I work for Wal-Mart. My job, other than to make pictures is to sell cameras(Yay, Photo Lab). Before that I worked electronics. But this week takes the cake where training is concerned.

I totally understand that Wally World is behind the times when it comes to technology. I got that when they were teaching us about MP3 players and the training program said that 512Mb was high in the memory capacity for players on the market today. (As far as the training is concerned, a 3 megapixel camera is really awesome too and you only need a  256Mb card for that) Anyway, this week we got a new training program Cyberscholar. This program was put together by the awesome folks over at Consumer Electronics Association and let me tell you that they don't know crap about electronics, let alone how to sell them to customers. The questions that go with these modules are assinine and poorly written. Here's an example

The category is Digital Imaging
The sub-category is Sharing Digital Images (Creative, no?)

Your customer wants to show his photos on his new DTV in the Living Room and his old TV in the Kitchen. How can he do that?

    A. Can't be done
    B. Via a digital photo frame
    C. Via portable flash memory
    D. Via a CD or DVD

I think I'll let everyone ponder that for a bit. The answer seems obvious, at least it did to me (Until this question made me fail the module 8 times)

Even better is their explanation for how a digital photo frame works.

"[A digital photo frame is] an LCD screen that's networked and lets you update the images any time."

Ok, so it's not all bad. A digital photo frame is and LCD screen. But, to my knowledge, we don't have any photo frames that are network capable in my store or indeed on the website. All the frames I've seen are plug & play only or download and play. If I told a customer that the frames were networked they'd believe it and wait for their pictures to magically appear on the screen. Sure someday really soon (Probably before the end of this year or next year) that could happen, but explaining how to do that to the average customer who is just barely able to grasp the concept that DVDs don't have to be rewound is going to be monumentally difficult and certainly not worth the $8.50 an hour that Wal-Mart thinks I deserve.

So how much did the mega, giant, EVIL, corporation pay for such a quality training tool.

Absolutely nothing.

That's right pennypinching Wal-Mart has given all of it's electronics employees a substandard training tool that some random home office flunkie found online. I'm suffering for it because I know better. But, I would dare say that 50% of my fellow employees don't know any better because their first experience with electronics of any kind was when they came to work for Wal-Mart and had to learn how to operate the cash register. The old training program was outdated, sure, but at least it was accurate. This Cyberscholar stuff is just crap.

I guess the moral of the story is you get what you pay for.



Oh yeah, the answer is C.

Current Mood: irritated