So starting today, I’m turning a new leaf and getting some job applications turned in. Blockbuster is simply not paying me enough for what they are choking out of me. In the last couple months, they said the company is going in the path sales in order to boost profits. It’s not at all hard to sell a Rewards Program at $9.95 for an entire year, I believe I’ve had days where I’ve sold upwards of 15 of them once. But the really hard ones to sell are the Movie and Game Passes.Let’s do the math:

Let’s do the math:

Customers are usually smart enough to understand; I’m renting 3-6 movies now at $3.69 per movie and for another $9.95, I can count those towards my free rental reward now. And only after getting three free rentals has the rewards program paid for itself. Then it’s good for an entire year after that. I could usually sell these quick when I asked how many movies did they usually rented in a month. Also, my background in sales at Radioshack helped.

But customers, smart or not, don’t understand talking a customer up from $3.69 to $29.99. You could only rent one DVD at a time and our average customer base liked to rent 3-6 DVDs per visit. So we were nearly always at a disadvantage. That person with one DVD was a rare renter and that person with 6 felt limited by the one out at a time rule.

I’ve come to the idea that customer service is just not for me anymore. It starts to stress me out and can’t take it much longer. I was told by the Sales Manager that if we failed to sell at least one pass per week, we’d get written up for failing to meet sales goals, something I wonder if they really can do. And if you sell 2 or more, you get to wear jeans all next week. (Umm, wow, what a reward — NOT! I actually dislike jeans.)

Customers can just frustrate me to high noon. Don’t get me wrong, I love management, I ran a Radioshack store for nearly two weeks once when the store manager was out of town and I did okay. We had roofers that week, so I fixed the satellite dish, I kept sales generally going, and I genuinely enjoyed it. But it’s just not me anymore. I need a better paying job. And if I want to accomplish my calling of going to Japan I need to start saving now. I’ve been doing very well with my spending. I have more money in my bank now than ever before.