Camera Store - The Hell of Retail

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...

posted by Remus