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Comment by spectramax | Hacker News Reader

Office Depot, Staples, Office Max : These stores need to die. I’ve never felt worse by stepping into these stores without some clerk coming up to me about up selling this kind a bullshit.

They’re old relics that need to die like Sears did. They’re not innovating, they’re getting desperate as we’ve seen RadioShack in early 2000’s leading up to its bankruptcy in 2015.

Furthermore, they pay poorly to their employees, and there is a whole bunch of toxicity in there. Best Buy was on its way on the same path but they’ve saved themselves by a narrow margin. I still despise their “Geek Squad”. They take advantage of uninformed consumers and it’s sleezy. It makes me angry just thinking about it.

The leaders and executives that run these businesses are completely and utterly out of touch with their core business values, innovation and having a vision for the company. Spineless bozos.

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I've never had a good experience in Staples. I really try. Every time I go in I think it will be different. It never is. I don't know why I do it. They're just really close and handy for those odd things. It just never ends well. The last time i went in was for pens. It ended with me arguing with a security guard who decided i'd been looking at the pens too long. He stood there yelling at me while I purchased my pens, threatening to call the police...i'm still not sure why...and the cashier was trying his best to be polite and completely uninvolved.

That sounds like a really weird experience.

Sometimes it feels like you can have someone who takes their job extremely seriously to a fault or someone who couldn't care less and lets everything bad happen, no way to have someone right in the Goldilocks zone.

Yeah, pretty sure that's was what it was. It was pretty quiet in there. As soon as I walked in the security guard started following me. He asked me immediately what I was doing there and what I wanted...I said pens, so he escorted me to the pens aisle,.stood there for a bit getting impatient before telling me to hurry up. I said straight up to him that if he was suspicious of me and wanted to watch me fine, but not to sit there and tell me to hurry up. That was when he started yelling.

He never really did anything just stood there and yelled. I just kind of ignored him at that point. I found the pens I wanted and he followed me back to the register. That was when the threats of calling the cops came.

I dunno, I could understand if I'd looked or acted shady or something. But I was on my way home from work, dressed reasonably, shaved and groomed and all that.

Doubly ridiculous considering that people who spend too long in the pens aisle are Staples's main customer base.

I would have told him to call the cops honestly. What are they going to do? You've done nothing wrong, in fact, you're the victim of harassment. In a just world they would ream out the idiot security guard for wasting police resources.

I did...several times and laughed at him and asked what he planned to tell them i'd done. By that point, i was feeling fairly adversarial and was in the process of purchasing the needed pens, so i stopped giving a shit. He didn't have an answer for that but he pulled his phone out and everything just, didn't dial for some reason.

I even told him i'd wait for them to show up and we could all have a nice talk. By that point, the cashier had finished, he'd made no move to call so i left. He kinda followed me to the door and just stood there while i walked away.

I feel kinda bad for the cashier. He was young, looked like a highschool student or something. He looked really uncomfortable and really tried his best to be completely uninvolved. I was extremely polite with him. Told him to have a good evening and thanked him profusely for the pens. This seemed to anger the security guard more.

I once had a clerk at Staples tell me that they couldn't in good conscience sell my father-in-law the really, really good deal on a laptop "because it had 6GB of RAM, which is really unstable, like you know how CPUs only come in powers of 2 in order to work right", which I suspect could be translated as "this awesome deal of a laptop is a scam advertising offer, and we don't have any in stock and can't write a rain check at this bogus price."

What he meant is probably based on the fact that if you are using double channel memory access mode then cpu can read from other module while first one is busy and since he said it was 6 GB so probably (4GB + 2GB) which means when you fill memory to 4 GB mark it will not have free module to alternate and performance will degrade. But this is all in theory and highly speculative in practice you would probably see 10-15% ram speed degradation not a 50% as you would expect. So unless there were some other issues like mismatched ram frequency the statement that is has to be in the powers of 2 is not really a hard rule, to perform optimally you want it to be but it is not strictly necessary.

I'm willing to bet any amount of money that that's not what he meant.

The clerks at those stores often have no idea what they're talking about and just repeat things they've heard.

In this case, it's actually very possible that the clerk really thought that incredibly stupid statement about a product that the store was selling.

On the other hand, I've found that sales attracts and retains incredibly unethical people, too, so that's still a possibility as well.

In Texas/Oklahoma, the Office Max / Office Depot stores I've been to have all been decent. I almost only go to them for printing services (and at every store, the printing people have been great), but I've bought a cheap mouse here and there when I couldn't wait for shipping. I've seen signs for those "services", but never any upsells. I guess it would be different if an average customer tried to buy a computer, idk.

When there's an opportunity for deception to increase margins, I find these types of stores decent so long as they detect that you are not ignorant.

Fraudulent tech support aside, people still need to buy office supplies. Unless their markups are horrible I don’t see why they shouldn’t exist for that.

Not easy to justify that square footage on selling pens alone.

There's more to office supply than just pens, though...

"Geek Squad" was an independent company in Minneapolis 20 years ago that was acquired by Best Buy. There's no reason to put "scare quotes" around it.

n.b. I worked for them as a part-timer (aka 'Rookie Agent') from 98-00 while I was in high school before the company was acquired by Best Buy. I stopped working there when the founder decided to unexpectedly let go of all of the part timers for whatever reason.

The reason I use double quotes is because there is nothing geeky about what they do. They deceive people in the name of computer health checks, mostly old people and less tech savvy folks. There are dozens of stories of these “Geeks” that steal personal information from customers’ computers.

I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make?

Want a dozen + 1?

As a friend, I setup a precision workstation for a small business owner. Part of this setup was a hardware raid 1 array. (He wanted a fast machine that was very reliable. His money, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯).

He took it to the Geek Squad to have a printer setup on it. These idiots destroyed the raid array while doing idk what complimentary scan or wtf ever. The friend had also stopped using the dropbox drive and used the regular user's folders to save stuff.

This did not end well. It was judged to be my fault for using poor quality hardware and software. He bought a gaming desktop from Best Buy. I learned a lesson.

Fair dues to Office Max in New Zealand, they aren't like this. Instead, I get treated with cold indifference. To be honest, I find it preferable; if I'm going into a stationery/office supplies store, I know for what reason I'm going in — a personal tour guide certainly isn't necessary.

I go in, I get what I need, I pay, I go out. Might be a different company with the same name and logo.

I'm pretty sure it was Officemax in Christchurch I went to when I was there to buy a prepaid phone sim card.

There were so few sales people there that it took about 15 minutes standing at the counter to actually purchase it. The whole counter was completely unattended for that entire time.

Doesn't sound too unlike the (now-closed) one in Napier and the one in Wellington that seems like nobody's actually there until you look right down the back.

> Office Depot, Staples, Office Max : These stores need to die.

In the UK, Office Outlet (formerly Staples) was placed in administration last week. [1]

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-47626280

I don't know if it's true, but I remember reading on HN that Samples makes all it's money delivering office supplies to businesses and that their stores are essentially just warehouses.

The only reason I've had to step foot in an Office Depot in the last 5 years is to drop off shipments. It's the closest FedEx and USPS drop-off location to me. Even then, I always try to have my items boxed and labelled before I go in so all I have to do is drop them off. I make a beeline for the back of the store, leave my items with the person, and politely say I don't need a drop-off receipt. Then I book it back to the front of the store and get the hell out.

That’s precisely the situation where I’d want a drop-off receipt just in case my package goes missing or magically opens itself.

... airlines, rental car companies, shoe stores, insurance brokers, video games, SASS vendors...

Is there a business that doesn’t try and suck out your wallet with ad-ons, premium packages and options of dubious value?

But at least they price match so I don't have to wait two whole days.

Whatever did you have against Sears?

They should have their corporate charters (or other enabling paperwork) dissolved.

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