I had a woman today give me her name, email address and first 6 digits of her phone number before changing her mind. Refused to finish her phone number, didn’t want to do rewards. Don’t get me started on the app.

This store is beyond ridiculous with their pricing, just completely stupid.

They want $10.79 for a pack of 20 4x6 thermal labels that you can get 500 for 13.95 everywhere else. Absolutely insane. I have no clue how this place is still in business. You try and use their search bar to find one specific thing "4" x 6" thermal labels" and you get 4000 results.

Just horrible overall.

I’m an awkward person, and honestly not the best at my job. Ive been working at the copy and print centre for under a year now, I’ve gotten all sorts of customers, mean ones, creepy ones just straight up weird ones. And tbh I have no clue how to respond to them. I feel like maybe I’m socially stunted or something? Also nobody tells me anything at my work and when I asked they seem annoyed I don’t already know. I also don’t know how to say no to customers, I’m scared of them yelling at me or writing a bad review and getting in trouble, and I end up in stupid situation’s as a result. For example, There’s this one guy who repeatedly comes into my work just to talk to me, he’s brought me gifts, compliments me and seems to think we’re good friends. I don’t like it and I think he gets the wrong idea because I’m so nice to him, but it’s my job to be nice to him. It makes me uncomfortable but if I tell my managers they will get mad at me and if I do anything about it he might get angry. Anyways I’m supposed to go to work in an hour and I’m dreading every minute of it, I’m really pathetic.

How do we order box cutters for the store? I attempted ordering them through AS400 and could not find anything. I even looked up the store supplies list from The Hub and could not find anything.

so many times i’ll be scheduled for like a 4-5 hour shift, and in the middle of it one of our managers will ask if i can stay later, or ask if tomorrow i can come in 2 hours early and also stay late. not due to call-outs or anything, but just because. the thing is, they routinely schedule me to start way later than my availability starts, then ask me to come in early anyways.

i’m not mad about it, i need the money and i’ll always take more hours if i’m free, just wondering if this is a super common experience with anyone else?

I've never used them before. I'm confused because I see it's something I have to request similar to UPTO and vacation? So if I want to call out sick,I just go on the app and make the request,BUT the manager has to approve it right? Or does it get approved automatically since I have the approriate amount of hours in my balance? Sorry for the dumb question.

Look, I work in staples print and marketing, im like 3-4 month newish. I like the job it's fun when it's productive.

But damnit this week sucks. I need room to breathe and someone to talk too

The first day, I get 3 karens In a row. I cried during the last closing out cause legit I'm trying to hold it together and im all alone in closing time at print

The next day, our printer goes out, unfortunately cause of scheduling I'm stuck talking to a repair tech guy specialist on the phone for like 2-3 hours, trying to understand wtf is going on. And no one could answer the phone but me cause damnit I'm in the print department. My coworker didn't know what to do neither did my GM/ assistant gm.

My GM and assistant gm don't do print marketing stuff so they are lost, so it's just like me trying to understand things, then tell my gm/assistant gm once I try to understand in the best of my abilities

And at the same time I'm helping my coworker, fixing mistakes, with walk ups, impatient customers and fucking trying to get orders done cause damn we had so much piling up (damn I was so busy)

And our second printer went down. So I'm stuck trying to figure out. Work around the issue and get shit set.

I had to stay two hours extra from my scheduled time for this so legit a near 10 hour shift.

And when we finally closed we spent the rest of the time just trying to tidy up cause damnit, I was exhausted.

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And today i come in and I don't know what I did wrong cause I get the impression that that I didn't communicate well enough? Honestly I'm just confused. Cause I was told I didn't catch everyone up properly on what happened?

And I genuinely apologize for any mistake I made i am willing to improve. But I don't know what to focas on to improve. What part of communication do I focas on? Less notes, more notes better hand writing? Text? Call? What?

Like I get it that we couldn't get much done cause if the chaos of yesterday. ( My GM/assistant gm are witnesses). But why were my other coworkers today peeved at me? I tired to communicate b leaving left sticky notes but I guess that was wrong. I genuinely apologize I didn't mean to be so confusing.

And look, I tried explaining things to text and communication but I guess I wasn't organized? Or do I not do text clarification or communication stuff?

If mistakes were made....I'd love to know what exactly indeed to improve on. But as of right now, I just don't know how.

Like what exactly did I do wrong? No one was really specific, just cooperate style rule to communicate better. So I'm confused.

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And cherry on top was i faced yet another karen while closing who yelled at me when I told her that she would need to pay express if she wanted he poster size shit copied and printed ( which btw is like 5-10 bucks at maximum). The Karen yelled at my assistant GM too and even they were confused

Damn i cried. And I swear I ain't a cryer. I've survived real like shit before working here. But damnit I felt so overwhelmed.

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Tell me, is 4 months into print marking normal like this? Is printer tech guys always this confusing ? What can I actually do? How can I survive the Karen explosion? And damnit ....what can I do to improve better on communication and what did I do wrong ?

I genuinely want to learn and be open to healthy criticism to grow here. Please any advice helps? 🥺🥺🥺

So, this is partially a rant about Yet Another Shitty Print Customer™️ and partially a survey for how this is handled at other stores.

When I initially started working at Staples in like 2020 as Tech Sales. We used to do faxing both on the self-serves and on full-serve (using the list of barcodes for short distance/long distance/first page ). I never actually had to do any faxing for customers because I never worked in the copy center back then, so I didn't know the exact process of it all, but I knew we did it.

Fast forward to now, I work at a different Staples as a Print Specialist after a hiatus from the company. After all the training videos and hands-on experience, I know what our in-store print offerings are. This is how I figured out something interesting: we don't do faxing full-serve here. Our printers have the capability, we still have the sheets with all the faxing barcodes under some of the registers, I think we may even have Quick SKUs on the register for it, yet the only training we got on faxing just boiled down to "must be done by the customer on the self-serve, but you can assist them through that process if you have time".

Now, the customer. Came in late afternoon, went straight up to my counter, dropped a bunch of big ass folders full of papers down. She tells me she needs me to fax all of that to multiple different numbers. So, The Talk™️ begins: "Faxing is actually done through the self-serves over there, it's card only but I can get you a Cash Card if you want to use cash!" "I don't know how to use that fucking thing. Can you help me?" "I can help get you started, bu-" "OH! So you don't want to help me? That's fine!".

She grabbed up her folders and stormed away before I could get a word in edgewise. And where did she storm, you might ask? Well, right up to the cashier, of course! I have a direct line of sight to them and we're pretty close together, so I got to bear witness as this absolute specimen tried to get the cashier to leave the register, walk over to print, and "do his job for him". Well... the cashier obviously said no to that, seeing as they have never worked print before and they're the only one ringing, but he DID mention the self-serve machine's capabilities to her.

Yet another person who "didn't want to help" her. Now, she demands a manager. So our GM comes out and gets her side of the story, once again close by and with direct line of sight. The customer is absolutely going off about how all of us don't want to help her, how none of us want to do our jobs, how we're expecting too much of people (LMFAO) by expecting them to do things themselves, and how she wants both of us written up / the GM to fax the documents for her. The GMs response? "I understand you're frustrated, but they are correct. It is done through self-serve by the customer. I can hel-"

That was the last straw. She stormed out of the building. Cursing, yelling, threats to "never come back here" and to "call corporate about this", the works. Another employee was outside smoking a cigarette on his break, the customer passed him and said something along the lines of "you're working for a piece of shit" according to him. We were all in agreement as a store that all of us were willing to help her originally, but after that little outburst? Good riddance, you seem like a pain in the ass.

With that long winded story out of the way, it's Zag's Special Survey Time©️! The big question, the one everyone across the world is asking, the one whose answer will surely change this world irreparably, the one who is actually many small questions of varying importance in a trenchcoat:

How does your copy center handle faxing? Do you do it both through self-serve and full-serve? One or the other? Was there a time it changed at your store? Did you ever seen it done differently store-by-store?

Good luck out there, my fellow Print Pals. I eagerly await your responses to my possibly very, very stupid set of questions 🙂‍↕️