A few people I trained ended up lasting over a decade, and that’s something to be proud of.