Introduction - Welcome!
Hello, and welcome to my blog. My aim is to make this an entertaining blog about the frustrations and amusing situations that arise when one works full time at a photo shop (where we sell cameras, develop pictures, and offer related services and products). While the subject matter might not sound intriguing (I’m sure you would not want to work at a store all day) do trust me in that plenty of situations arise there that are truly entertaining. When I started writing this (thoughts/reflections/observations about my job), I’d been working at a photo shop for only three weeks, and the funny and absurd stories and observations I had already collected would by themselves make for interesting reading, I promise you.
I’m not just writing to entertain the world, of course. Like any blogger, my main goal is to vent my frustrations, and to give you a glimpse of the mini-hell of doing what I do (in my case, working retail). But after hearing two people tell me that my experiences would make a great blog, and after thoroughly enjoying blogs about porn video rental stores and special-ed classrooms, I think my stories will be painful in the most entertaining way, if I manage to write them well enough.
Now, allow me to introduce myself… or, rather, not to. It should be obvious that my co-workers and especially my customers should not find out I am writing about them. Also, it would probably be alienating to you if I told you too much about myself, like my hobbies, my tastes in books and movies and TV, what I studied in school, where I’m from, and so on. Suffice to say I’m a male in my early twenties, looking for a job in the field I studied in school, but so far failing at that, and having to work retail to pay the bills. Possibly the only pertinent details are that I am a bit of a gadget freak and love digital cameras of all shapes and sizes, which is what led me to work at a photo shop. I’m sure you’ll be able to deduce other things about me as the blog progresses.
If you have any questions or comments about this blog or about myself – or, heck, if you want camera or photography advice – feel free to
email me. Also, please post comments/replies to the posts in this blog - Anyone (that means YOU) can add your comments to the blog. (Thing You Can Deduce About Me #1: I have a big ego, and think you will bother to write me, and comment on my writing).
I should also say, I’m really not a bad person, IMHO. However, dealing with impatient customers all day who do not try at all to figure things out for themselves, and having to behave according to conflicting expectations and mutually exclusive ideas of what a good salesman is, can make one kinda tired of acting nice, and here I can compensate by being extremely not-nice. Most of what you will read in this blog is cynical bitching, me making fun of customers who don’t really have any good reason to know as much about gadgets or photography or computers as I do. It will sound intolerant, disrespectful, and overly harsh. (So while this blog is not as bad as this guy's site, my blog is largely inspired by his tone and the nature of his complaints. One of my favorite quotes by him: "People are the worst!").
Please believe me when I say this is not the way I talk about (or to) people in real life. Thing is, in writing down the initial set of thoughts that led to this blog, writing down the STUPID things people said/did, turned out to be more fun that I imagined (because, of course, it made me feel smarter than everyone else), so it kinda snowballed into a major theme. I can only ask you to trust me when I say I’m a pretty nice guy. It’s just that a blog entry about how much I love my family, how awesome my girlfriend is, or how much I miss my little dog who now lives far away, would seem out of place here (but would be a better reflection of who I am most of the time). This is a distillation of all the bitchiness and apathy and irritation in me. I promise to try my hardest to make it sound entertaining.
All right. Enough with introductions. Let’s get going.
Good vs Pushy salesmen, and Things I Can't Control
When I applied to this job, I was asked what I thought the difference was between a good salesman and a pushy one. I answered that a good salesman finds out what a customer needs and works to fill those needs, while a pushy salesman tries to sell as much as possible without any regards to the customer’s needs or decision-making abilities. I was told this was a “Good answer!”. However – and I don’t know why I was surprised to find this out – I am apparently expected to be a “pushy salesman” a lot of the time.
For example, I am expected to sell about $150 worth of accessories with every digital camera. Now, with one-Gig cards costing less than a hundred bucks, most camera bags going for 10 or 20, and most cameras’ rechargeable batteries costing for $30-70 (except for rechargeable AAs, which are about $15), you can see I’d have to sell pretty much EVERYTHING in order to make that mark. We also sell membership cards and damage-protection warranties, which I guess would also help me reach that mark. But the fact is, not everyone needs $140 worth of crap with their camera. Most people today are buying their SECOND digital camera (I’m looking at my 5th, myself), so they already have a memory card and a bag. If the camera is AA powered, people will probably not want extra batteries then and there, and if it’s powered by one of those little Lithium-Ion rechargeable blocks, not every customer will decide it’s worthwhile buying an extra one for $70. Not every customer will want a damage-protection warranty, which is kinda expensive (cheaper than getting the camera fixed if it breaks, especially if it breaks multiple times, but still more than you’d like to spend). Some customers DO want it all, but most will take just one or two of these extra items. If I’m looking to fulfill my customers’ needs, how can I be expected to sell them $140 worth of crap with every camera? Given their picture-taking habits, and stuff they already own, it would make no sense for most of them to spend that much. But I am still told I should sell more add-ons. More add-ons. Gotta have those add-ons, baby. Guys, guess what, I got a FEVER, and the only PE’SCRIPTION, is MORE ADD-ONS. Yeah, I WISH Christopher Walken were my manager. Oh, wait, no, I don’t.
My performance is also monitored by what fraction of my camera sales also had damage-protection warranties, what fraction of my photo-finishing sales (developing film) had film sold along with the pictures, what fraction of my photo-finishing sales had a membership card sold along with the pictures, etc. Now, what if my customers don’t WANT film? Most of them buy film at Costco, where it’s cheaper. Many of them already have membership cards (which cost $16 but get them big savings on photo-finishing – It pays for itself if you get double-prints 3x a year or more), or have decided they don’t take enough pictures for the card to pay for itself. Why should my performance as a salesman be judged on what fraction of the population needs or doesn’t need this or that? Because rating my performance through how well I fulfill people’s needs is much harder, and because the bottom line is how much money I bring into the store, not how well I fulfill customers’ needs. Ideally, a salesman’s duty is to his customer, but in practice, it’s to his employer. So I guess it’s “Now that we see you know What a good salesman is vs What a pushy salesman is… be as pushy as you need to be to make us as much money as you can".
I make everyone aware of all the options that they could possibly want (no one buys ANYTHING without being offered a membership card and told what it gets you, and NO ONE buys a camera without having our optional damage-protection warranty explained to them), and people buy what they think they need. If they think they need very little, I remind them of the benefits, and of how easy it is for this or that to pay for itself. But if they don’t want it, they don’t want it. I’m doing my best, and just how good that ends up being (sales-wise) is determined by what people want/need, which is NOT something I can control. My manager tells me, “You should try to sell more damage protection warranties”, or, “Last week your percentage of film-per-photofinishing-order was low, you should sell more film”, and I say “Ok, I’ll try harder”, and I think “I’m already trying as hard as I can”. Of course, when I say “Ok, I’ll try harder”, I have to ACT as though I really want to try harder, as if what customers have been getting were determined not by what they need but by what I Jedi-mind-trick them into wanting. I can’t just say “I’m trying my best already, you stupid manager”, I have to sound convincing in saying “The fact few people this week needed film was actually MY fault”.
And while we’re on “things I can’t control but am told I should improve”… Our DISTRICT manager sometimes reminds us how sales are going down, the store made more money in photo-finishing on October last year than it did on October THIS year, etc… First of all, how many photo-finishing orders we do depends on how many customers walk in the door with film (or memory cards). It’s up to THEM. We’re not supposed to go knocking on doors, asking “You got any pictures you need developed/printed/enlarged/scanned?”. So what are WE supposed to do about this? Secondly, WELCOME TO THE DIGITAL AGE. Why do you think I bought a digital camera? Because taking pictures, and developing only the ones I like (if any), is MUCH CHEAPER than dropping off rolls of film (and then buying more film).
My manager, and my district manager, clearly feel like they have to put pressure on me to sell more. I wonder whether they realize I am not actually compelled by this pressure at all, and that I just ACT like I'm worried about my clearly not trying hard enough. I do my best all the time, and each week’s results are pretty much a product of chance, of who walks in the store and what they need.
Hablas Español?
Here's another "grrr, stupid customers" one: Customers who only speak Spanish. Now, I'm an immigrant myself, I had to learn English in a classroom, it took years of hard work. Why did I do it? Because if I'm going to live in a place and be a part of its society, I gotta learn the language! (Actually, to be perfectly honest, I started to learn English even before the thought had crossed my mind of living in the US. I started learning it because it is the international language, because I can meet someone from almost any country in the world and speak English with them). This may sidetrack a bit into my political views, but yeah, it makes me a little angry to see someone who lives in the US walk into a store and ask if anyone speaks a foreign language. A tourist, of course, would be a totally different thing.
Fortunately, though, my Spanish is good enough to help them out. I do it as cheerfully as I can manage, of course, cuz that's my job. I'm in a position to help them out, and to impress people at the store, and to make money, so of course I do it. Spanish is not my first language, either, but I speak it well. This was one reason I was hired. I do grudgingly admit that it makes good business sense to have a sales associate who speaks Spanish in a store, but of course that just means businesses will make it easier for immigrants to NOT learn English, if it means the businesses make more money. Sell-outs. So much for social causes and whatnot.
(Although I guess I'm selling out too, in not making my views on this topic known to my employer and to my customers. Oh well, who cares).
What's "compression"?
Many of the posts on this blog will describe painful situations with annoying customers. Others, however, will be rather philosophical musings on the nature of a retail job. Well, I guess not quite “philosophical”, but at least “thoughtful”, which can seem like “philosophical” when compared to how little thinking usually goes on regarding most things about this job. I.e., when all you do all day is tell people about cameras’ features, help them with simple digital tasks, and use the cash register, then occasionally asking “Why?” makes you seem like friggin’ Descartes.
So if the previous entry was all nice and thoughtful, I’ll have this one be one of the many upcoming “Customers Say The Stupidest Things” one.
You have no idea how many customers don’t know JPEG compression when they see it. Once a week or so you get someone who looks through their recently-printed pictures with a frown on their face, saying “digital pictures are just not as sharp as film, are they”. Of course, they’re flipping through digital pictures that looked like they were compressed down to 30k or so, with compression artifacts so big you can’t tell who’s who in the pictures. Every edge looks fuzzy and jagged, every high-contrast area loses all detail, every low-contrast area is a series of bands of colors. They honestly wonder why the pictures look like that. Apparently they don’t surf the net enough to know what a compressed, low-res picture looks like. I ask them about their compression settings, and they say something like “You mean that menu where, if you change it, you can fit more pictures in the card? Yeah, I may have changed that, but how was I supposed to know this would happen? Can you show me how to change it back? Is there any way to make the pictures sharper again?”. You mean, somehow invent information and detail that was not captured into your pictures? How’d you expect us to do THAT? Sure, I’ll reset your compression to “Fine”… “But they looked so nice on the little screen”… Yeah, that one-tenth-of-a-megapixel screen the size of a Cheez-it? You know, you can zoom into the picture on the screen to see how much detail you got, how sharp it is. Just press here to review it and press the “T” zoom button to zoom in… “Wow! I didn’t know THAT! That’s GREAT! Can you show me again, I gotta write this down…” Grrr…
Digital Pictures Are Pictures Too
The CEO of our store chain, a descendent of the founder (so his last name is the name of the store), is on a bunch of posters around the store, with short “quotes” that make customers feel that the chain is owned by a regular person who sees things the way you and I do, who wants you to have a pleasant experience while doing business with him. Like the stuff you see around a Jack In The Box, but supposedly not as fictitious. The more likely truth, of course, is that our CEO probably spends most of his time on his yacht or playing golf, and that the company wants money first and customer satisfaction second (or fifth).
Here’s an example: One sign says you get 15 free prints when you buy a digital camera (which is true), with Mr regular-joe pastel-polo-shirt-tucked-into-khakis CEO holding an SLR and saying “It’s not a picture until you hold it in your hand”.
That is such bullshit! Only 60-year-olds who ask me for help getting the memory card out of their cameras could believe in something like that. A picture is an image, it’s visual information, not necessarily an object. Sure, you could argue it’s not a “picture” when it’s a negative or a memory card, because at that point you cannot take in or appreciate the visual information of the image, but if it’s on a screen, it’s a picture! Say I show you a digital image, and later on it gets published in a book or magazine and I show you THAT. Wouldn’t you say it’s the same picture? Of course you would! Is an essay not an essay until the printer spits it out?
I’ll even go further and say it’s LESS of a picture once it’s printed, because information is lost in the printing process, and the print also decays with time. So the print starts its life as an imperfect representation of the “ideal” image (the information on the negatives or digital file), and goes downhill from there.
I know I’m being overly nitpicky about, well, how one defines “picture”, and of course you can have your own personal definition of “picture” and it’s none of my business (if you want to define “picture” as “a print”, knock yourself out). But I’m sick and tired of people saying “I need something physical”, “I like hard copies”, “I want something I can hold in my hand”. And to see our company encourage this irrational need for prints… makes good business sense, ok, but I still don’t see how having a handful of 4x6s which are too dark and have fingerprints all over them and have to be stored in huge albums or boxes and will look all purple in 10 years is better than admiring your pictures on a 14” monitor and storing thousands of them on your HD or some optical disk. It just doesn’t make sense.
Unless you’re a professional photographer. I’ll give you that. If your pictures are so sharp and so filled with small, subtle details that a computer screen can’t do it justice, then you need an 8x10 to really see what you’ve got. But then again, a 4x6 isn’t going to do that kind of picture justice either. So an 8x10 is better than a computer screen for looking at, but a computer screen is better than 4x6. In any case, it’s a picture, and the digital picture always holds more information and lasts longer, and you have more control over it. The print is a short-lived, fragile, imperfect, dirty, clumsy, and impractical representation of the digital ideal image. So if you think a picture is a print, and a file is not a picture, then you're missing out.
The Sales Rep Who Doesn't Know Her Camera
So the other day, a sales rep for a camera manufacturer comes to our store. I suppose I ought not to tell you the name of the camera manufacturer, so let’s call it “Fiji”.
So this Fiji lady comes in, tells us a bit about their new cameras (just lists features and prices, pretty much), tells us about how we can go to Fiji’s site and enter contests to be eligible for prices (and if we say she sent us, she gets stuff too), and so on. Then she tells us about a photo contest that Fiji has for their sales people, and she shows us a couple of pictures she has taken with this hot new 5-megapixel camera they just released. It’s an awesome camera, with a sharp lens, sharp CCD, super wide angle, and manual controls (and a big screen, and AA power, and other features that make it fun to use as well as a powerful camera). She took a picture of this colorful fan-type-thing she has on her garden, the type that spins around when the wind blows
She goes on for a couple minutes about how well-balanced her composition is (quite true), and how sharp the detail is (quite true – although the backdrop is a dirty, dark, and kinda ugly wooden fence, and tall messy-looking grass all over the place, all captured vividly in high resolution). I ask her why she didn’t take a picture of it spinning, since you could see it in sharp detail on the picture, but motion blur would make it a cooler picture. She says “Oh, the digital froze it. It WAS spinning. You know, how digital cameras always freeze the action”. Um, but you have a manual-exposure mode, and a shutter-speed priority mode. “Yes, you do, it’s great, this is a great camera!”. Then why didn’t you use the manual-exposure mode? “Oh, I thought I should take it in auto. But look at how still it looks… Some motion blur would have been nice, but the digital always freezes the action…”
It was pretty evident to me that this lady had NO idea about how aperture and shutter speed work, and would not know how to use the manual mode to take a well-exposed picture, much less a steady shot with motion blur. And I’m supposed to trust YOU with camera information?
To sell cameras, you have to know more than regurgitating what camera has what features. You have to know how to USE cameras, how to exploit what they offer, so you can tell people what to DO with those modes, and how to do it. That's MY opinion anyways.
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PS: I think the Fuji E510 is the best camera you can buy for under $300. This is the one I’m talking about here. It’s VERY powerful. If you know how to use manual settings, you can take any picture that a pro would, with the narrow depth-of-field, macro, motion blur, panning, long-exposure, time lapse, literally anything you can imagine (well, anything that doesn’t require a lens longer than 90mm or so – and the thing does have a lens mount where you can attach telephoto lenses, so you CAN go longer too!). I’m a huge fan of this camera (which is why the Fuji rep’s use of auto mode frustrated me – she did not use the things that make this camera special and powerful). Until we ran out of them, it was the first one I recommended to most people, along with the Nikon 4100 (except for dead-beginners, whom I usually show Casios and older easier-to-use Fujis, and people with a lot of money to spend, whom I usually show Sonys, and people who want a lot of zoom, whom I show Minoltas and the bigger Fujis and maybe Canons and Panasonics. Wow, I just revealed all the secrets to being a digital-camera salesman).
The Thing I Hate The Most
Now, here’s something that REALLY gets to me. At no time do I come close to acting rude to a customer, unless THIS happens. It annoys me so much, it’s getting in the way of my enjoyment of other activities when I see it happen.
Some customers refuse to TRY anything. They ask for help before they even start. They walk into the store, wanting to get prints from their digital camera, and when I say they have to take the memory card out, they hand me the camera and say “How do you do that?” or “I don’t know how to do that”.
Why don't you look around your camera for a little door that says "Memory" or "Card" or "SD" or "XD", or that has a little memory-card-looking symbol on it, or failing THAT just open every little door until you see a card? It's what I'm gonna have to do. I don't know where your camera's card slot is any more than you do. Why are you asking me to figure it out for you? You have hands, you have eyes, you might as well try it yourself!
Anyways...
The card then goes into one of three kiosks that are hooked up through a network to our lab (we use the same machines top print from digital as we do to print from film). The kiosks have an EXTREMELY CLEAR “Steps to follow” procedure: “1: Place card in slot. 2:…” and then, when they’re looking at their images on the screen, there’s a “1: Touch each image to select it. 2: Press these buttons (image of button) to select how many you want. 3: Press “Edit” if you would like to zoom, crop, or alter the color, brightness, or contrast, or for special effects”. And so on. Not only is the interface very intuitive, with all your options laid out in front of you with the names you’d expect and in an order that makes sense, but there are step-by-step procedures everywhere, down to which buttons to press.
Still, customers say “I’m gonna need some help with this” as soon as they get started, or even before they first touch the screen! What’s wrong with these people? TRY IT! And THEN if you have a problem (like not being able to find a certain function, or doing something inadvertently), THEN you come talk to me. Don’t you realize a bunch of programmers were paid a lot of money to make this as intuitive, user-friendly, and fool-proof as possible? The problem with making things more fool-proof is that they just keep coming out with better fools.
Whenever someone says “Now I’m gonna need you to show me how to delete the pictures in my camera”, I make a point of showing them that, as I do it, I’m figuring it out right on the spot (which I usually am, as I’ve only had 4 digital cameras and, chances are, have never used their model). This is so they see that they could have done it themselves if they were not so… I dunno. In any case, I say “Every digital camera has this little green triangle-in-the-rectangle “Play” symbol to go into the card. Now, since I don’t see an obvious “Trashcan” button, I’ll go into the menu. Hmm, “Card Setup” looks promising. Ah-hah! “Format”! There we go! “Are you sure?”. Yes, I’m sure. And that’s it”. (I say this as if I were talking to a 4-year-old, because it's so simple to figure it out yourself, and because I think the customer deserves to feel a LITTLE bit embarassed, or at least a little mad). In other words, I pressed the buttons that were most LIKELY to work, all the time realizing I could be wrong, and then at the end the camera asks if you’re sure when you ask to do something destructive. It’s not like I had some procedure memorized. Why won’t these people just EXPERIMENT?
And the reason why I say this gets in the way of my enjoying everything else is that my other job is doing tech support at a library. (Here I go again, revealing more about myself than I would like, and thus alienating some readers. Oh well, I bet everyone reading this knows me personally anyways). Our network is very buggy, printing often does not work, and sharing/hosting/file-transfering/saving is tricky and non-intuitive at best. On top of that, we have multimedia services like movie-editing computers hooked up to VCRs and to TVs and to DVD burners and to DV tape players. Not only is it hard to keep those working properly, it’s hard to show someone how to use these complicated systems. Lots of times, people ask me “I need you to show me how to use the movie-editing software and equipment”. That’s my job. And I’m liking it less and less because it’s reminding me less and less of teaching and tutoring (which I tremendously enjoy) and more and more of stupid customers who refuse to experiment. However, it would take days or weeks of experimenting with the video equipment to learn what I could show you in 10 or 20 minutes, so it kinda pays to be taught as opposed to learning yourself (which is why I'm paid to be a Multimedia Consultant). But with a little digital camera, I think you can go through the menus and read the relevant parts of the manuals in less than “weeks”… The point is, if it will take MUCH LESS time for me to show you something than it would take for you to figure it out, then I'd be ahppy to do it, but if it's gonna take as long for me to show you as it would take for you to figure it out (because I'm figuring it out myself as I go), then it might be more considerate of you to try it yourself...
Big Scary Computers (kind of a continuation of the previous post)
And while we’re on the subject of computers and of people too dumb to use a touchscreen…
Our store currently offers print-from-home. No, not just selling printers. We have an online service where you go to a website, upload pictures, fill out an online form, enter your credit card info, and then stop by the store a couple hours later to pick up your already-paid-for pictures.
For some people, though, that is apparently too hard.
A company that makes digital-photo-organization software is working on integrating print-from-home into their software. In the same screen that would show you some folder of your pictures (you know, “My Grandson’s College Graduation” or whatever), there would be a button like “click here to have this picture printed at the photo shop”. Every now and then, one or two programmers stop by the shop to see how the latest trial-run worked. It’s always the same guys, so I’ve been asking them about this project. I ask them why the current method is not good enough, and they say “Oh, you know, this is for people who are not necessarily that computer savvy”.
Since when is knowing how to use WINDOWS being computer-savvy? Who needs a PROGRAM just to ORGANIZE their friggin’ digital pictures when Windows (or Mac OS-whatever) allows you to make folders, name them, name the files in them, structure the folders and files however you want, and view all folders and files in big friendly thumbnails?
It’s like PictBrige, EasyShare, one-button-downloading… All these technologies just to move your files around. Good lord, since when is knowing how to use Windows so friggin’ hard? Oh, look, I can create a folder, name it, rename the files in it, and put some of them on a disk to take to the photo shop! (By dragging them to the CD Drive icon and clicking on “Record files to CD”). I can even delete the pictures on my camera’s memory! I’m so computer savvy! Why is so much thought put into allowing people to remain unfamiliar with drag-and-drop interfaces? (Oh, wait, it must be because people are stupid. I should read my own blog).
But seriously, it’s because people are willing to pay a little more to have to learn/do a little less. The higher price of photo prints that comes from having my store pay for this foolproof software is gladly accepted by all these old people whose worst nightmare is learning how to burn a data CD. Maybe there should be a tech-savvy price and a tech-fearing price, so that if you did things the HARD way (sending your pictures to us over the internet using – gasp – Windows and your email program, or burning your own CD instead of having us do it for you), you get a discount so that the tech-fearing old people have to pay extra for us to keep developing foolproof software that is always “too complicated” anyways. Politically, I strongly believe that everyone should pay for a country’s education and health care, so I’m a fan of high taxes and European-style near-socialism. But when it comes to people’s stupidity, I strongly believe you and I should not have to pay extra for it. In the ideal world, hospitals would be free, unless you gave yourself lung cancer from smoking and diabetes from eating McDonald’s. If that is fair, then why should we all pay for some people’s refusal to learn how to use a mouse?
And in a slight change of subject: Back to the touchscreen system in our store. When you first touch the screen, it changes to show you three big "buttons", each about 1/3 of the screen: One shows an arrow pointing from a CD and a bunch of memory cards to a bunch of prints, and under it is written "Print pictures from digital". On the next button there's just a huge CD, and it says "Save digital pictures to CD" under it. And on the last, it shows greeting cards and calendars, and under it "Make greeting cards and calendars" or something.
You would not believe how many of the people who bring their pictured in on CD touch the "Save digital pictures to CD" button. Some of them ask me for help, and touch it as I approach. Other come ask me for help asking why there are no options related to printing. They just see the big CD and press the button. You may say that's just bad interface design. I say it's bad reading skills, because it SAYS RIGHT THERE... Ah, never mind. I keep expecting people to THINK, to READ instructions... Silly me.
400mm, f 2.8, I.S. ... What does that mean again?
In the time I've worked at the store (two months now), we've had two customers who spent a ridiculous amount of money on SLRs and lenses and so on who clearly did not know how to evaluate or use what they were buying. Personally, I think you should learn a little bit about photography before you spend $1500 on equipment, so that you know what you're getting. But hey, I wasn't gonna tell THEM that.
First, about a month ago, this guy comes in, wants to get a nice camera to take pictures of his kids' soccer games. All right. You probably want a lot of zoom, right? Let's look at the Fuji S5100, the Panasonics... "What's this one?". Ah, I see you're interested in the Nikon 8700, the most expensive fixed-lens (non-SLR) camera in the store. "Well, it seems to have the most megapixels, and a pretty big lens". Yes, that's right, did you figure that out by yourself? (You can tell I love sounding bitter when I write about my job). Anyways, I show it to him for a while, and then he asks why the D70 and D100 are more expensive (those are Nikon's entry-level SLRs, by the way). "Why are they better? What do you get with them that you don't get with the 8700?". All very important questions.
So I pretty much define for him what an SLR is: You can change the lenses in the front, so you can get a fish-eye lens or a huge telescope-like zoom lens or anything in between, and they're all sharper than any fixed-lens-camera lens. You can use filters to bring out detail or for special effects. You get an optical through-the-lens viewfinder. Response time is very fast. The focusing system is very smart. And, among other neat features, the camera will tell you how you exposed incorrectly, if you did, and show it to you when you review the picture in the little screen. SLRs have fast burst modes (lots of pix one right after the other). Flash shoe above the camera. Remote control. Focus and Exposure bracketing.
"All right, that sounds great! Let me take a look at that!"
This is the D70. Comes with an 18-70 lens...
"What does that mean?"
So I explain to him what the focal lengths and aperture ranges mean on a lens.
He walks to the door, takes pictures of cars on the street. Reviews the pictures, and some glare on some cars make for big white blobs on the image. "What happened? How do I fix it?" You overexposed... See, the camera is flashing those areas, showing you they're just white. You fix it by pointing the center of the viewfinder at the brightest areas when on auto mode, or by making the shutter faster. "How do I do that?". So I give him a quick lesson on shutter speed. He takes more pictures of the car, better exposed. "OK, this is great! I'll take it!". So, someone who didn't know about shutter speed, aperture, focus lengths, SLRs, etc etc, just half an hour ago, is now making the decision to spend $1500 on a camera. Um, ok. I'll go back there and get you one.
The other time that happened, about a week ago, a guy came in wanting to buy a nice camera with tons of zoom so he could take pictures of his friends surfing. My manager handled this one, so I didn't get all the details. All I really know is that I caught him saying to her "So if it's darker, you shoot slower... Ah...", and not much later he was walking out with an SLR, tripod, bags, some accessories, and a 500mm lens. Doesn't it just seem wrong that someone who says "So if it's darker, you shoot slower..." spends $1500 on equipment he probably doesn't appreciate or know how to use well? I mean, he got some great stuff, and he'll be taking great shots with it (probably), and we did make a lot of money off him, but still...
Suckers With Money
A woman comes in who knows next-to-nothing about cameras, wants to get a digital, makes some comments leading me to conclude she has a generous budget. I show her five cameras that are easy to use and take good pictures, and are attractive to someone who doesn’t know much about cameras and has money to spend: compact cameras, big screen, impressive-sounding number of megapixels, etc. In other words, cameras that are kinda-expensive-to-very-expensive.
She does not seem to mind, as this is all in clear view of many cheaper cameras with their prices brightly advertised (i.e. she never says “Why exactly are these $400 cameras better than those $200 cameras?”). We settle on the Casio EX-Z55. She leaves the store apparently satisfied.
I feel great about my selling skills for a couple hours - a feeling that can be summarized by the thought: “Hah! Sucker! I can’t believe I convinced you that you need a pocket-sized 5MP camera!”
(Nah, that's not true. No convincing was required, as much as I would like to think I am that persuasive. I just showed her a couple cameras, told her why they were nice, and she chose one. The only thing I did that was at all "skillful" was starting with the top-of-the-line cameras, and she apparently did not have a problem with paying that much for a camera so we never even talked about cheaper ones. Besides, I take too much pride in being an "expert" to willingly deceive customers into buying something they don't need. Most of the time, anyways. Also, my primary duty as a salesman is first to my employer, and second to the customer. In other words, I "sold out", I sound like an expert so that people end up being persuaded to buy something nicer than they thought they were about to. It's not often that this suceeds so well, though, Most people come in looking for a camera at a certain price range, I show them cameras on the upper end (and just above the upper end) of the price range, emphasizing how super nice the more expensive ones are. With THIS customer, though, I showed her the nicest ones I had, and that was ALL. Too easy).
In any case...
...not much time later, the woman comes back. She says she consulted with her husband, and she probably only needs a 3MP camera. Whoa, looks like we have a real independent- and critical-thinking individual on our hands all of a sudden, I think to myself sarcastically. So the obvious thing to do is to go down to the 3MP equivalent of that camera, the EX-Z30, and she’s about to get it...
...when her husband calls her cell phone. She's like “Yes, we looked at a bunch of different ones... No, I’m not sure why I want to get it... Here, talk to him”, and she gives me the phone. Um, hello? He asks: “Is this the best camera in that price range? If you were to get one, which one would you get?”. I’d be between that and the Nikon 3200, depending on whether my priorities were size + cool factor + big screen, or just performance and reliability and price. The Nikon does take better pictures. “But the Nikon’s so BIG”, she complains. “Well, let me see it… I suppose I could take it… lemme talk to him…" She takes the phone. "Honey.. Ok… Uh-huh… Ok, we’re taking the Nikon”.
I remind her that getting a photo printer now would be $50 cheaper than later, and she IS getting more than half her money back… so she takes a printer, pretty much impulse-buys it. See ya later!
Selling to people like this is like shooting fish in a barrel, if only it weren’t for their husbands or children (or, you know, their more-tech-savvy friends or relatives who point out to them that, if you look around, it's easy to find good deals on gadgets that do ALMOST everything the super-nice gadget does, but for half the price).
This makes me worry about what the salesmen at electronics stores must convince my mother that she “needs”… When I go shopping with her, she is so lost, yet so willing to spend a ton of money…
From "What's Megapixels?" to "You got a P150? I'll take it"
The last couple of posts got me thinking about something that I think about every time I help someone pick a camera. And that is; How much research should a customer do before stepping into a store and buying a camera?
Once I was showing someone a bunch of digital cameras. She was going "The one looks nice, let me see it... Nah, I don't like it that much, it's kinda awkward to hold... How 'bout that one?" Oh, very nice. This is a Canon S1-IS, it's got 10x optical zoom, image-stabilized, three MegaPixels... and she says - and I swear I'm not making this up - "What's MegaPixels?".
That shows one end of the spectrum, where a customer approaches me not knowing ANYTHING about digital cameras. Of course, that means I get to "set the stage" for them, make some generalizations about manufacturers, explain all sorts of things that they will remember when they read up on cameras (like what "MegaPixels" means, why "digital zoom" is BS, different features, the market in general). Which is kinda neat, but if there is a long line of impatient customers waiting for me to be done with my little lecture (I am often the only salesman behind the counter), then I can't really have a nice leisurely chat about digital cameras, especially when I know it will not end in a sale today. (It does often end in a sale a week later, though, which is kinda rewarding, as is hearing "I thought I'd ask you all these things because you guys come highly recommended").
One of our mottos is "Our Expertise is Free". But please, do share... especially if there's a long line behind you...
The other extreme of the "How much research should a customer do?" spectrum is the guy who walks in and says "You guys got any Sony P150s in? I'll take one". Someone who has read up enough online about why this or that camera has the best features for the price and for the customer's taste should know that it's cheaper to order online... But sure, I'd love to sell you one. Makes my job easier, if less interesting. A more efficient use of everyone's time.
But the question is: Should a customer go to Consumer Report or Steve's Digicams or DP Review, do product comparison tables, read up on features, and choose a camera, all at home? Or should a customer just go to the store and ask the salesman? You might say that going to the store is a good idea to get a basic notion of what's out there and of what different features are (like MegaPixels). However, very straightforward glossaries exist online that explain these things.
I say, ideally you'd do all the research online and narrow it down to a few cameras, and then go to the camera store to pick them up and see how they feel so you can choose one after having played briefly with all of your finalists. I do realize that this makes the salesman relatively obsolete, reduced to the role of fetching cameras out of the glass case and operating the cash register at the end of the purchase. In other words, our "free expertise" is no longer required. I think that's the way a customer should do it. You're gonna trust a SALESMAN to tell you which camera to buy from him? Our expertise is free because we recommend the things that we profit from the most... Nah, not all the time, but sometimes.
It's like education. In a way, a teacher should not be necessary, and a student should be able to do all their learning from books and from observation, given they are already motivated to learn. Is that possible? Well, is it possible all shopping will be done online by comparing features of tables, that humans will be removed from selling altogether? Sounds good to me, but extremely unlikely.
Sometimes - heck, most of the time - at work I feel like a robot, working the cash register, taking in orders for developing film, cleaning the glass counters, organizing the shelves, going to the back to get that guy's P150. I'm just a machine. The only time I feel like more than that is when I'm telling someone about cameras, something that only I could say (out of all the people in the store) because I've done a ton of research about cameras, read SO MANY reviews and comparisons, used so many of them myself. I do feel kinda like an expert. But I should not be your ONLY source of information. Cuz then, who knows, you might go home to find out your husband doesn't think you need a 5-MegaPixel camera, and THEN where does that put us?
"I want a Nikon 5200". "No, you want a Sony P100". Huh?
So a couple days ago I did something I am told all the time I am not to do. Something that makes a sale much less likely. I don't know why I did it, and I know it was by very low odds that it worked out in the end.
A customer comes in and says she wants to get a compact-ish (i.e. small but not super-tiny) digital camera in the 4-5 MegaPixel range. She has narrowed it down to between the Nikon 5200 and the Canon SD410, both of which are about 400 bucks.
I tell her that there is no reason why anyone should buy an SD-series Canon Digital Elph, which I think is true. For the money, you could get a Nikon that takes sharper pictures (one megapixel higher, and for the same price, as a Digital Elph), or for the same image quality you could get a Nikon that is $100 dollars cheaper and has other advantages (powered by AA batteries rather than proprietary Li-Ion, more ergonomic, etc - Canon Elphs are shaped like little bricks). For example, take the two cameras she was comparing: The Canon had 1 megapixel less and was the same price as the Nikon. Easy choice.
Then she said that it was very important to her that the camera be compact, and that image quality also ranked high - the main reason she was leaning towards the Nikon.
Then, here's where I do something crazy, a wild gamble: I say that she can get a Sony P100 for $350 (that's $50 cheaper than the other ones), it's smaller, has a better movie mode, better interface, faster performance, FIVE megapixels, etc. The customer had it narrowed down to one item, she was gonna buy it, but I had to throw another one in there and "muddy the waters" as she herself put it. Why?
I'll even go farther and say that the Nikon would be the more profitable sale for the store AND FOR ME, as I get more comission on Nikon products because Nikon rewards stores and salespeople who sell their cameras with, well, a few extra dollars. So why did I have to show the woman a Sony? Because it was closer to what she wanted, because I knew she would see no advantage in the Nikon, given what she wanted. Maybe I was feeling guilty about selling that rich woman that Casio. Maybe I wanted this customer to tell her friends "This guy at this store stopped me from buying a camera so that I could make a better decision". Maybe I wanted to take pride in working for people rather than for the store. Maybe it was just because my manager wasn't there and I decided to try something crazy. I dunno. It went against the training which we receive at the store, which says 1) don't show them more than one camera, so that they trust you that this one is best, and 2) once they're close to picking one camera, leaning towards it, praise it to no end and make the other ones sound inferior. This maximizes sales, but does not quite maximize the customer's satisfaction with their camera.
I take way too much pride in my work.
When The Cat Is Away...
In the previous post, I hinted at something that is SO true... When the manager is not at the store, everyone works a lot less. We don't quite pounce on customers so readily, we let the paperwork fall behind... All these little chores like flattening and recycling boxes, taking out the trash, dusting, windexing the glass displays and the door, straightening and reorganizing the shelves, vacuuming... it all gets left till "later". Every employee rejoices in seeing the vacant hole on her schedule, too. I even bring a book!
We're supposed to read through tons of thick manuals over the first three months of working at the store, as part of our training. Of course, a couple WEEKS into the job, you're familiar enough with everything to not need to do the reading, but you kinda have to do it anyways, as there is a long checklist (PAGES long) where you have to check for each CHAPTER you read. So, as you can imagine, my manager does not like it when I bring a novel to work and read it during dull periods of time. She'll remind me that if I want to read, there is plenty of other stuff I ought to be reading. And she'll be right, too. But if she's not there...
I should say, though, that my manager is one of the nicest and most reasonable people I have ever met. She's awesome, and one could not really ask for a better boss. But still, she IS the boss.
Why I'd Hate To Be Manager
A bit more on the role of the manager, as I see it. (Of course, there is more to it than what I see, but what I see is interesting enough for now).
As I see it, the manager is in a really awkward position, if they want to be a good, effective manager. To be effective, they have to get us to WANT to do the right things, not just to do the right things because the company (aka "corporate", the faceless office on the other side of the continent) wants us to. So she has to get us motivated. To really do that, she has to be one of us, she has to seem to empathise with us, to know how we think and what we want, so that we in turn share her concerns about our performance.
What makes this awkward is that it's hard to correlate what we are required/desired to do better, with the results corporate expects. For example, corporate wants us to sell more damage-protection warranties and more add-ons with the cameras we sell. Corporate says our photo-finishing numbers are down. Corporate says one of the reasons we are doing just a tad less business than we were on the same month last year is that we are not following dress code that strictly. However, any reasonable person should see that the number of people who come in the door during the month to drop off film is subject to statistical distributions, NOT to whether I have my shirt tucked in or not. So, at the same time that the manager has to be "cool" and sometimes say "Yeah, it's kinda silly that we have to do [blah], but we kinda have to", they also have to sometimes say "No, it's actually really important that we work harder so that our business does better", even if there's not much we can do.
(For example, the layout of our store is PRECISELY determined by little maps, charts, and pictures. This is to create some consistency in the chain. It's not really important in any way except for the fact "corporate" cares about it. THAT, out manager admits. She is on our side in pointing out some of the sillier things they expect us to do. But sometimes she BECOMES "they", and tells us that "You know, it's really important that you try to sell more warranties with the cameras", in a way that somehow makes "I try my best every time, and say all there is to say to every customer" sound like it would not satisfy her. The worst part is that I sold a warranty with almost EVERY camera in my first 2 or 3 weeks at the store, and now I'm down to one in 2, or one in 3. She says "Whatever you were saying before, that was working! Do THAT! What were you saying that was different?", and I answer, honestly but with less confidence than I actually feel on this, "I dunno... I really think I'm saying the same things...")
But really... Our manager can’t say “yeah, you gotta do this, even though it’s stupid”, she has to actually convince us we should do it, put it in a way in which the stupid-ness of it is not obvious, in such a way that the request sounds reasonable. So she ends up explaining the importance of this or that with a kind of logic that sounds very thin, like someone stupid trying to explain what someone much smarter explained to THEM but they forget exactly how the reasoning goes. So all it accomplishes is us thinking “You don’t REALLY believe in that, do you?”. But she HAS to do it, independently of whether or not it sounds reasonable. Maybe it’s the kind of thing that does motivate people with lower IQs, or who take less pride in what it means to be a salesman and an expert (rather than the fingers of a corporation).
Clearly, the less you think about the dynamics of retail, the happier an employee you’ll be… except when you feel bad for not selling enough extras, at which point you could realize that you did what was best for each customer.
Which way is better: Selling for the customers (which requires figuring out what is for them, and being motivated by helping people and giving them a good experience, and not worrying about what corporate says you “should” be selling – high-profit stuff like warranties), or selling for the company (which requires selling as much as possible, especially the stuff highlighted by corporate, and being motivated by making money and hitting those parameters, some of which are half luck anyways)? Are they mutually exclusive? Can you be motivated by the desire to please corporate AND the customer? Aren’t those two different attitudes?
Well, what about our manager, who is loved by customers AND by corporate? Maybe she is nice enough, informative enough, funny enough, etc, so that customers don’t notice when she sells them stuff they don’t need, so THEY’re happy, and corporate is happy. Now THAT’s being a salesman, not the Platonic ideal of a salesman who helps each customer find what they need, but the best, optimal, most effective salesman given the different and often opposing pressures of modern retail. I’d still rather not “sell out”, and help each customer find what he needs. (Says the guy who sold a poor (rich) woman a much nicer camera than she needed). I would probably not be an effective manager, because I would feel I am insulting my sales associates when I say “Our photo-finishing numbers are down when compared to the same month last year, and that’s BAD, but we’ll bring our numbers up! And sell more warranties, you know you can do it!"
"You can do it!"
Building off my last thought on the previous post...
Every week's newsletter, and so much of the training stuff I'm supposed to read, talks about making goals for yourself, selling more, being a better sales associate, selling more add-ons with cameras, selling more damage-protection warranties with cameras... And it's all said in "Self-improvement" language: setting goals, focusing on your weak areas, all that BS. Dude, we're just selling cameras! Most importantly, what we really do is provide information (filtered, selected information, all right) to the customer, and then cross our fingers hoping they will choose to buy. We can't be PERSUASIVE - we can just point out our low-price guarantee, and our easy refund policy, and all the free stuff and discounts that you get with this or with that, in what common situations this or that pays for itself, what this or that can do for you. That's not that hard to do, especially as it's the same list of stuff every time. The newsletters say things like "make goals for yourself about improving on your weakest areas, be that selling damage-protection warranties, selling membership club cards with photo-finishing, or demonstrating/presenting products to customers". "Keep those goals attainable but challenging". Or articles by sales associates who say "I worked hard until every customer who gets a camera also walks out with a damage-protection warranty". How the heck do you do THAT? Sneak it into the transaction and hope they don't look at the receipt?
All we can do is give information. To hope, or rather, to EXPECT, that the customer decides to buy, does not make a lot of sense. I sure as heck will not feel bad, or less secure about my selling abilities, if I am unsuccessful at selling for a while, because, statistically, there will be streaks of people who will end up deciding not to buy. With all the "You can do it!" BS must come a "Oh no, I failed, I must suck" disappointment from having invested emotional energy into "improving" something you have no control over, and then failing, which you sometimes will. No, whether or not I sell is NOT in my power. But of course, corporate would hate it if any of us ever figured that out...
Hi, I'm Troy McClure. You Might Remember Me From...
Watched a sales-training video at work today. (Did some real work too, like cleaning, dealing with a furious customer, selling a Sony T1... Had to work for the sale too, show off all the features - DANG that's a nice camera. I could talk about it for an hour. Oh, wait, I just did).
The video was as bad as you'd imagine. Narrated by a news-team-like couple with segments in between, of actors pretending to work at a camera store. Or maybe they were real employees, given how I've seen better acting - and better camerawork - in the video projects my high-school class groups put together. The writing is brilliant, too: The salesman does a few small wrong things and the customers walk away furious, or don't buy anything. The salesman does a few small things right, and suddenly the customer is cheerful, talking about their lives, buying everything in sight, and thrilled at everything the salesman says. Oh brother...
The tape did include some nice points about how to sell. Most of these are things that most confident and respectful people should have no trouble with, like how to greet customers, how to present a product, how important it is to be informed, how you ought to treat your customers like people, with respect (i.e. not hover over them, but not ignore them). Duh.
A few of the points I disagreed with strongly enough to post them here.
One is that a salesman ought to start a conversation with a customer, using the customer's pictures, shopping bags, clothes, personal items, or other such things as clues to what to talk about. "Customers feel more willing to make buying decisions when they are in a relaxed environment, so make them feel at ease, be friendly, use their name if you know it, ask for it to begin with". Now, I don't know about you, but I HATE salespeople who ask personal questions, who try to pretend to be my best friend...
"Wow, so I see by your pictures/shirt/cap that you just spent a weekend at Eagle River. I used to go there a lot". "Um, yeah, it's nice, isn't it?".
Who, other than 60-year-old ladies who are oh-so-glad for any human interaction, would ever say anything like "Oh yes, it was WONDERFUL! The waterfalls, the pretty trails, the yellow-tailed spotted northwestern wild woodpeckers... did you manage to spot any while you were there?". I mean, other than for his trying to sell you stuff, the fact is that the salesman DOESN'T CARE, and trying to PRETEND that he cares only makes things more awkward. I try not to ramble too much when I talk (I get it out of my system by writing, as you can tell), even to friends and relatives, so if someone I barely know asks "So how was [event advertised on my shirt]?", all I CAN do is awkwardly say "Um, it was cool". What possible purpose could be served by me giving him details about something he doesn't care about?
(Unless he DOES actually care about it. I do have a couple very strong interests, which consume all of my free time outside of work - one of them is a very specific, small niche/field of photography, and others are more normal hobbies. If I see a customer shares these interests, I'll bring it up. The older customers do love it, and the younger ones are pleasantly surprised that they can talk to me like a real human being for a minute or two. But most people do NOT share these interests, and I'm sure as hell not going to pretend I like baseball just for the sake of trying to get a customer to feel more comfortable. I don't think I could pull it off, either).
The other point I strongly disagree with is: "It's bad to compare products". "Don't fall into the fatal Comparison Trap!!!". Show the customer one thing at a time, and just praise THAT. This makes it more likely they will buy something, and prevents the customer from thinking the store carries inferior products. That is BS. Different cameras have different features and cost different prices, and so offer different cost-benefit ratios. The super-nice ones are kinda overpriced, and the super-cheap ones take crappy pictures, with a full spectrum in between, and then you have your pocket cameras vs your big-lens ones... Just because I talk about two cameras at a time doesn't mean one is better, it just means I understand the customer can have priorities that I don't fully understand, or that THEY don't fully understand until they see a camera and fall in love with it. I do want them to get the camera that is right for THEM, because, you know, that's what I know how to do, because I know a lot about a lot of cameras, but I still don't think I can make a choice for someone else.
(I'll give you a perfect example: A customer came in one day and said they wanted a not-too-large digital camera, one that did not look too fancy (as it would be used in less-than-affluent neighbourhoods for some very necessary social work). She wanted the best camera she could get fitting that description for about $200-300. I thought about it for a second, and pulled out the Nikon 3200 ($200), the Fuji E510 ($300), and the Casio EX-Z30 ($250). The Casio is a very small 3-MegaPixel camera with a big screen, but not too sharp a lens. So it's tiny, pretty cheap, and very stylish. The Fuji is a 5MP camera, powered by AAs, and with ALL KINDS of amazing features, like manual control of everything, so that someone who likes photography can use it to take amazing pictures. But it doesn't look all fancy. The Nikon is also 3MP, no manual controls or other exciting features (well, lots of scene modes, and the always-desireable AA batteries for power), definitely the least fancy of the three. So the choice is between something cheap that takes good pictures, something tiny and cool that takes "all-right" pictures, and something a little more expensive and a little bigger that takes awesome pictures. All those are pretty similar cameras - similar price, at least, and roughly similar size. Each is the best deal for cameras with those respective attributes. How am I supposed to know how the customer will prioritize size, cost, and picture quality + manual control? What it comes down to is this: To whom is my duty greater? To the store or to the customers? "To the store" would means "make sure people BUY stuff, whatever it is, especially if it's expensive cameras with damage-protection warranties and lots of add-ons", and "To the customer" would mean "make sure people make decisions that are as informed and thoughtfully-made as possible". I know "To the store" is the right answer, but I still feel compelled to be as nice and honest to the customers as I can. And yes, I felt that way BEFORE selling that overly-expensive Casio to that rich lady).
And then, a couple things on the video were just really funny. Like when the news-host-wannabe narrator says "An ordinary salesman might make that mistake, but not you. You're a professional!". You mean other salespeople work for free, just for the fun of it? Whew, I'm so glad my boss does not realize that! (My official job title, by the way, is "Professional Sales Associate", which is where that comes from).
The other funny thing is when they in the video were saying that if you offer a customer a product (by which I mean: "So, would you like to buy one?") and they say no, then "don't worry, the sale is not over!". That makes it sound like the sale is a battle between salesman and customer, a duel, where we win if we sell something and they win if they don't buy anything. Although this model of retail is accurate, it's funny to think that corporate would make a video with a line that even admits the remote possibility of this model being useful, especially since every OTHER message they send us is about how important customers are and how we are to love them so much and treat them so nice and get them to like our store.
We got a new guy in the store today, a new "Professional Sales Associate". So our manager thought it might be a good idea for us to watch the video (she had been putting it off for me, because despite it being a required part of that training checklist I mentioned in the other post, I seem to be selling very well, and have been out-doing HER on more and more days). Right after we watched the video, wouldn't you know it, I had to talk to a customer over a long time about a camera (the T1 I mentioned at the beginning of the post), demonstrate it, talk about its features... In short, I pretty much reproduced a successful sale from the video, all the way to selling tons of extras, a damage-protection warranty, AND a membership card. A textbook sale if there ever was one. I later said to the new Associate: So, just like the video, huh? And he was like, "No, much more realistic. You didn't spend half an hour talking with him about his kids' dance classes and soccer games and about the baseball game last night". Good, at least it's not just me who thinks that salespeople ought not to try to live up to this chatty, over-friendly standard...
Acting Cheerful - Why? How?
People in retail are expected to be cheerful. What’s there to be cheerful about? Oh, I love doing menial things anyone could do, standing on my feet all day, hearing you bitch about how your aunt’s left ear was cropped out of the picture, picking things from the shelf which you could have found yourself, and ringing them up in a machine-like manner. Robots could do this. Whoop-dee-flippin-doo, let me have the honor and pleasure of ringing that up for you!
Sure, if I were in such a precarious position in my life, financially and educationally, that I felt VERY grateful to have any job at ALL, then I guess I could be cheerful. But even then, the realities of how boring and meaningless my current job is, are such that I do not feel like I have to be cheerful.
But, of course, I still act cheerful, because, you know, I’m a nice person. I do aspire to some Buddhist ideals, the key one being ignoring suffering by abandoning desire (This job’s not so bad! I don’t NEED a better job, so why worry about it?), which leads one to potentially be cheerful despite circumstances (The Dalai Lama, upon being asked why he smiled all the time despite all the horrors of the world, famously answered “Do you have a better alternative?”). However, I fall short of this ideal, so at work all I can do is ACT cheerful, as I cannot BE cheerful while watching my expensive education going to waste.
Stress Is Inherent, UNAVOIDABLE
In retail, where any smart store hires fewer employees than would be needed for customers to not have to wait to be helped (i.e. In retail, where people HAVE to be made to wait as there are often more people than sales associates), the salesman must be (or at least look) stressed out in order for it to look like he's doing his job properly.
If I'm taking in someone's film order and there are people waiting, I HAVE to do it as fast as possible, even sacrificing being very friendly. If I'm showing someone cameras, I have to do it in an abbreviated way, and tell the other customers (during pauses that are hard to find or engineer) "I'll be with you in just a second" (which, to the person I'm talking to, will hopefully translate into "I'll be with you as soon as this customer here stops wasting my time"). If the phone rings and I'm with a customer, then I say so, but if it's an important call that I HAVE to take, then speaking calmly will offend the waiting customer.
In short, acting calmly while someone is waiting for you to help them is, well, practically rude. So, if there are more people than sales associates in the store at any one time (which is often), we all have to at the very least act stressed out, and talk and move fast, for the sake of those waiting.
We do have to. Trust me. I've had a couple customers wait until their patience ran out, and I suspect that on those cases, their patience ran out extra fast because they felt we were not hurrying and were doing things at too leisurely a rate.
Sometimes I wish I COULD be calm all the time, making sure I do things well and making sure I talk to people slowly and curteously so that they know they are important, rather than just someone taking up everyone's time. That's the way I act in real life. But in the store, it's just impossible, unless I want to really piss off the people who are waiting. How sad.
Commander Data would be very disliked if he worked retail. I can see someone getting all impatient, and him going, with all the calm in the world, "Forgive me, Ma'am, but I am currently occupied in helping this customer, and I am afraid you must await your turn if you seek my assistance".
I wish we had one of those take-a-number things, or (on really busy days) those restaurant pager thingies that buzz when it's your turn. Or at least a QUEUE, you know, a zig-zaggy line defined by ropes or something! Some camera stores DO have those. But not ours, sadly.
(For American readers: That's pronounced KYOO, by the way, not KWEE-wee or KYOO-wee).
Aww, Aren't Little Kids Cute? NO!!!
Well, I do think little kids are cute. During walks with my girlfriend, or walking around my town's downtown area or in the nearby parks and trails, it's so cool to see little kids interacting with their families and friends, saying cute and often insightful things, just playing. It makes the world seem like a happier place. And I already think the world is pretty happy, despite what this blog may suggest. (Remember, this is where I dump all the bad stuff, so I can have pleasant dreams, and smile as I walk down the street or drive around listening to music, so these thoughts of this job don't stay rattling around in my head).
Little kids in the store, though, are such a pain. We do get the occasional well-behaved kid, but for most of them, the time mom takes to drop off a roll of film or (especially) to ask me about digital cameras FAR excedes their attention span. Babies crawl all over the place (like behind the counter), and pick up stacks of film and batteries from the lower racks and throw them all over the place in glee. Young sisters play tag around the display stands, knocking over stuff, breaking glass frames, all while screeching merrily. While waiting for some passport pictures to come out of the printer, a 6-year-old played with the printer tray so much he broke it into 3 pieces, so passport pictures were being dumped onto the floor for two weeks until we got a new tray. One little boy, while his mom talked to us about her developed pictures for the ridiculously long duration of 5-7 minutes or so, took a bunch of big boxes off the wall and made a wall (no, a CASTLE) with them, putting our telescopes around it like cannons. When the family left, my manager came to me with a smile and said "I have a gift for you..." Ooh, what? (I thought she was at least semi-serious). "You get to clean that up!" That what? Oh...
One friend of mine (or, rather, one guy who sadly hangs out with a lot of my friends) tries very hard to be cool, acts like a clown, is an asshole a lot of the time, makes fun of people (and all kinds of comments) in inappropriate ways at inappropriate times... One of my friends nicknamed him "Mr Unfit For Social Interaction". That's the best phrase to describe these wild, animalistic little kids.
Until my kids have grown up enough to know how they ought to behave in public, I think I'll keep them locked in the cupboard under the stairs.
What worries me is that I know how much of a lie that is, and that I have it coming big-time as I was far from a little angel when I was a kid, throwing tantrums in public on a regular basis.
I guess being a parent is even harder than being a camera salesman, huh?
"I'm Gonna Miss My Train!"
A lot of times, we get customers come in just as we're about to close. It's kind of annoying, but it's all right. God knows how many times I managed to make it to a store or restaurant just before they closed, and how glad I was to not be turned away. I mean, what are they gonna say, "We close in 5 minutes, so please leave"? We stop letting people IN the store at closing time. Of course, we'd prefer to be able to start cleaning up and closing up at closing time, rather than spending 15 minutes telling someone about a camera, but if that's the way it goes, oh well.
Tonight, we actually had THREE people in the store as we closed, and it was just me and the new guy out on the sales floor, so two people had to wait for me to help them... One just wanted to know what's out there as far as compact cameras go, so he was inconsiderate enough to require my attention (for no good, constructive, purchasing-related reason) AFTER closing time AND while other people waited. The second guy actually wanted to buy a camcorder, so I treated him super nice and actually felt bad that he was made to wait by the first guy.
And then the third person was a woman, who was like "Could we hurry this up please, I have to catch my train in like 5 minutes". Now THAT's not cool. That's REALLY not cool. Why do you assume you can come in at closing time and be helped right away? Sometimes, you gotta wait, especially at that time when everyone is trying to fit in a few last batch of useful errands (or just shopping, or researching cameras) for the day (we do usually get a lot of people in in the last half hour).
In fact, why does anyone EXPECT prompt service at all? Sometimes you have to wait a while. You're free to leave at any time if it looks like your time constraints are not compatible with how quickly (or not quickly) we are able to help you. That's a decision YOU have to make. No point trying to get everyone else to feel bad. We'll all just feel mad at how unreasonable and spoiled you are, because only you seem to feel that we're not doing things as efficiently as we can, especially at closing time. Heck, we wanna go home too.
"400mm, f 2.8, I.S. ..." Part 2
The guy who spent $1500 on fancy SLR stuff came back today to get some of those surfing shots developed. He got some great pictures... despite having forgotten how to change the shutter speed. "Go to those free classes we offer, we want you to really know how to get the most out of your equipment!" was the most cheerful way we found of saying "If WE had equipment like that, WE'd make sure we knew what the heck we were doing with it"...
A Statistical Anomaly
How much money does my store make per day? How much do I sell per day? How much money is spent on each transaction?
Of course, the answer to each of these questions is some kind of distribution. The first two questions may have distributions that are vaguely Gaussian-like, but the last one is far from it. Most of the people who walk in the door either want film developed or digi-prints, or they buy expensive equipment, so most transactions are either in the $10-$30 range or in the $300-$600 range.
In any case, any distribution has its tails, and boy did I get a "several standard deviations away from mean" one today. Where do I start...
Just as I get in, late in the morning (I closed the store today, so I was not there at opening), a lady calls asking whether we have the Canon Pro1 or some Samsung camera I'd never heard of. I say no, we don't, but we have some LIKE them, that are much better deals too. The Canon is an awesome camera, but way overpriced, I'd be happy to show her some better deals that do abou the same thing. "Like what?". Well, we have a couple of Fujis that are similar... "Oh, oh, wait, what's the model of the Fuji?". I was thinking the S7000... "Yeah, yeah, I read about that one too!" Good, so she knows I'm not trying to trick her or anything, and what I tell her about the Fuji matches what she has read. She needs the camera for studio work, portraits and so on, and she also needs something that is easy to use, another two reasons why the S7000 is perfect for her. It's what WE use to take passport pictures - most of us are far from expert photographers but the pictures always come out very nice. AND, it costs half as much as a Pro1 (I can't say this enough, Canons are rip-offs). "All right, I'll stop by today to get one". Great, I'll set one aside. Our last one too.
She calls again later. "What about the Digital Rebel? Is it a better camera?" Well, of COURSE it's a better camera, but it's an SLR. "What's an SLR?". I tell her, concluding with "If you want something that is easy to use, an SLR is not what you want". Meanwhile, I'm thinking: I get more comission selling Fuji than selling Canon, but all my performance-tracking parameters will look great if I sell a digital SLR... "But the Rebel will take better pictures, right? And it would be the better camera to have in the studio, right?" Right. "Because my friend says that, if I'm gonna spend $900 on a Pro1, I might as well buy a Rebel". You have a very smart friend. "But the thing is, I don't have quite enough money for the Rebel, I'd have to wait till the end of the week, until this person pays me on Thursday... Could you hold one till then?". Um, I suppose. But you know, we offer zero-percent-interest financing for up to a year. "REALLY? So I could take it now and not pay right away?" Correct, if you are approved, a process that takes a form being filled out and my making a 5-minute phone-call. "All right! Put aside a Rebel for me, I'll be in today!"
She comes in a few hours later. I show her the Rebel. I remind her that for studio work, she would need a remote control, and she says I'm right. As I go to get it, she says she is also thinking about getting a smaller camera, to take to parties and so on. Something that fits in the pocket but takes sharp pictures. I tell her about the Sony P100 for three or four sentences, she holds it for a few seconds, and says "All right, I'll take one". At this point I'm getting REAL excited. You know, you could get a P120 that's the same, but has an extra battery and a leather case for only $50 more. "OK, sounds like a deal to me. Oooh, look, what's that behind you! An underwater camera!" That's right. But you know, Sony makes a little plastic box that goes around the P100, making it an underwater camera. "Oooh, really! Do you have those in the store?" Afraid not, I'd have to order one for you, it'd be here by the end of the week. "Sounds great!" And you need a bigger memory stick than the one that comes in the box. "You're right".
Back to the Rebel, I tell her she needs an extra battery ("You're right"), a one-gig card (She got two 512s instead, despite that being more expensive, because it would be easier for her to keep her pictures organized), a damage-protection warranty ("Oh yeah, you shoud see how clumsy I get with expensive equipment")... "And I wish there were a book or something on how to use this camera, something friendlier than the manual"... I pull out just such a book, written for beginner users who want to learn how to use a Digital Rebel.
"Now, while I'm here, let me see if I can knock some other people off my list...", and she buys a reflecting telescope. She then decides a digital picture frame would be a good way to look at her pictures while away from a computer. And from now till Christmas, we offer a full $150 rebate on the HP140 photo-printer, making it practially free. "What do you mean, practically free?". You pay $150 now, but you get a $75 rebate from us, a $25 rebate from us, and an $50 rebate from HP, so you get all your money back as checks in the mail. "Well, you can't beat 'free'...". She also gets a couple of lens-cleaning kits, and a membership card, and a bag for the Rebel.
I scan all the stuff, we fill out the financing form, I call the financing place, she is approved, and so she walks away from the store with three huge bags (well, me carrying two huge bags, and her carrying one, to her car, where a pair of very friendly Rottweilers await patiently. Very sweet dogs. I mean it). She got a Rebel, two 512mb CF cards, a bag, a book, two lens-cleaning kits, a remote, a Sony P120 (with extra battery and case included), a 256mb Memory Stick Pro, a digital frame, a reflecting telescope, a photo printer, and the warranty and the membership card... about $2500 worth of stuff.
Afterwards, I had my manager take a picture of me holding up the super-long receipt like a master fisherman standing next to a Marlin.
So from now on we'll be making a point of telling people we have one-year interest-free financing, if there is any chance at all that it will trigger someone else to go on a twenty-five-hundred-dollar shopping spree...
What Kind Of Sony Do You Have? "A Cybershot". Grrr...
Here's another one of my pet peeves: I ask someone whay kind of camera they have - or even what kind of [some camera manufacturer] they have - and they reply "A Cybershot" or "A Coolpix" or "a Finepix". Do they not realize that EVERY Sony is called "Cybershot [something]", EVERY Nikon is a "Coolpix [something]", EVERY Fuji is a "Finepix [something]", EVERY Casio is an "Exilim [something]"? Clearly not. At least some other manufacturers have a FEW families of digital cameras, but still the family name is way too broad to be useful. For example, Fuji Finepixes go from small $150 fit-in-your-pocket point-n-shoots with minimal features and minimal price all the way up to $2500 digital SLRs. If I ask you "What kind of car do you drive" and you said "A Ford", you could drive a Focus or a pick-up truck, and so you didn't really answer my question.
This comes up when someone needs a battery, or a charger, or a memory card, or a bag, or some kind of accessory. The kind of bag that would fit a tiny Finepix 303 is VERY different from the backpack you would need to haul a Finepix S3 around.
Why does that bother me? It comes down to that issue of how much research one ought to do before buying a camera. If you did not look at enough Sonys to figure out that they're ALL called "Cybershot", then you clearly did not do enough research to figure out that your camera is the best you could get. Say you got a Cybershot P120. Can you really buy one with confidence without having looked at the similar P100 (cheaper, as it does not come with a leather case or with an extra battery) and P150 (a tad more expensive, but much higher image quality), and without having considered the P93 (same features, but cheaper as it is bigger and a little older) or the W1 (same price, same features, but different form factor)? They're ALL called Cybershot, and you really should look at all of them before you get any of them, because of how similar-yet-different they are. When I ask what kind of camera a customer has, and he looks down at it and very decisively tells me "A 'Cybershot'", that just says "I did not bother to do any research at all, and just bought the first camera I saw in front of me".
How can you be truly happy (or, for that matter, truly unhappy) with the camera you have, if you don't know what's out there? I am VERY hapy with my big-lens Fujis and Panasonics because I KNOW there is no camera out there quite like them, with all the features I want. It was those two afternoons of research that allow me to think "Wow, my camera is AWESOME!" every time I use my Panasonic. It's a good feeling. I know for a fact that the only comparable cameras the the Canon Pro1, the Minolta A1 and A2, and a couple Olympus and Sony cameras, all of which cost half again as much. I also know that the comparable Fujis don't have image stabilization OR that much zoom, that the Canon S1-IS only has 3MP and only 10x zoom, and that the Minolta Z3 has a much slower lens, so mine is the only one with all the features I want. It feels great to think about that, to know I own an exceptional machine in the ways that are important to me.
In any case... even more infuriating is when I ask a customer what camera they have, and they say "A Canon, the 5-MegaPixel one" or "A Nikon, the one with the swiveling screen". Did you seriously not do enough research to realize there is more than one 5MP Canon, and that most high-end Nikons (I can think of 4) have the swivel-screen? Getting back to the "What kind of car do you drive?" analogy, I hope you realize that "That Ford one with four doors" or "The Subaru with all-wheel-drive" is only slightly more informative than "You know, the kind with four wheels, the one with the engine in the front and the trunk in the back. The steering wheel is on the left... it's got all these lights at the very front and the very back... you know the one...".
Given what price range you're willing to restrict yourself to, there IS a camera out there with the features YOU want and NOT with the features you don't care about. Yes, there IS that much variety out there, as the combinations of different features are endless (big or small screen, big or small lens, how many megapixels, manual or auto exposure, compact or not, AA power or Li-ion, 3x or 12x zoom...). Do so many people not care that they get a camera that they are as happy with as is possible given their budget? All it takes is a couple hours on Froogle and/or Steve's Digicams and/or DP Review and/or Consumer Report. Would you buy a car that is not EXACTLY what you want, or JUST as close to that as possible given your budget? A camera is an extension of your senses, practially a part of you, so if something about it is clumsy or uncomfortable or not as powerful as you'd like, then, well, that sucks. It's an annoyance no one has to put up with, but people seem to be happy to buy whatever is in front of them, and then complain later.
You can get the camera that is right for you! And it will feel great when you do! Why skip the research, and then get a crappy camera you will hate and never use, and then make your camera salesman all mad when he sees you have no idea of how varied digicams are?
----
PS: For the sake of completeness, I should say Sony also makes a series of digicams called Mavicas. They write pictures straight to disks, which are physically huge, and used to hold a lot more data than memory cards way back when. So Mavicas are huge, bigger than many camcorders, and kinda obsolete in the days when MicroDrive memory cards can hold more data than a whole DVD. They do take great pictures, though.
I'm Back!
Facing yet another week of minimal work (much like the first week, and kinda the only week, during which I posted regularly), I think I'll be posting some more stuff.
Let's start with some random pictures.
Does anyone else think the box Fuji made for its 330 and 340 cameras is... kinda scary?
Is this supposed to be "AAAAARGH! I HATE YOU, YOU STUPID FRUSTRATING GRAINY-LCD PLASTICKY-FEELING NO-SOUND-RECORDING PIECE OF CRAP!!!", or it is a "Mo-om, I SAID I WANTED a REBEL for Christmas!". In any case, we will all be having nightmares tonight:
Yeah, that's how I feel, working at the store, a lot of the time. Maybe Fuji put that on there to comfort salespeople. "Yeah, thanks for selling our stuff, we know that THIS is how it feels sometimes".
And here is a sign we have at the store for our clearance items. I swear I did not Photoshop this:
I think the person who WROTE this sign might be in need of a head examination, or of a change in careers...
That's all for now.
To Quit Or Not To Quit
So, as you may have gathered by now, I don't much like my job.
Most middle-schoolers should have been able to pick up on this. I can see an SAT reading comprehension test with one of my entries followed by
(22) The author ___ his job.
a) loves
b) is thrilled by
c) looks forward every day to
d) does not much like
But getting back to the point... Despite the fact this job is not that pleasant, I recognise that my enduring it is necessary for the payment of bills and the purchasing of food, both of which are essential to my well-being.
However, the real problem is: This job, plus my studies (all right, I am not quite out of college yet, I'll be graduating in a couple weeks), is not leaving me any time to look for a REAL job. I have a few leads about companies that might hire me to do interesting and rewarding work, and I would love to read up on them so I could send them informed-sounding cover letters, along with my resume and maybe some of my best work I have produced for my classes... But reading about the company and preparing these things for them, let alone interviewing and so on, take a lot of time. Time I do not have.
Here's how little time I have: You know those days when you wake up at your own pace, read for fun and surf the web and watch TV/DVDs and play Halo all day, and then go to sleep not having changed out of yoru pajamas, barely having left your room at all except to pee and to eat... If I don't have a day like that every couple of weeks, I go insane. I have not had a day like that in about 3 months. I actually CRY when I think long enough about how long it's been since I've been able to truly relax, since I've had a whole day when I did not feel I had a list of urgent productive tasks to accomplish. Yes, I'm spoiled, and yes, I know I will eventually only be able to have a few days like that per year when I become an adult, but right now, it's essential to my happiness. I feel like I have to put on a serious face and bury my anger/frustration deep down, so that I don't cry/scream/whine continuously due to the impossibility of my ever truly resting/relaxing. The only reason why I had the time to write this blog was that I did not have homework for one week. That was the week I had time to take all the tons of little pieces of paper I had written "notes" on and develop them into blog entries. Also, the fact that I am at work at different times each day, and different days each week, have meant that managing my time is next to impossible. I am eating unhealthily (often taking whatever is the fastest, not the most nutritious, meal available) and not exercising. And I have not been able to spend more than an evening at a time with my girlfriend, which is SO not cool.
But I digress. The point is, I am not doing as well in my studies as I could, and my search for a real job has ground to a halt (as have less important things like playing video games and reading novels). This is actually a very bad thing for my future and my life in general.
So I wanted to quit this job, and get a job with regular hours, and one that left me enough time (like say THE WEEKENDS!) to look for a real job, relax, and hang out with my girlfriend for more than a couple hours at a time. I looked into tutoring, and into being a dance instructor (yes, I enjoy ballroom dancing).
Eventually, however, I realized that searching for a real job IS a full-time job, and that I would have to have NO JOB (especially at the same time as my studies) in order to really be able to dedicate time and energy to finding a real job, and to have enough SPARE time and energy for me not to have a breakdown when I think about how little free time I have.
My parents have expressed throughout my life that they feel they should help me out however and whenever they can to get my life on the proper track, to help me get my education as best as possible. So I asked them if they would support me until I graduated and found a real job. They said yes.
So I decided to quit.
Throughout that day, the birds were singing, the sun was shining, and every tree and rock and bicycle and object I saw in front of me revealed layer upon layer of miraculously intricate beauty. It was like I was high for a day. As someone who likes to draw and to take pictures, I kinda like to admire things like the texture and details of wood and concrete, the way the light of the setting sun plays on the leaves of a tree, the way shadows overlap and hide or enhance details, the way clouds look at sunset, the way things look so different at night. I could recite the "Sometimes there's just so much beauty in the world" speech from American Beauty, but I'll spare you. The point is, there is just TONS to look at and admire in any ordinary place. And I am only able to see that when I am fundamentally content, not worried, not stressed out, able to relax, and at peace with my life and myself. I was very glad to notice all these things again starting the day when I decided to quit this job and get my life back to the way I wanted it.
I also scheduled a few trips that my job would not allow me to take: Home for Thanksgiving, Home for Christmas and New Year's (my manager said I could have about a week off around New Year's, and that was it), and three days off a week and a half ago for that aforementioned Very Big Event in the niche field of photography that I am interested in.
OK, so here's where it gets interesting.
I knew that all I really wanted was more free time, and the ability to take those three trips. I COULD have told my boss (my manager) that "Hey, I'll keep working for you if you want to, but here are some new conditions". I thought that was an asshole-ish thing to do, holding my job hostage like that.
I also knew that, as long as I was employed there, I would feel certain duties of an employee. If my boss said "Could you come in at such-and-such a time, even though I had not scheduled you for that time? Sorry about the short notice", I would feel obliged to say "Yes" if I did not have unbreakable plans for that period of time. If my boss asked me to stay late one day, to work extra hours, etc, and I did not have plans with other people for that time, I would feel I would have to say "Yes". That's just what a good employee does. So even if I DID do the asshole-ish thing and say "I'll remain an employee, but for fewer hours a week", I would not feel I could stop those fewer hours from growing.
So, for all these reasons, quitting altogether was preferable to just working fewer hours. Time to give two-weeks' notice.
So I wrote my boss a long apologetic note, explaining why I felt I had to quit. She read it, and asked me if I could not be persuaded to work fewer hours, and I told her that No, a complete break of my duties as an employee would be the only way to prevent them from growing greater than I wanted them, because I do feel a duty to take on whatever duty you assign me, within reason. (In other words, I tried to make it sound like "Being a proper employee is more than I can do right now, and I would not want to be less of a good worker than that", which was essentially true). So she said, all right, you'll have your last paycheck in two weeks.
She did, however, really want me to work there part-time, if possible. I felt tempted to give in and be a bad employee and say "Ok, but just a few hours a week, and I get to go on these trips I have planned". So I guess holding one's job hostage in exchange for some demands is not as bad as just quitting. I guess that makes sense.
It doesn't make much sense if you see your job as being "Doing whatever you can to ensure the success and well-being of your company, and the trust and goodwill of your employers", if you care about your job, if you think it is important, that it ought to be done well. But I DON'T care about my job, just about earning money. So the "holding one's job hostage" thing does make sense if you see your job as simply a deal where you exchange time and energy for money. "Hey, I just decided that I don't want to sell ALL this time anymore", or "Hey, I think the price of my time is gonna go up". I't just a business relationship.
However, I still felt bad about quitting, about screwing over my boss, and the store. They would be REALLY understaffed, and our manager and our district manager and sales people from other stores would have to be filling in for me. (Not that it's my fault that they don't hire aggressively enough, and too selectively). When they hired me, I said I'd work through the holidays. How do I suddenly say "I have decided that this deal is not in my interest anymore, so I'm gonna call it off"?
Well, my contract does say my employment is "at will", meaning "the company holds the right to terminate my employment without cause or notice", a right I also have. In other words, it's the same as being fired, except I'd be firing them. I would be doing what is best for my interests in a way that is allowed by the contract, and although I'd be screwing someone over, I would only have to feel bad about that if I wanted to.
My girlfriend asked me how I could look at it like that. They're the employers! They're the ones in a position of power! Ah-ah, actually, no. Whoever cares less about my employment, whoever needs it less, is in a position of power. In this case, it's me. I'm the one who says "either things go my way or our relationship is over" to my boss. That was very empowering, although it furthered the feeling that I had to do it just right to make them not be mad at me.
So I quit. I "fired" the company - they were being detrimental to my interests, and their demands were greater (and benefits less great) than I had been led to believe when we started our relationship, so I ended it.
But is the story over? No, not yet.
I then made the mistake of talking to one of the lab guys about this. He is really cool, and I allowed him to persuade me that working there is not so bad, that we get great discounts, that the store really needs me (we ARE understaffed like you wouldn't believe)... c'mon, at least work a few hours a week. You'll still get tons more time than you have now, can't you help us out just a little? Do you need ALL those hours? I thought about it a bit (clearly not enough), and agreed with him.
All right, I'll stay. Part time. Sixteen hours a week, MAYBE 20 (down from 42), and I get to go on my 3 trips. So I told my manager. I did the asshole-ish thing, and said she could "keep me, under the following conditions". She was pleased. It's not an asshole-ish thing to offer something instead of nothing, and I swear I was not being purposefully manipulative by saying I'd quit (at which point she realizes she needs me) and then say "All right, I'll stay if..". So I ended up not feeling bad about saying I could only work part time, and not through the holidays.
I'm such a wimp.
Not THAT Again...
So an old-ish customer comes in, saying he wants to get prints from the digital files on a CD. I tell him to go on over to our kiosk and follow the instructions (I was busy). He gets to the kiosk, looks at it for a second (clearly the "Press here to start" was not clear enough), turns to face me, palms turned outwards, and says with a small level of outrage: "But I've never done this before!".
If you've read my post about The Thing I Hate The Most... you know this is it. Dude, the computer will ask you for some information, one thing at a time, and give you some obvious choices. Give it a chance.
I came up with a nice analogy. Say you're applying for a credit card, or for financing, or for a membership card at a store, or for a job, or maybe you're doing something tax-related, or maybe filling out a survey or helping out with a Psychology study by answering some questions. In any of these situations, you have to fill out a form, probably one you've never seen before. All that this form does is ask you for one or two pieces of information at a time, followed by a space or check-box in which to enter this information. Not too hard. What if you said "But I've never filled out this form before!" when it's handed to you. The person handing it to you will look at you like you're retarded, quite rightfully. So why do I have to be all caring and empathetic to a customer who looks at an extremely simple sequence of button-presses (each of which asks for one or two pieces of information and makes your choices clear) and tells me that I should help him cuz he's never done it before?
Commitment, Good Vs Bad Jobs
So right now I'm sitting at my OTHER job, the tech support / multimedia consultant one. (This was true during the time a good fraction of this blog was written. Not much action here in the library).
The thing is, I'm not supposed to be here today. But the person who WAS supposed to be here is about to fail a class, and needs to study hard for a final tomorrow, so I get this phonecall, on a Sunday, asking if I can come in. And I did.
Thanks to my working-much-less-now arrangement with my boss, and after a week of pure REST around the Thanksgiving holiday, I have actually had enough free time lately that I decided that I would be ok spending Sunday afternoon working at the library.
This is WAY more commitment than I feel towards my camera store job. If, when I turn my cell phone on after lunch (I was having lunch at a restaurant with a bunch of people, so the phone gets turned off, as basic manners dictate), I get a message from the camera store saying "So and so is not coming in today, we need someone right away"... I'm quite sure I would not go. I'd probably pretend I did not get the message until it was too late or something. (But if I actually answered a phone call, and my boss was asking me in real-time, I would have a much harder time saying no. Again, I'm such a wimp. I buckle like a belt).
With the library job, though, I'm willing to drive a half hour (and another half hour to get back) to fill in for someone at the last minute, to make sure things run smoothly. It might be even more of a hassle for the camera store to find someone ELSE to come in (other than me) than it would be for the library, but for some reason I CARE about the library much more than I care about the store.
Why is that? I was thinking that to myself as I drove over here. The best answer I came up with was, I feel a stronger, more meaningful connection to my boss and coworkers at the library. I really see us as a team trying to do something, and I think I individually let down each member of the team if I mess up, or even if I fail to help when I could to prevent the consequences of someone else messing up. I think it's important to have someone on call to answer questions and fix problems. Most importantly, I feel like part of a big organization, and I share my values with this organization (values of how important it is to have the library be well-run and helpful).
At the camera store, I definitely feel like I have a deal with the company, exchanging my time for money. I am me, they are someone else, and they can't pay me to CARE, they can only pay me to BE there and DO stuff and PRETEND to share their interests for a few previously-agreed-upon hours per day. If they are at some point understaffed, then I may choose to not care, or I may choose I want to get paid for just a few more hours of pretending I care.
I wonder why I feel so connected to the library, and so alienated from the camera-shop company. Both places require expertise that not many people would be as qualified to give as me. Neither job is very exciting.
Could it be simply because the store job is so much more work? It's many more hours a week, hours spend almost entirely on my feet, hours where, if I'm not interacting with customers, I'm doing paperwork or cleaning/arranging stuff. The library job is a few hours a week, and I spend almost all that time doing homework or writing blog entries or drooling over pictures taken by people I know with their Digital Rebels.
I guess the key difference is that, in the store job, I have to ACT. I have to act like I'm loving my job, I have to act like I'm HAPPY to show someone how to do something simple that they could have figured out themselves, like I'm happy to be a cash register monkey. I have to wear my shirt tucked in, I can't eat or drink in sight of customers... Basically, I have a "professional" (read: artificial, non-human, robot/machine-like) relationship with the customers. In the library, I can dress however I want, eat/drink (within reason)... and, much more importantly, I can talk to library patrons genuinely, without having to act. Maybe it makes a difference that they're students just like me, while most store customers are in their 30s-70s. Maybe it's because it seems to me like optimizing the resources of a research institution is more important than selling to the consumerist affluent more than they need, and even more than they think they want. Maybe it's because I genuinely enjoy working at the library, because it's so easy and relaxing. But really, it's because I can be myself.
(On a couple occasions, customers came into the camera store that I did not necessarily have to be all professional with, and it definitely made those experiences more enjoyable. Once was when a guy I knew from my Sophomore-year dorm came in, looking for a camera for his wife (!!!) to take pictures of jewlery she designs. I answered his questions the same way as if a friend or acquaintance asked me, outside of work, about cameras. But after he picked one (Fuji S7000), I did go into "sell the warranty and the extras" mode. SO I guess I don't act that different when I TALK about cameras, just when trying to sell other things, when I stop giving genuine advice and start acting like a big walking talking pop-up window. The other occasion I felt I did not have to be all professional was when someone of my nationality came in, looking to get a camera. A young guy about my age. We talked about cameras, he went with the Nikon 3200, and as soon as I started asking if he wanted this or that, he waved his hand and said "Just relax, man". He could see right away when I stopped being myself. And he told me in as nice a way as possible that I should not try to sell him anything else, that it was not worth trying. So, as I was ringing up his camera, I asked "You sure you don't want a bigger memory card or a bag or anything?", he said "No, man. Relax". (We do say "relax" a lot where I come from. Or maybe "Just chill" would be a better translation. It doesn't mean "You're getting way too worked up about something", it means "I think you're about to worry about something just a tad more than you need to". We pride ourselves in being very laid back). In any case, what these occasions show is that I like talking about cameras because I can be myself, and I hate selling because I have to be "the company", which I am NOT).
Another reason why I feel much more commitment to the library job is that my boss is a genuinely nice and friendly guy, who makes sure he lays out what's expected of us, who is supportive and super-patient when we don't know what to do. My boss at the camera store is nice but in a less genuine, more phony way. You can't ever really trust that she likes you. She will say quite harsh things if you ask something unreaosnable, but she'll say them in a friendly tone, which is when it strikes you that you can't ever know just how happy or unhappy she is with you. When you ask her how to do something, or where something is, she answers in hints or questions, making it a lot of work a lot of the time. And if you're ringing up a sale, or doing something else in the cash register, and you forget what to press for this or that function, she will just come in and press buttons very fast, rather than saying "First you go into the "Point of Sales" menu - see here? - by pressing 16, then you choose this option by pressing 7, which is the option will the functions related to doing that kind of thing". The ten seconds it would take her to do this would make a world of difference. The customer may appreciate saving the 10 seconds, but I would appreciate their having a "He's learning" mentality than a "He doesn't know what he's doing" mentality.
Any other reasons why my boss at the camera store is not as good a boss? I guess things are just more laid back in the library. We always have people when we need people, and in the rare occasions we don't, it's not a HUGE deal; Some people are not able to print their papers, but no one loses money (well, the library loses those 10 cents a page it would have gotten if people had managed to get their things printed, but no one really cares about that too much). We have a lot more resources for anything we need to do. All the resources we have here for patrons, I can just go ahead and use if I want (with less hassle than a non-employee would have to go through), as long as I ask first. Heck, I borrowed a camcorder for 5 days. I've printed for free on one or two occasions (no, not more). I've taken our external hard drive home overnight. I guess since our goal is not just making money, and since the university makes sure we have everything that we need, we don't have to be all paranoid all the time... unlike at the store, where everything is kept under lock and key, frequently inventoried, tracked on 3 different systems, hooked up to alarms, and so on.
I guess having been a library patron, I see the importance of having all these complicated things run well. Never having been a business-owner, it's not as obvious to me that it's important for every little mechanism at the camera store to function properly and well.
My professor spent some time the other day talking about how important it is for us to find a job that makes us happy - or at least a job that doesn't make us miserable. And the differences might not be as simple as we think (like how well it pays). They will have to do with the work environment, the kinds of relationships you have with people, the kind of interactions you have, the kind of product you're making or service you're providing. Granted, we will be lucky if we have ONE job to choose from, but I guess it's important to go into it knowing what to expect, and not being surprised if this or that becomes a huge source of unhappiness. Having had some great jobs and some awful jobs (and at least one that was great and awful at the same time... maybe I'll talk about it later), it has become very important for me to find the differences, so I know what to look for now that the time has come for me to find a REAL job, for me to start a career.
OK. Enough rambling for now. Back to studying for finals.
(PS: The above entry has three Clerks references. Did you spot them?)
Probability, Insurance, Statistics, and Cameras
So I'm probably going to buy a new camera very soon. I'm imagining what it would be like to say "no" to my co-workers about all the add-ons and stuff, when I know how bad it looks for them if they fail to sell me all that crap.
I'm sure I'll be asked if I want to buy a warranty. And I'm sure I'll say No. Why not? Here's the deep dark secret: Because it's not worth it. Like, mathematically.
We're always being pushed to sell more damage-protection warranties with cameras (which is when, if anything happens to the camera, anything short of theft or loss, we'll fix it or replace it for free, even if YOU broke it being stupid. It does buy you some peace of mind, and is cheaper than what it would cost to fix the camera).
If we're always being pushed to sell them, they must be very profitable.
If they're very profitable (or, really, profitable at all), then on average most people do not get their warranties'-money's worth in camera repairs. Which means that you're better off not getting it, because you're so unlikely to use it. In other words, the warranty costs less than a camera repair, but the warranty cost divided by the probablility of you actually breaking the camera is NOT less money than the cost of the camera repair. Otherwise we wouldn't be selling them. This means not getting a warranty is a gamble, but one in your favor. (If that's probabilistically obvious to you, you can skip the rest of the post. If not, read on. I think it's actually pretty interesting).
It's like insurance. From years of looking at what people need their insurance to pay for what, hey know how much to charge people so that, when people do need the insurance money, the insurance company still makes money from them in the long run. Even when people need tons of insurance money - like if their car is destroyed or something - then those people, and everyone else, is charged just a tad more so that the insurance company makes money in the end. So if people just put away as much money as you would pay the insurance company, then on average most people would find that this money is enough for them to pay for doctors and car repair and whatnot. But for SOME people - the ones who do crash their cars irreparably, the ones whose house burns down, then ones who for no reason catch an expensive disease - they DO make money off the insurance company. And if, tragically, you end up being one of those people, then you want insurance!
How many people profit from insurance in the long run, versus how many people don't, can be guessed at by how profitable insurance is. Which is: marginally. So the gamble of whether or not to get insurance is a pretty even one. Of course, the small probability of a catastrophically strong need for being insured is what leads most people (and the law) to decide (quite rightfully) that it's a good idea. But in the end, all that insurance is, is: either you're paying for someone else's car accident/disease, or they're paying for yours. Which is great, in an idealistic, socialist kinda way.
(Wow, that was longer than I expected). Why is it important for me to lay all that down clearly? Because that's what allows me to see that warranties on electronics, as much as they buy you peace of mind, are most often not worth it.
Say 90 people buy cameras this month. Say that half of them buy a warranty, and that the chance of you breaking your camera over its first couple years is one third (I'm just making up numbers, but hang on). That means that 45 people buy a warranty, and that 15 of those will have the camera repairs paid for by the warranty. (Or, rather, 15 camera repairs, not 15 people: If you need it repaired twice, that counts as two, and you need to stop carrying your camera in your pocket when you go snowboarding). That means that everyone who buys the warranty has to pay one-third of a camera repair cost, in order for the warranty system to pay for itself, as far as the store is concerned. If that were the case, then the system would break even (if they charged you the fraction of a camera repair cost (one third in this case) that corresponds to the fraction of insured camera repairs per camera purchases, 15/45). For it to be profitable, they need to charge you MORE than that. If they charge, say, 40% of the repair cost, then, on average, seven fortieths of your warranty cost goes to the company, and 33/40 goes to paying for repairs (because, remember, one in three people use it, in our example).
This means that the chances of you needing a camera repair are 1/3, so on average the money you will be spending on camera repairs is 1/3 the cost of one repair... but you just paid that and a little bit to the store, which is more than the expected cost of getting it repaired if and when it breaks.
In other words, if 1/X of the people who buy warranties actually use them to pay for camera repairs, and if all those camera repairs put together cost Y, then the warranties must cost Y/X to break even, and MORE than Y/X to make money. However, each person on average will spend Y/X on camera repairs, which means that, if the warranty system is profitable for the store, than on average it is not profitable to the customer. It IS a little profitable to the people whose cameras break, but it is very much unprofitable to the people whose cameras don't, so in the end, it's actually not a good gamble, statistically. Just as gambling is just slightly unprofitable for most people, and quite profitable to very few, but not enough to make it a good deal (which is why casinos make money).
So don't buy camera warranties. Unless you buy a camera from ME of course...
The Trade Expo
As I mentioned several posts back, I went to a trade expo not too long ago. That's where people from different camera companies told us why we should sell their cameras. Salespeople "selling" to salespeople. And some of them were not that great salespeople. It was actually pretty funny, sometimes, to see some people who were clearly not technically trained talking about the features and design and details of their products...
The Trade Fair thing was only for people from my store chain (salespeople and managers and so on), so it was not that great an affair. If you're thinking of an enormous building full of fancy booths... think more of a school science fair, with a few tables each covered in papers and cameras, sometimes with a TV and/or poster behind them. Nothing too fancy. And in the back, the two corners each had 30 or so seats and a projector screen, for a series of half-hour-long powerpoint presentations given by the camera companies' salespeople.
Kodak's presentation was particularly funny. First, the guy could not get the powerpoint presentation to play a movie, which does nothing to build our confidence in him as someone who knows electronics.
He went on an on about how simple everything is. And you do like it simple, don't you? Simple is better than complicated, right? Anyways... You can load your friends email addresses onto the Kodak Easyshare program (which requires all kinds of steps, entering the right thing into the right window tons of times...), and then "tag" the pictures that you like, right after you take them, so that everyone gets sent the pictures as soon as you put the camera down on the dock. Except, "tagging" also takes a bunch of button-presses, as does uploading the email addresses into the camera and then choosing who gets which pictures. And when the pictures are emailed, are they reduced and compressed? because if they aren't, then a lot of people's email inboxes are gonna get clogged, but if they ARE reduced and compressed, then people with big inboxes who like sharp pictures are gonna be disappointed. The whole EasyShare system did not look easy and simple at all. Why not just put your pictures into folders, and email them out yourself? The EasyShare program also burns picture CDs. And after you burn a picture CD, you can add more pictures to it on another burn! (Wow, imagine if I could do that just with my operating system! Oh wait...). Another great example was the one-click printing. He showed us a window, half of which was a hige button that sais "PRINT!"... and the other half are pull-down menus so you can choose your printer, paper type, dpi, and a bunch more details, which means you're gonna click way more times than once. How deceptive.
The guy also can't say "Schneider" ("Snyder") or "aspherical" (AY-sPEErical). He says that the filter adapter "brings it to 55mm, which they tell me is a common size". Ah, I see you're an experienced photographer too. Jeez...
He tells us that the next-to-last number in the camera designation tells you how much optical zoom it has (the 7330 has 3X zoom)... but does the 7300 have ZERO zoom? Don't you mean, ONE times? No optical zoom means the max focal length is ONE TIMES the minimal focal length (same length), not zero!
"And you gotta get the camera dock! If not, then you have to find all those cables for the camera, plug them in... With the dock, all you have to do is put the camera on top of the dock!". Um... why is the dock any easier to hook up than the camera itself? And why would you lose the camera cables but not the dock cables, or know where to put the dock cables but not the camera cables? They're the same cables! "People buy the camera, and if they say they don't want a dock, they're usually back by the end of the weekend asking for that dock. Because who's buying these cameras? First time users!" Yeah, because your cameras SUCK! Here, he was very right - anyone who buys a Kodak digital camera is buying their first digicam, because no one makes that mistake twice.
(I don't like Kodak cameras. They are not ergonomic at all, have poorly-designed interfaces, don't have advanced features like manual controls and image stabilization, feel cheap and plasticky, are kinda big, and that whole EasyShare thing they pride themselves on so much is much more complicated than just using Windows to do the same things).
To his credit, some OTHER people asked some stupid questions. He showed two shots taken with the 7490, which has 10x optical zoom (another break of the third-digit-zoom rule). One shot zoomed all the way out, one all the way in. It did bring out a lot more detail. One of my store chain's salesmen raised his hand and asked "Is that the same frame"? He wanted to know if all that detail was in the zoomed-out shot. Great, even people who SELL cameras don't know the difference between optical and digital zoom...
Fuji's guy didn't even try to PRETEND he knew what he was talking about. "I often lose myself in trying to explain to the customers how our Super-CCD works, so we won't go into it... What it comes down to is, it records like a 5MP, but prints almost like a 10MP". Everything SO dumbed down. Not much more than you get just from readint the catalogue. (Of course, he could not say that the super CCD uses octagonal pixel sensors which leave room for little mini-sensors in between them, and that this does not quite double the resolution but gives the camera some data to keep the interpolation from being purely guesswork. That's not THAT complicated. But I guess "interpolation" has more syllables than he'd like any one word to have...). "This camera has a wide angle adapter lens..." How wide is it, I asked? Equivalent to what focal length? "I dunno, widER... I'd have to look that up". Great, so you can say "this is a great lens" but not say exactly how great. This is like a car salesman saying "This guy has a lot of horsepower!" How many? "I dunno... A lot!"
Most of Nikon's presentation was about how their cameras can guess better at aperture, shutterspeed, and white balance, than other cameras, so if you choose the right scene more, you get better pictures more easily. And he's right. But why not just get a camera with manual controls... Ah, never mind. He did make one serious slip-up, saying how Nikon's low-dispersion glass focuses light more sharply, making for more-highly-detailed pictures, and he illustrated this by showing something like the following graphic:
Here he's confusing FOCUS with CHROMATIC ABHERRATION. A lens that does not focus sharply would make light of ALL COLORS spread out behind it and end up, from one point, not all in the same point on the sensor. But when the spreading of light splits it into different colors, then that's not because of bad focus, that's because light of different colors refracts differently, and some colors will be focused more than others, and in different places from one another on the sensor. This is called chromatic abherration, and is a problem with a lot of cheaper telephoto lenses. Seeing the light split into a spectrum, and saying that this has to do with the focusing and dispersion/diffusion rather than with the curvature and refractive properties of the lens, is PRETTY BAD in my book.
I think that, in order to sell something, you can't just explain what the features do, you have to explain how they work, so that you can REALLy explain what's going on, what the user gets out of it, when it works and when it doesn't, etc. And this isn't rocket science here, people. I dunno, I was disappointed at how all I got was lists of features, and some images showing us what these features do (but rarely how they do it). Not much more than what you get in the catalogue. Except presented by enthusiastic salespeople, who are so EXCITED that it's so EASY for you to get great pictures and share them if you use their camera. Look, dude, stop being so excited, because the best thing you can do is tell me what to tell my customers so that they buy this camera. While a lot of the presentations included some "So you can tell your customers that the camera does THIS, and that it works easily and very well", most of them were more like "Wow, isn't this COOL?!". I can imagine a salesperson leaving this place, and later trying to tell a customer about a camera, like "It does this thing where you can see more detail when it's dark, and it knows to focus on the people... I forget the details, but trust me, it's really cool!". If you're presenting to salespeople, you can't be too much of a salesperson yourself. Tell us the features, tell us how to impress people with them, don't be too excited yourself, don't try to make US feel that the camera is cool in a way that we are so overwhelmed by it, we do not learn how to pass on that excitement ourselves. Don't just show us cool images, and cool comparison "WITHOUT the feature, WITH the feature" shots, and make us go "Wow"... TELL us how it works, because when WE have to sell the camera, we're not gonna have all those comparison images and so on. We can't say "Trust me, you get more detail when it's dark", we CAN say "the shutter knows to stay open for longer so that light from dark places exposes better, and the image stabilization keeps shake or motion blur from being a problem".
Salespeople know insincere selling when they see it. Well, don't all people? I guess not. Not with so many commercials relying so strongly on flashy loud presentation. "You should be excited by this!!!". Um... OK!!! Sheesh... Buying should not be based on being excited and impulsive and overhwelmed with how cool something is. It should be based on comparing features and prices. Right? Am I the only one who thinks this?
A Great Quote
Nineteenth-century scientist James Croll was the guy who pretty much figured out when, how, and why, Ice Ages happen. He was a stonemason’s son who had only the most basic education, but always read all he could find about science. He started his work life as a millwright, and after many other jobs became a janitor at a museum. At the museum’s library, he read enough physics to be able to formulate the most detailed mathematical analysis of his time regarding planetary motion (and thus Ice Ages, among other interesting effects). This got him work as a geologist, and he was eventually elected a fellow of the Royal Society and published more on the relationships between a planet’s motions and its climate. I wonder how many ex-janitors the Royal Society ever had among their fellows. “Good Will Hunting”s got nuttin’ on this guy.
I bring him up because he once said
“The strong natural tendency of my mind towards abstract thinking somehow unsuited me for practical details of daily work”
If only people could still get away with saying things like that nowadays.
Whaddaya MEAN, you don’t have Ni-Cad AAs?
I have just finished reading a novel which is part of one of the longest, most diverse, and most interesting series of novels written in relatively recent times. (This might lead you to suppose that I am probably, although not necessarily, into Sci Fi or Fantasy).
(In the exciting world where I imagine this blog to exist, you, the reader, do not know me, but know (or are) my employer (or their lawyers), so I must keep my identity hidden while still revealing facts about my life, as above. However, I am well aware of the facts that I do not live in this romanticized world, that you probably know me (and the book I’m talking about), and that my employer could not care less about this blog. It’s still fun to play undercover clerk, though, even if only in my mind).
In any case…
So I want to go to a bookstore and get the next novel in the series. However, I am currently on a trip to my home country, where I strongly doubt any bookstore would have any but the most famous of this Russian author’s works (which are usually thought of as stand-alone books, but most of which are actually a part of this super-long storyline). This made me think of how frustrating it would be to go to a bookstore and not find the book. This thought brought back memories of going to my country’s bookstores (almost all of which have selections that are just so limited) and not finding a book I’m looking for. I would usually express some of this frustration to the person who works there: “What do you MEAN, none of your stores has it? Don’t you think you should carry it?”
This memory in turn led me to think of my recent experiences at the camera store where I found myself on the other end of this kind of situation. It’s useless to complain to me that the store does or does not carry this or that. Am I going to write a letter to the corporate office, saying something like “A customer thinks it’s outrageous that we don’t have this, and they’re right! You don’t know how to select our product list properly!”? No, I’m not.
Most recently, a customer wanted AAs for his Nikon SLR. In our battery area, we have tons of AAs, but they are almost all alkaline, and he wanted Nickel-Cadmium ones. I suggested rechargeable Nickel-Metal-Hydride ones, or maybe some that were Lithium-Ion… But no, “the power curve is all wrong, you could actually irreparably damage the motor when the battery’s effective voltage starts dropping… I’ve been taking pictures for a long time, and you just don’t use these in a nice SLR… How can you NOT HAVE Ni-Cad batteries and call yourself a camera store?” I checked on the computer to see if other stores had them or if I could order them, but they did not come up on the computer at all. “Tell your manager about this. You really should get those batteries”. Um, ok, I will.
It really comes down to how much – or how little – a clerk is an extension of the interests of the company, and of how limited our decision-making is, so we absorb the impact of an angry customer but do not have the power to actually do anything about it. If a customer is outraged at a price, at the lack of availability of an item, etc, then all I can do is agree with them, and in the process divorce myself from the company because there’s nothing I can do. I can say “You’re right, this is wrong”, but in the instant I do so I stop being The Company and start being a fellow photo enthusiast who is outraged but powerless. If I were to still be The Company, I would say “the decisions which led to this situation were deliberately made to optimize your experience with us and our profit from it and from such experiences of others”, or something. In other words, I either say “You’re right, and I wish there were something I could do, but they won’t listen to me any more than to you”, or “You’re wrong, and/or We don’t really care” – the latter being the gist of any correspondence any unhappy customer ever receives, if they receive anything at all, after writing a retail chain’s corporate offices with complaints.
So people at a bookstore will understandably not care and not do anything when I am frustrated brcause I can’t find the next novel, and the bookstore understandably does not want to put a low-demand item on the shelves.
Hard-to-find items only get harder and harder to find as control of retail is centralized into big chains that only sell what is hugely popular. Thank goodness for eBay.
8x6 dilemma
Speaking of low-demand items…
Here’s something interesting: the camera store where I work, which also does photo-finishing (developing and processing and printing photographs), offers many sizes for prints, one of which is six inches by eight inches. This is an unusually wide aspect ratio (a 4x6 print is one and a half times as long as it is wide, unlike an 8x6 which is only one and a THIRD as long). Well, unusual until you realize that one-by-one-and-a-third is the aspect ratio of almost all pictures captured by digital cameras. In other words, digital pictures are more square-ish, or “fatter”, while film pictures are more rectangular-ish, or “thinner”. But digital pictures can also be made into 4x6s, and film pictures can also be printed as 8x6s, albeit with cropping and/or stretching to make the picture fit.
In any case, I never really thought the 8x6 size was unusual. It’s the same price as the 5x7 but a little bigger, so a lot of our customers get it. We have no shortage of 8x6 frames, and quite a few 8x6-friendly albums. It’s quite a bit cheaper than the next size up, and with an employee discount it is cheap indeed, so when I take a picture I think is nice, I usually get an 8x6 of it. As I only take digital pictures, I don’t even have to worry about cropping – the image fits into the print perfectly every time.
I just spent a week on the opposite coast from where I live, as my parents live across the US from me. I wanted to get some 8x6s organized into albums and frames to give as gifts for my family when I came to visit my home country. However, while getting the prints made was no problem, finding 8x6 albums and frames was difficult. I got the prints made at a store of the same chain as the one I work for, and they did not have any albums or frames for that size. I asked about this, and they said “Yeah, we don’t really have a lot of 8x6 stuff”. Gee, thanks. I tried three other photo shops, NOT of the same chain, and they all told me “it’s just not a common format”, “it’s very low-demand”, “no-one does 8x6”. Well, I do! And anyone with a digital camera should too. No good reason not to (you get less cropping and more picture for the same price), except that half the country seems to think it’s a weird size.
I went back to the store where I got the prints, near my parent’s place, and asked them what was up with the lack of 8x6 stuff. “In the store where I work, in the [opposite] coast, we have tons of it”. “Well, you know, I think it’s a size WE made up”, the associate told me.
Hmmm. I wonder if he’s right. That’s really interesting. How odd that a chain of photo shops – a very large one with stores in 48 states, but just a chain of stores nonetheless – could have that much influence on the world of photography. It’s possible. I mean, manufacturers of frames and albums do make 8x6 products, and even in my home country (where I’m writing this right now) I do not have trouble finding 8x6 stuff. Imagine, a size invented by an American store for people with digital cameras, determining what gets designed and made and sold all the way in other continents!
Never underestimate the power of a large retail chain.
PS: Traveling away from the big city where my parents live, to the small town not too far away where my sister goes to school, I stopped at another store of the chain I work for, and did find a precious few 8x6 albums and frames – JUST enough for the Christmas gifts I was planning on, just in time for my trip to my home country.
PPS: Yes, I could have printed those pictures (for the gifts) as 5x7s once I figured out how hard it was to fund 8x6 stuff… but that would mean they would have to crop my pictures! NEVER!
What’s “aspect ratio”?
Speaking of aspect ratio…
In a time of widescreen DVDs, sixteen-inch PowerBooks, and wide Plasma TVs, I would think that the simple concept (or even the term) of “aspect ratio” should not be alien to most people.
However, the fact that people often ask for prints (or other picture-making services) in an aspect ratio different from that of the original image, and then are surprised at the results, shows that very little thinking indeed goes on about the proportions of your rectangular photograph.
The most typical symptom of this lack of thinking happens when people get prints in the most common sizes, 4x6 and 5x7. Divide those lengths and you see that they are 1.5 and 1.4 times as long as they are wide, respectively. Most film pictures, and all digital pictures, are a little wider than that, proportionately (about 1.33). That means some of the area near the longer edges has to be cut off for the image to fit in the print. Either that, or the image must be “squashed” to fit the proportions (which often makes people look unnaturally fat or skinny, depending on the orientation), or the image must be printed with some empty space to either size. The default, though, is to crop the image, which allows you to get the subject to be as big and detailed as possible. It does mean some stuff gets left out.
Customers are always mad that we cropped out the wrong thing, despite our best efforts at guessing what’s most important in a picture. Worse yet, customers often complain about cropping as if they were unaware that cropping any differently from the way we did it would cause someone’s face to be half-cut-out. Sometimes they appear to miss the impossibility of having both THIS object AND that object in the image while still having the image fit the narrow aspect ratio.
The most extreme examples are customers who bring in old photographs which are square (about 3x3 in.), and ask to get 4x6s out of them. I scan the photographs and show them that you have to cut this or that out for the image to fit in the 4x6. “Oh, REALLY? Why?!” What do you MEAN, “why”? Well, because your picture is a friggin’ SQUARE, and you want some of it in a RECTANGLE, so you gotta cut SOMETHING out!
Once, a customer had a picture of herself by a sign, with another person on the other side of the sign. She wanted to crop the image so that it was her and the sign, with the other person cropped out, but in such a way you could still read all the sign. The sign was kinda diagonal in the picture, and as you slowly cropped more and more of it, you stopped being able to see the whole sign long before the other person was gone. It took a while for the customer to see that SOME of the other person – at least the arm – had to be in the picture if she wanted to be able to read the whole sign.
One way to bypass the whole “what do I crop out” dilemma is to print the whole image so that it fits in the print, plus some empty space which then gets cut out. In other words, instead of making the longer dimension of the image match the longer dimension of the print (with the shorter dimension thus being too big, necessitating cropping), we make the small dimension of the image match the small dimension of the print. (This is equivalent to, instead of cropping the image of a narrow/rectangular movie image so that it fits your TV screen – the “Full Screen” format – you can instead show the whole rectangle so you see the whole image, but then the image is smaller and you get a black band on top and on the bottom of the TV screen – the “WideScreen” format). Since this means the print becomes smaller than standard, it will not fit on albums and frames, and its subjects will be smaller than they need to be, so almost no one ever chooses that.
Occasionally, professional photographers want an 8x10 or 8x12 print, and then complain that something was cropped out. I again explain to them that the image they supplied was a different aspect ratio than the print they wanted, so something had to go. They then ask me what the hell I’m talking about, and then ask if it’s possible for me to not crop anything, which means they weren’t paying attention to what I was saying. I then tell them that they have to either ask us to print the whole image in the print, which will make the print smaller (equivalent to watching a widescreen movie on a TV), or to distort the image so that it fits the aspect ratio (equivalent to stretching the widescreen movie so that it fits the TV screen except then everyone looks really skinny). They then ask me why that is. Grrr.
Is it so hard to understand that it is NOT possible for a 4x6 image (which is 1.5 times as long as it is wide) to fit in an 8x10 frame (which is 1.25 times as long as it is wide) without some cropping, stretching, or adding empty space?
What’s worse, my regional manager then made fun of me at a meeting once for talking to customers in terms of aspect ratio, as if I were teaching them how to analytically solve coupled second-order differential equations or something. Dude, in, like, SEVENTH grade, when you learn the quadratic formula, one of the neatest things you could do with it is to find the Golden Ratio, the aspect ratio of a rectangle that, when a square is cut out of it, it leaves behind a rectangle of the same aspect ratio. This has all kinds of applications, like in ancient Greek architecture and stuff, and shows you that you can actually find out something relatively fundamental about geometry from complicated (for a 7th grader) algebra. Which is very cool. (Solving this problem is a fun way to pass the time if, say, you’re gonna be stuck in a line or airport terminal or in a car or plane for a while and happen to have a pen and a scrap of paper with you). Anyone who is not familiar with the concept of aspect ration had a bad 7th-grade math teacher. Or just does not try hard enough to make use of their widescreen TVs.
(Widescreen TVs, by the way, have the option of making images adjust in any of these ways that we do with pictures: stretching (everyone looks really fat because the image is wider), cropping (you only see the middle of the image – not a problem when you watch a widescreen movie, which is the point of having a TV like that), or showing the whole TV image in the middle of the screen with a black rectangle on either side. Just like is shown in the image above, but on a TV instead of onto a print).
And, as I said in the previous post, the reason that I like 8x6s so much is that you get the whole digital image in a big but cheap print and you don’t have to worry about any of this stuff. Digital pictures are always one and a third times as long as they are wide, which is more “square-like” than the traditional 1.4 or 1.5 for film.
That 1.33 aspect ratio actually comes from the size of the standard TV, because TVs have always been one and a third times as wide as they are tall (until widescreen ones started coming out a few years ago), so computer monitors (with rare exceptions) are also always one and a third times as wide as they are tall. Since there are many standard pixel sizes in this format (“VGA” is 640x480 pixels, which is what a TV is, and “SVGA” or “Super VGA” is 800x600, which is what most computers were until recently), early digital cameras claimed “VGA” or “SVGA” resolution so people knew that this could fill their computer monitor and be the right size – or just because people were familiar with those image sizes. When cameras started being able to capture images with one or more megapixels, they stuck with the old VGA and SVGA aspect ratio of one and a third (which after all IS still the one used on computer monitors – mine’s 1400 by 1050 pixels, most range from 1024x768 to 2000x1500). The exceptions are digital SLRs (which want to behave as much like film SLRs as possible, so the images they generate have an aspect ratio of about 1.5), and some consumer digicams that have a “4x6 mode” where a black bar is shown at the top and bottom of the display (like a widescreen movie) to show you what you will see when you get that picture developed as a 4x6 (the camera also does not record the pixels outside that area, so what you see IS what you get).
Of course, knowing the average digicam user, I can see them going “This mode does not let me get as much into the picture – Who’d ever use THAT?”, and then getting the picture printed as a 4x6 and asking “Why were the top and bottom cropped out?”. Grrr…
Take A Number
Remember how, on an earlier post, I said that I wish our store had a “take-a-number” thing like banks do? So that, you know, when there are more than a few customers in the store, they get in some kind of order instead of milling around impatiently. I was kinda kidding – only banks and consulates have those things, no store of any kind I’d ever seen has one. Well, the camera store near my parent’s place has one! It’s super busy too – each of the 3 or 4 times I went in there (several batches of pictures to give as gifts, albums being adjusted, etc), there were at LEAST 4 or 5 people in line at any time, more sometimes. And they had 5 or 6 people working at the store at any time, some of them telling customers about cameras, despite the long line! (It must be nice that they have more salespeople than cash registers, so the salesman that is talking to a customer about cameras doesn’t feel like the people in line are all waiting for him to finish up already and help the line move along. Two of the cash registers were continuously manned). My store is the same chain. I wonder if there’s any hope of us getting a get-a-number system. Nah, probably not.
My Only Friend, The End
So, as I’ve said, I’ve been wanting to quit for a while. Work was getting in the way of my having time to study and find a real job, and it was making my hanging out with my girlfriend absolutely impossible, time-wise. Well, the end of the academic quarter came, and I had to pass the hardest class I’ve ever taken in my life (a class so absurdly painful it deserves my writing a blog just about IT), and it was looking like they were just going to give me one day off before my final… So I quit. For good. Passing that class was the number one priority in my life, so that I could graduate, and therefore I would feel extremely nervous in this last week of the quarter if I did anything other than study for that final. And since this was closely followed by my spending a week at my parents’ place, and then two weeks in my home country, and then time back in the US looking for a real job… I thought I should end my employment at the camera store. And so I did. So I might be writing a few notes here about photography or about how having worked there influences my thinking and my daily life (it does quite a bit – see the next entry), but mostly this blog is going to wind down to a stop soon.
Being Cheerful, And The Key To Happiness
So remember how I wrote a post about how it was very hard for me to be cheerful while I was dealing with customers (except when I was talking about cameras)?
That had actually led me for a while to feel kinda bad when I dealt with people in retail. I’d see a smiling face at a store or restaurant and painfully realize that that person was probably miserable.
But I eventually realized that they probably were NOT as miserable as me. No, not because of that silly idea James Croll expressed about some people being better “suited for daily work” than others. What I realized was; either you’re overqualified for retail and so it’s a temporary thing, or you’re NOT overqualified for retail in which case you actually ARE lucky to have that job, and should be happy about it. Only stupid, weak people like ME actually WORRY about having an undignified sell-out-like job like that.
Well, it’s not quite like that. Let me go easier on myself. The reason why I was unhappy at that job is because I do have an education, and aspirations, for an engineering job, for a kind of job few people could do, for a kind of job that requires four (or in my case, four and a half) years of tough college classes, preceded by years of pretty tough high-school classes. It’s because I have an appreciation for, and an ability to model, all kinds of physical phenomena, and this was going to waste. That, however, was not the primary problem. As I said, I could have just realized that employment at the camera store was a temporary thing, and I could just enjoy its pleasant aspects (like how little responsibility I had, and how little I had to think) until I found my real job. However, I could not enjoy the job, because every minute on the job was a minute not studying for my class (in which I was badly struggling), and a minute not looking for a real job (which takes a lot of time, talking to a lot of people, etc). And working at the store left way too few minutes in my day for these things, which were supposed to be top priorities but I was not getting to them because of working at the store. Since my parents had already said they would support me until I got a job, then what I was doing at the camera store was not only a waste of time, it also meant actively neglecting some extremely important things, for no real good reason. I felt bad because I knew that studying for my class, and looking for a job, and hanging out with my girlfriend, would all make my life better in more important ways that working at the camera store would. It took a couple painful months for me to turn this realization into action, but I finally did.
So I did not enjoy working there because there were some immensely more important things I could (I mean, SHOULD) have been doing with my time, and there was no good reason for me to not be doing those things instead.
So if you’re there as a temporary thing but that’s not keeping you from taking steps towards the next thing, or if you’re NOT there as a temporary thing and your plans for your life aim towards the income and stability of a retail job (and maybe for things you have plenty of time to do in your off-time, like slowly studying towards something better, or raising a family, or having another job or hobbies), then there’s no reason why you should feel bad about working at a store or restaurant.
So I’m not saying “I’m meant for better things”. I’m saying “I had some other opportunities and duties which I was neglecting for no good reason, and that was detrimental for the plan I have for my life”. So I was kinda procrastinating from my life plan by working there. THAT was the problem. I was not doing the important things. I was being an idiot. Oh well, I’m back on track now. I think.
And as long as I assume that people I encounter at stores and restaurants are on THEIR tracks, and doing optimally all they could do for THEIR lives (which they probably are, as most people are more responsible regarding this kind of thing than I am), then I have no reason to think they are miserable, that they have good reasons to wish they were at another job.
They are probably genuinely cheerful, too. All that it takes to be cheerful and happy is knowing you are doing all you can for your life to be all that you think it can be, and all you want it to be, to the extent of your abilities. (Anything else is icing on the cake. So I don’t walk around feeling sad for not having a Digital Rebel, I walk around sad because I am almost missing some key opportunities to make my life better, like hanging out with my girlfriend, looking for a job, studying more, and exercising and eating right). I’m usually pretty good at those things, just not these past few months…
That’s Greek To Me
So I was at my family’s Christmas get-together last night. My cousin’s boyfriend, who was snapping shots with a small point-n-shoot Sony Cybershot, noticed me using my Lumix and asked me what kind of camera it was. I said; It’s a Panasonic, an FZ10. “Is it nice?”. Oh yeah, I said. Four megapixels, and a 420mm-equivalent f2.8 lens, image stabilized! “Dude, you just spoke Greek to me”, he then said, meaning “I didn’t understand a word of that”.
When he asked me if my camera was nice, what was I supposed to say? “Yeah, it’s nice”? If a camera is nice, it’s nice for a few reasons. If he doesn’t know what those reasons might be, then I do wonder what kind of an answer he expected. I should have then asked HIM whether his camera was nice, to see what kinds of things HE would have said, but I was too busy thinking of what to say in response to “That sounded like Greek to me”. I think ended up saying “It just has a great lens” or something.
While I’m talking about the Christmas party… My OTHER cousin’s boyfriend is definitely on the other end of the amateur-photographer spectrum, bringing to the party his EOS3 loaded with 3200-speed B&W film and an f1.4 (!!!) 35mm lens (as well as an f2 135mm) with a 72mm orange filter. (I hate not having the nicest camera in the room. It does happen sometimes). Seeing that I also use 72mm filters, he said he had a few extra ones I could have (He’s such a cool guy. No, not just for that). I guess he appreciates how expensive and hard-to-find they are, and would be willing to give me his old ones probably because he got better ones. Like me, he probably spends a good fraction of his disposable income on photography, but in his case that’s actually a lot of money…
Sales Incentive & Tiny Paychecks
Despite the fact I have already quit, and have not worked at the store for a little while, I keep remembering relatively interesting things worth writing here about.
One thing I just realized is that I did not write as much as I wanted on how we worked on commission. I talked about it a little bit earlier, like when I said one cannot dedicate oneself to represent the company when one is paid so little (even if one is paid a little more for selling more), and when I said some cameras lead to more commission than others (which is why selling a Digital Rebel is not as good in some ways as selling a Fuji S7000, to that lady who bought $2500’s worth of stuff). But let me talk a little more about this, so maybe you’ll realize the profound impact it can have on our behavior – or how ineffective and extremely insulting it is when we stop to think about it for just a little bit.
The system works like this: For everything we sell, we get a little bit of money. Well, not everything - not some things like film, bags, and accessories. But for every camera or camcorder we sell, for every membership frequent-customer card, for every damage-protection warranty, for every passport picture we take, and for every dollar's worth of photo-finishing we take in, we get a little bit more money. Just how much money depends on what the item is: 3% of photo-finishing orders, 20% of the cost of passport pictures and membership cards, etc. For cameras and camcorders, though, we get a fixed amount of money, which is called a Sales Incentive.
How much that Sales Incentive is depends on the manufacturer. Manufacturers who spend a lot on marketing and advertisings may choose to not spend a lot on buying out salespeople. Manufacturers who are less well-known, or who make crappy cameras, may be more interested in paying us to promote and recommend (in the hopes of selling) their stuff.
Some manufacturers also have "points" programs on top of this monetary sales incentives. For example, for every Casio camera we sell, we get Casio points. For about five cameras' worth of Casio points, we can trade in our points for a small, cheap Casio watch. For about sixty cameras' worth, we can trade it in for a Casio digital camera, which sounds pretty cool but is actually probably impossible to accomplish within the period of this points program. Again, the reason for this, which is the same reason that most manufacturers try to buy out salespeople to promote and sell their stuff, is probably that the image quality of Casio's cameras is less than superb.
This does NOT mean that I only recommend crappy cameras. Quite the opposite. I try to keep the sales incentives out of my mind, and really recommend to a customer what I think is best for them. Honestly, it just so happens that the Canon cameras in the store's selection are overpriced (except for the SD200 and 300). While I get much more money selling a Nikon D70 than a Canon Rebel, I honestly tell customers that they're about the same... but Rebels do break a lot, are not built as solidly, and can be unreliable, so they're cheaper for a reason. And if a customer asks me "What's a good entry-level digital SLR?", I say "The D70". But of course I would never recommend a D70 over a Rebel for someone who already has Canon lenses, for example, and as far as image quality and features, they really are about the same, which is what I say if asked. We've even had a few D70s returned because of bad pixels on the CCD, a bit of information I will not volunteer as easily as Rebel horror stories.
Sales incentives for a camera are usually in the $5 range, give or take. However, if you sell a couple cameras a day, that can be about 20% of your paycheck. It disgusts me to think how those $5 affect my state of mind during a sale.
It is rare that I think "I should sell THIS camera instead of THAT camera, or convince the customer he wants THIS camera instead of THAT camera, because THIS camera has a higher Sales Incentive" (so despite Minolta's super-high sales incentives and Panasonic's inexistent ones, I still recommend an FZ10 before a Z3, and explain why the Panasonics are superior)... However, it is quite common that I think "I really ought to persoade this customer to buy a camera, because it means a 10% or 20% higher paycheck if I keep it up". So I do get quite excited during the process where my talking about a camera or two looks more and more likely to end in a sale. It's like playing through a long, challenging, unforgiving level in a video game, and knowing that if you just get through this last little part, you get to save your game and earn a new weapon or something. It's the feeling of "I can't scre up NOW, I'm almost there, and it will be so sweet if I succeed". It's quite an adrenaline rush, and I feel quite pleased at the end. (This of course shows that what I did was quite different from just presenting information and letting the customer decide - which is not what selling is about).
One key lesson in this post is "Don't trust salespeople". But they point I wanted to make was that, whenever it looks likely that we might sell a camera, it's like there's a five-dollar bill dangling in front of us, and I just hate it how much this affects my outlook on the selling process. It does motivate me. Maybe it's something in me that knows that those $5 bills add up a lot at the end of two weeks. Or maybe I'm just looking for any motivation that makes my job look like a fun challenge. But I still feel like I'm being bought, for very little, and it's sad. I want to say it's insulting that they dangle $5 in front of my face to get me to act like I love this camera and for me to invest energy into convincing someone they ought to buy one... but I accept the $5 and do it. It's depressing when you think about it.
Especially when you think about how little they pay us. As I've said, if we really mattered to the company, they'd pay us more than what we need to barely survive (especially as where I live, cost-of-living is just about the highest in the US, I think). They justify the low pay with "At least you get paid more if you work harder". Well, I get paid a LITTLE more if I work a LOT harder - and that's assuming that working harder brings in more sales, which is true but far from linearly. I can't Jedi-Mind-Trick customers into buying, I can only sell so much no matter how hard I try, and even that much does not bring in a decent paycheck. How dare they talk about motivation, about how nice this job is supposed to be, about how great this store is and how great this company are, if they pay so badly?
Sometimes, they try to tell us how we don't just charge for film developing, we supply memories! Helping someone get and understand a camera, and giving them their pictures as prints, is supposed to be important, and we're supposed to feel good about it! Well, yeah, but no. Sorry. Not if you're paying us so little that it's hard to survive on. At least my region's manager has admitted that for many of us, working in this chain is a temporary thing, and that's ok. And she sometimes makes jokes about how, when we think hard enough about our jobs, it's understandable if we then want to go cry in a corner. I don't know if her saying these things is good or bad.
Maybe I should just face it that we're clerks. Just clerks who know a tad about photography. But still, some people do do this for a living for much or all of their lives. Is that ok? And shouldn't they get paid more?
Or maybe I'm just spoiled.
Or overqualified.
Nah, just spoiled.
In Response to Feedback
In the post "That's Greek To Me", I said "I hate not having the nicest camera in the room. It does happen sometimes". Some people took that literally. I hope you did not. I am NOT annoyed when I do not have the nicest camera in the room - it's usually an opportunity to learn more about photography and to briefly play with someone's cool toy. Although I must admit it does feel kinda nice to have the nicest camera in the room, which is the case often.
And in my post about "The Key To Happiness", I said people should not be unhappy about having retail jobs if they (the people) are on track to their goals in life, or have decided they are not qualified to do anything else and unable to get those qualifications (which is a questionable decision but anyways). This, I do pretty much mean. I have received feedback saying that no one who has a crappy job, or a crappy life in general, should have to be happy about it. "Retail is hell", my friend said, "even if it's all you can do, and just the fact that it's all you can do does not mean that it's easier to put up with". I don't think I entirely agree with my friend this. Yes, retail is hell. But in everyone's life, you do the best you can, you may or may not make it quite as high as you were aiming, but you get SOMEwhere. And no matter WHERE that is (in terms of income and other areas of one's personal life), it's not as good as the higher, more desireable situation, but also not as bad as the next-lower situation that you managed to keep yourself out of. In other words, every life has its difficulties, and I think there is some happiness to be had when you know that you've made a life where you do NOT have some of the difficulties other people have, and where you did the best you could. Sure, modern society is not completely meritocratic, and some lucky people have more opportunities than others, but is it productive to be unhappy all the time about how good other people have it? It can be, if this unhappiness motivates you, I guess. But if there's nothing you can do, then there isn't much of a point to being unhappy.
Digital Camera Guides
BoignBoing has recently features a guide to photography. I would like to quickly mention why that guide is far less than ideal for the audience to whom Boing Boing recemmends it (owners of digital cameras who want to start stepping away from auto mode and trying to use their cameras' more advanced features).
At
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/01/12/photography_primer_t.html
Boing Boing praises this guide:
http://photonotes.org/articles/beginner-faq
As great as that guide is, I would say it's not so good for beginners. It's VERY long and goes IN DEPTH into all kinds of minor issues. And that's just in the Beginner FAQ! In other words, this guide has tons of great information, but it does a poor job to pointing a beginner to the information and tips from which he would benefit the most. It also does not display pictures to illustrate the complicated concepts it covers. Of course there ought to be webpages out there that explain the intricacies of the less-often-used modes in SLRs and other technical information. Getting an SLR, learning how to use it, and understanding the world of SLR lenses, film, sensors, flashes, and other accessories, can be overwhelming, and the page pointed at by BoingBoing does an excellent job of being thorough and informative about the more obscure points.
But if you just have a fixed-lens digital camera and are thinking about trying to slowly venture away from auto mode, then that guide is WAY overkill.
The guide at AirShowFan.com is a much better resource for beginners. It goes over the controls that are immediately useful, shows examples of pictures taken at different settings, and progresses slowly and linearly from the more basic concepts to the more complicated ones.
So if you have a fixed-lens digital camera and want to learn to use all it offers, then check out AirShowFan.com.
If you are thinking of buying an SLR but you know very little about the options you have or about what they mean - or if you have an SLR but don't know what all the buttons and menu options do, or what accessories to get - then the guide at Photonotes.org is for you.
Start from the top!
If you just found this blog and scrolled to the bottom expecting to find the first entry here... Sorry to disappoint. This blog reads from the top down, like a normal piece of writing. The latest post is actually the one just above this one, and the very first post is at the very top (the "Welcome!" one). Enjoy reading it, and thanks for coming! (And please send me an email or leave a comment or something if you have any feedback).
