Boss puts retail employee on probation because they aren't comfortable shilling credit cards: 'He said I needed to be asking 2-3 times per interaction'

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Put on probation at work because I won't shill credit cards...

Working retail is all about customer service. I've worked in retail and learned that I have a different approach to sales than some of my other teammates. The way my brain and personality work, I know I'm not good at the hard push. I'd rather let the customer come to their own conclusions and be helpful to them if they have any questions. Because that's the way I like to be treated as a customer. I like to walk into a store and be able to browse on my own without any guidance from anybody else. The second a salesperson tries to sell something to me, I feel pressured, and then I'm more likely to just walk out with nothing. I think a lot of people are like this. But that's not always the way that companies and managers instruct their salespeople to be. The manager in the story certainly had a different approach. Customers like to feel like they're making their own decisions, even if their hand is guided a little bit by the people in charge. Nobody wants to feel like they're falling for something. Nobody wants to feel like they've been duped into something that might take advantage of them in the long run, like a credit card. But that didn't stop this manager from wanting their employees to double down every time they asked about credit cards. But the employee in the story wasn't buying it. They were good at their job anyway, and they didn't want to lose face with the customers that they already had.

Sometimes competition in the workplace is a good thing, and other times it drives people apart. It all depends on what kind of approach you have as an employee. If it were me, I would be discouraged by competition. I don't like feeling like I'm battling out for something against my coworkers. I like to feel like we're all of us together working towards a common goal. But everybody is motivated differently, and everyone has different relationships with competition. But the boss in the story was hammering a certain tactic that at least one coworker was deeply uncomfortable with. As a person who has worked in retail, the story resonates with me and my experience of that world. It's a very particular world, and we all have our own feelings about it. This story illustrates a big issue within that job. 

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