Toys R us? Complaint!!!!!!!!! :(

rihanna09

JustWonderful wrote: »

You serious?

The DD is 12 years old, and by the sound of things the SA was being an !!!, but yet you lecture the mum??

I take both your points, but honestly I still think DD could have been a little less hot headed and have a teeny bit more of a longstanding polite demeanour (she did at first, but then both of them escalating). Its' also a case of the SA needing to be a LOT more mature, :mad: And realise he's arguing with 12y/o child

Equaliser123

vyle wrote: »

You don't necessarily need a piece of paper to have a skill or knowledge.

It isn't just a "piece of paper".

It's called an education.

Tiddlywinks

Your 6 year old appeared, to the sales assistant, to be fiddling with electrical goods without adult supervision - I feel it was right for him to intervene and ask her not to touch.

He may or may not have been rude - but you only have a child's word for it because you were on the phone so unable to fully hear what went on.

You older daughter then reacted inappropriately - I'd say save the embarrassment of outlining this in a letter.

I'd also suggest that you help your daughter curb her aggressive tendancies and explain that shop assistants do actually have a position of authority in a shop and that adults generally (indeed anyone) should be shown respect. And, no, before you ask, I am not a shop assistant.

vyle

Equaliser123 wrote: »

It isn't just a "piece of paper".

It's called an education.

You can educate yourself and still be just as good, if not better than somebody who has formally taken the qualifications.

When employers look at CVs, all they are looking for is, essentially a piece of paper.

"Oh, you've got this, you must be better than somebody who hasn't."

In a lot of creative jobs, especially software engineering and game development, qualifications are virtually meaningless, because too many colleges and universities teach skills that are out of date before the course has even began.

I'm in the process of earning a degree, but I'm not going to look down on somebody who doesn't have certain qualifications, be they GCSEs or A levels or anything else, because nobody knows why they don't have them, nor what talents they truly have.

I'm not saying it's not worth going to school and getting an education, but some people teach themselves every bit as well as the institutions do -- as anyone who saw that documentary about aspergers will have seen. There's a guy who taught himself fluent Chinese (not sure which dialect) and was able to write most of the kanji after two months. He then went off to china to live for a few months to see his girlfriend.

midget_gems

Id certainly expect someone who works behind a till, handling my money to have the most rudimentary skills in mathematics, and i am highly surprised there are people who who seem to think otherwise.

Correct, it is possible to have a skill without an official qualification, and in a creative job that might not matter. But thats beside the point. This isnt a creative job. This is a job that at its core, is nothing more than basic mathematics and common sense. You would be one of the first people on here to cry to high heaven about staff incompetence when someone working on tills all day couldn't even count your change properly.

And a piece of paper it may be, or a simple 2-sheet CV it may be. But as an employer, if i looked at someones CV and read that they chose to dro out of school at 16 without even bothering to complete something as basic as thier GCSE's, i would certainly not think twice about throwing the CV in the bin there and then. That simply tells me that person was lazy in school, and most certainly can't even put enough effort in to make it through a 9:00am to 3:30pm day let alone a 9-5 day. You can argue all you like that this person may have had perfectly valid excuses like learning difficulties or illnesses or grew up in some crazy country where books were banned and everyone was forced to speak backwards or some !!!! and i will totally agree its unfair and unjust. But as an employer, i dont care. I have two CV's, one with qualifications and one without. I choose the one with qualifications and i waste no more time about it.

Jeff_Bridges_hair

You dont need a maths GCSE to count money.

pulliptears

Jeff_Bridges_hair wrote: »

You dont need a maths GCSE to count money.

Quite true.

I failed maths miserably (I was arty not mathematically minded) but I worked in a shop as a cashier from my early teens and through college. Modern tills do the work for you, they tell you how much change to give, they give you a total at the end of the day. Providing you can accurately push buttons you really don't need any Maths qualifications whatsoever.

And before anyone says anything, I was damned good at my job, unfortunately the same could not be said for my colleague who's till was regularly showing a million pound deficit at the end of a busy Saturday

Dave101t

always avoid toys r us, i see them on here in the vents section often....
interestingly, there is a new smyths toy shop in team valley retail park, their staff are very helpful, despite me just window shopping.

vyle

midget_gems wrote: »

Id certainly expect someone who works behind a till, handling my money to have the most rudimentary skills in mathematics, and i am highly surprised there are people who who seem to think otherwise.

Ability to count, and having the ability to calculate the hypotenuse of a triangle while working out how many floor tiles (at X dimensions) would be needed to pave a triangular room are different things. Of course I'd expect someone whose job was to count money to be able to count.

In fact, you'd need a very good reason to have not sat and/or passed GCSEs. However, there are people with those reasons.

Like I said, my partner was taken out of school by his parents at 14, just as he was starting his GCSEs to go to spain, where they didn't find the house they wanted and returned just before he turned 16. It was too late to take his GCSEs in school, they'd had no fixed address and hadn't enrolled him into a spanish school (and he couldn't speak spanish anyway).

None of the colleges would take him in unless he had those GCSEs and by that point he'd already taught himself to program and knew more about programming than the college courses would have taught anyway.

Correct, it is possible to have a skill without an official qualification, and in a creative job that might not matter. But thats beside the point. This isnt a creative job. This is a job that at its core, is nothing more than basic mathematics and common sense. You would be one of the first people on here to cry to high heaven about staff incompetence when someone working on tills all day couldn't even count your change properly.

11 year olds have basic mathematics and you can't get a GCSE in common sense, so they don't really come into it. If you can count, fine. You don't really need much of anything to work in TRU because they don't tend to have staff actively selling so even an interest in the current toy market overqualifies you.

I'd expect the ability to count and common sense, but funnily enough my mental arithmetic is pretty shoddy, but I got an A* in maths GCSE because I could remember theorems and whatnot.

And a piece of paper it may be, or a simple 2-sheet CV it may be. But as an employer, if i looked at someones CV and read that they chose to dro out of school at 16 without even bothering to complete something as basic as thier GCSE's, i would certainly not think twice about throwing the CV in the bin there and then. That simply tells me that person was lazy in school, and most certainly can't even put enough effort in to make it through a 9:00am to 3:30pm day let alone a 9-5 day. You can argue all you like that this person may have had perfectly valid excuses like learning difficulties or illnesses or grew up in some crazy country where books were banned and everyone was forced to speak backwards or some !!!! and i will totally agree its unfair and unjust. But as an employer, i dont care. I have two CV's, one with qualifications and one without. I choose the one with qualifications and i waste no more time about it.

I agree, if somebody CHOSE to drop out of school, then !!!! them. There are some jobs where qualifications are very much necessary - the medical profession for instance. There's no way that common sense alone would suffice and you can't really teach yourself unless you like to sneak into operating theatres and take notes.

There are some jobs where qualifications don't really matter - you can either do them, or you cant - such as shop work.

There are jobs where they can go either way, such as creative and technology based jobs. Hell, even 'business' to an extent. I don't think Alan Sugar has a business degree, but he's doing well enough. In that sort of role, a qualification really is nothing more than an education that gives you some basic prodding and a piece of paper to say you told the educational body what they wanted to hear.

My web design skills are SHOCKING, but I aced my web design unit, while some of my friends who made wonderful websites that blew my mind got low grades. That's because I read the marking criteria and made something that hit the key points.

I guess that means a qualification says, "this person can follow instructions" and that is a valuable skill to have... but that is also just common sense. I could probably get a web design job, but if somebody with genuine talent got the job over me, it'd be a travesty.

rihanna09

Hi all,
Just an update, My dd sent the letter 2 fridays ago I think... and we've not had a reply as yet. I emailed them asking if they'd recieved it and was blatantly asked if my query involved a store and was provided a phone number. Just wanted to query if this was the standard proceedure for so called lost letters!