As AP I am at the bottom of the barrel as far as positions go at Best Buy. It technically is possible to advance in the asset protection field but promotions are very few and far between. If you hope to advance in the company you have to take a sales position and work your way up from there. If you do anything other than sales don't expect to ever get promoted. There are people who have worked at my store for over 10 years and still have not achieved any kind of leadership position because they are not in sales. A lot of those people are also lazy and useless too so I guess it's not totally Best Buy's fault. Even if you are in a sales position you will have to wait a long time to move up.
Leadership at Best Buy is dismal. They care more about hanging out with their friends than taking care of customers. As a result the costumer service at my store is absolutely horrible. Almost everyday I get customers telling me they didn't get any help at all when there were a bunch of employees standing around talking and that they will never come back here. I don't blame them for not wanting to come back. I wouldn't. I try to tell the sales people on the radio that a customer needs assistance and most of the time I get ignored. I have to stay at the front of the store and monitor the cameras so I can't help them either otherwise I would be happy to help.
Yesterday a customer asked me for assistance and I told him I would get someone to help him and I called over the radio for someone to help him. There were at least 6 employees in plain view just standing around talking in groups but not a single one of them came to help this guy until after a minute or 2. What does this have to do with leadership? They don't do anything to stop it. They are often in those groups talking to the other employees. Yes they will send an employee to go help someone but they don't take a strong stance against the employees standing around ignoring customers. When the managers are not around the sales associates will go back to ignoring customers and trying their best to avoid doing their job. My store has been threatened with being closed before and I really do believe it will be happening next year. The managers have shown no back bone with dealing with the problems that plague my store. The Google review for my store has it rated 2.5/5 which is a bit high in my opinion.A lot of times the mangers themselves disregard complaints that customers have and act like there is no problem.
We also suffer from being very understaffed. I don't understand why the managers insist on running skeleton crews everyday except Friday and Saturday. There are plenty of times where we only have one cashier scheduled for the day and they are only there for a few hours so most of the day there won't be any cashiers. I have also seen plenty of days where there were no cashiers scheduled at all. So then the customers have to go wait in the customer service line which takes forever because the customer service associates are dealing with returns, exchanges, warranty problems, and all sorts of other time consuming stuff. A lot of times I have seen customers just put a product down and leave because they don't want to stand in a long line that isn't moving.
If your job involves standing in one spot all day then expect start experiencing feet, leg, and knee pain. Two of the girls have been having a lot of problems because their job involves standing in one spot all day. We aren't aloud to sit and they don't give us any kind of comfort mat to stand on like my other job does. It would really make a huge difference because right now we pretty much stand on hard flooring.
