Working at Radio Shack in the 1990s

First, some background:

I grew up in the United States.  I dropped out of high school in the mid-to-late 1990s and got my GED.
Growing up, I never thought about going to college.

For the longest time, I wanted to be a police officer.  I think this was at least partially influenced
by my lifelong hobby of listening to scanner radios.  [See future entry on scanner radios]

Then, because of all of my time spent hacking the telephone system as a teenager, and because I had found
marijuana and I figured there was no room among cops for pot heads, I decided that I wanted to become a
lineman for the telephone company and eventually go on to work in a Central Office (the buildings that house
the telephone switching equipment) by picking up a two year Telecommunications Systems Engineering degree at
the local community college.  In fact, at age 18 I applied to become a lineman with the local telephone
company.  [See future entries on GTE, hacking the phone company]

Along the way to this vision, a high school buddy of mine who was already working at a local Radio Shack
told me that I could for sure get a job there and that the pay was good because it was based on sales commissions.

As an aside, I've been a lifelong electronics, computers, and radio geek since a very young age.  I was one of
countless kids growing up in the 1980s and early 1990s that hung out at Radio Shack stores and played with
the TRS-80s, programmable pocket calculators, and other gadgets whenever our parents took us to the mall.
So, the job seemed like it should be a good fit anyway.

And just like my buddy said, getting the job was a piece of cake.

Working at Radio Shack:

I worked at Radio Shack toward the end of what I think was its heyday.  There were still some fairly technical
folks working there as salespeople (Amateur radio operators, mostly).  It wasn't uncommon to find a soldering
iron with plenty of evidence of use in the back of a store.  I would commonly draw out connection diagrams for
customers, be it for a new telephone extension, a new A/V system, or for hooking their computer up to something new.
I personally on several occassions soldered things together for customers.  And as a licened Amateur radio operator
myself, I was even able to send off to the Tandy / Radio Shack corporate headquarters in Forth Worth, Texas and get
a custom engraved name tag with my call sign on it!

This was also a time when Radio Shack salespeople had to wear long-sleeve button-up collared shirts, pants, belt,
and quite a few guys wore dress shoes.  Few Radio Shack salespeople were women, although one of the best performing,
highest grossing Radio Shacks in town was run by a woman.

My pay ended up rarely being much above the Minimum Wage, mostly due to my not working in high enough volume stores
(a coveted position, to be sure) and also because of Radio Shack's very complicated sales commission model.  One could
very easily find themselves working "out of commission" (no commission on top of essentially the Minimum Wage) if you
were in some random strip mall Radio Shack somewhere.  Later, I would finally get to work at some malls (real shopping
malls, not strip malls) and the money could be substantially better, especially during the "Golden Quarter."  Also, "spiffs."

[A note on "spiffs": Slang for an immediate bonus paid for a sale.  These are where you could sometimes really make
some good hard cold cash.  Radio Shack would often have a paid bounty (spiff) out on selling, for instance, cellular
phones or computers or getting people to sign up for some long-distance telephone service or another, and also often
for selling Tandy Service Plans (TSPs, which were very expensive but were also extremely flexible and would cover just
about anything so some customers really liked them).]

One of my favorite take-aways from working at Radio Shack was the fairly extensive system of self-led training that
they put us through.  Each store would have a big set of training workbooks (about 10) in the back.  There were
training workbooks on basic AC & DC electronics, telephone systems, A/V systems, basic salesmanship, selling intangibles,
etc etc.  You had like your first 4-8 weeks of employment to read through each workbook (about 50 pages each) and take
a multiple choice "Scantron" test at the end of each workbook (about 30 questions each), submitting each "Scantron"
sheet to the District Sales Office by Fax where they would be graded and only credited to you if you made passing scores.

Some little lifelong take-aways that I got from the training and from my year or so working there:

* "Ask for the order": There's a huge numbers game to salesmanship.  Say you're trying to get people to switch their
  long-distance provider to company X.  Make sure you ask every single customer if they're interested in it.  Don't
  ever be pushy.  Just ask.  If you've already built up some rapport with someone then they aren't likely to be combative.
  If they say "no thank you" then simply move right along like you never asked.  Using this simple approach and the
  number of customers we had visit each day, I could always easily meet whatever the District Sales Office quota was,
  or whatever the spiff required (i.e. sell 2 cell phones in one day, get an extra $75 cash).  I'd also get $2,000 and
  $3,000 computer sales this way.  Someone would be stopping in for some batteries.  I'd casually ask them if they happen
  to be looking for a computer, and an hour later they've opened a new Radio Shack credit card and put a new $3,000 computer
  on it.  So just ask for the order.

* The difference between being a clerk and being a salesperson: Clerks just ring up whatever the customer came in for,
  salespeople sell things to the customer.  Radio Shack would even look for "clerks" or "clerking" by analyzing all of
  the nightly POS (aka cash register) data that was uploaded by dial-up modem to Forth Worth each evening -- finding
  clerks was easy because the average number of items per sales transaction for them was always much lower than of
those who were actively "selling."  Radio Shack didn't want clerks.

* The opportunity presented by bad customer experiences: Say a customer comes in with a telephone that broke the day
  after its one year warranty expired.  They come in to complain and to have the phone replaced.  Say you look the
  other way on the warranty, replace the phone, and even throw the customer a free 8 pack of AA batteries.  The
  customer can actually be left with a better impression of you as a place to shop, or as a salesperson that they
  can trust, than if the phone had just kept on working and they never had to come in for service.

NOTE: For my fellow autistic readers, the computer in the back of each store was a PC running SCO Unix.  It had a
modem and would dial into a computer in Forth Worth at the end of each night to transmit data to and receive data
from headquarters (inbound automated inventory replenishment shipments, sales data, customer name and address info, etc).
I never fooled around with it much beyond poking around enough to know that it was running SCO Unix.  Things I
considered but never actually did included using the line monitor on my lineman's handset and an inductive pickup coil
to record the DTMF digits dialed by the modem and to even capture the modem traffic for later off-line analysis.

CREATED 2020-03-29