It's a done deal: Dell puts an end to all 140 US mall kiosks
By Darren Murph 
posted January 30th 2008 12:13PM
posted January 30th 2008 12:13PM
[Image courtesy of NotebookReview]
posted January 30th 2008 12:13PM
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I'm now a former Dell employee too. So let me clear something up about what we did at the kiosk. We were there to make sure that people had what they needed to enjoy a system. We weren't there to rape anyone out of their hard-earned pennies. There are a LOT of people that would buy 1GB of RAM to run Vista. That's not a good computer by any means. I worked really hard explaining what the hardware and software would do for people and what they really needed for a great performance.
Now that I've tried to explain that, remember: 1,000 people are out of jobs. Jobs that they thought were secure yesterday. So whether you believe the kiosks were pointless or not, show some humanity for people that are now in some trouble.
For their performance: kiosks have been operating for 24 fiscal quarters, missing goal on only 3 of those. We have been the face of Dell for 6 years and deserve better treatment than what we got. I understand enough of the business world to say that it MAY have been a good call, but how they did it was unprofessional, unkind and made everyone feel unappreciated.
Hey Kurt, I'm sorry you lost your job and thanks for letting us know more about your job. I however think it's perfectly understandable that they closed down the kiosks. If anything they should have gone the way of Apple - and at least tried that. I doubt it would have worked as great but it could have saved your job.
Now, as for the 1000 people you say lost their jobs. How many of those actually worked full time and how many were just students with part-time jobs?
Well one of the guys I work with just came back from the national guard, full time with Dell. He's married with two kids and that was their only form of income. Now if he falls behind on bills and his credit suffers, his military clearance will be taken away.
One of the regional managers in New Jersey had just bought a new house.
I am not as dependant on that income as the rest of my team was. So it's not the job or the money that upset me. Just how it was handled. I really loved that job. It was a respectable thing to do where I got the chance to interact with people, help them make an informed decision and even follow up with them weeks or months later and hear both the good and bad.
Hey bro i am also a former dell employee as of 12am last night(1-29-08) i got a phone call at 12 a.m. from our Regional manager telling us that we were all getting fired. I think it is bull shit that these morons on this message board are putting us down becuase we sold good computers from a kiosk. Over 1000 people were fired, alot of us including myself have families. I am only 24 so I can find a job easy but for the older reps i feel bad for becuase alot of people are looking for younger people to work for them. All and all i think it is bullshit what dell did to all of us hard working employees
I guess Mitt Romney must have given Mr.Dell his gameplan - Screw everyone you can while trying to make a profit. Always the same with these big coportion-types; one day your fine, the next day "F*** you". National City Bank did the same thing about 3 months ago, but that was 9000 people who woke up that day without a job.
Oh....now I understand why NCB sucks now. It's because the employees were pissed! I had to move my 15 year account because of their crappy service! Well, fine with me...
In my local mall, the Dell booth stood right in front of the Palm Store.
Dell can move right into the Palm store after Palm store is gone within a few steps, sounds convenient?
Actually the kiosks did amazing business, I'm now a former sales rep. This month so far I pulled in 38k in revenue during hell month. This is consistent with my 40k rev per mo average.
Now, I'm just screwed and the customers have no way of contacting a person face to face.
Dude, you're getting a Dell... pink slip.
One can see both sides here.
For Dell, they failed at doing what they wanted, or they has a better business plan to move to. Apple shows you how to make money at retail, and it isn't a kiosk in a mall. It's directing (massaging?) the whole user experience. At an Apple store you can take photos or shoot movies and edit them. Or wrong a song in Garageband. There are free classes, and Geniuses can fix your Mac on the spot most of the time. With a Dell Kiosk, you have a human catalog who can give you good answers. That's only a small part of what Apple figured out by building a whole store inside a warehouse and testing and testing until they got it perfect. And only then did they actually build a real store.
So Dell had to make a move. Fine. That's legitimate. People get laid off all the time. Whether their jobs just disappear or end up going to Outsourceistan. That's the way modern day Darwinistic capitalism works.
Now, what they did wrong - from almost any perspective - is not give their employees a few weeks' pay to give them some time to find new jobs. Their loyalty deserves a little bit of appreciation. But unless Dell did this, they are going to get a black eye and will find it harder to recruit people in the future if they ever try a retail situation again. It's like the Silicon Valley company about five years ago that handed out pink slips at the Christmas party. It wasn't the laying people off that made them evil. It's the crass, insensitive way they did it. So if Dell didn't do anything to cushion the blow for 1,000 people, most of which no doubt did their jobs faithfully, then they deserve to be ranked amongst the worst companies to work for lists.
Actually, those new to computers, grandparents, noobs in general. the kiosk was a great place to go..people actually explained and helped them get a good machine verses a 499. celeron wally world special that gives u nothing...many customers will be disappointed and miss the kiosk and will have to talk to mike in India to get there questions anwswered...of course they won't understand what mike is saying..
of course...getting a pink slip makes me wanna just love Michael...NOT...lol
Holy crap that kiosk is by far the ugliest thing i've seen in 2008.
Any corporation, if they have a presence in the state being shipped to, is REQUIRED by law to charge tax. Not Dell's fault...blame the government.
on a different note, if that is the case, then why does reliance india call charge sales tax on our purchases ? they are located in india ... they dont have a local presence in AZ ... still they charge 8.25% sales tax.
None of the sales calls go to India, only tech support.
That's why Mitt Romulan is would NEVER make a good president!
I found the Kiosks were useful. I would never order a laptop or monitor without seeing and touching it first with my own eyes (especially since Dell's website does a sub-par job in presenting their products, compared to Apple for example).
Using an article about Dell mall kiosks to bash Mitt Romney? Go somewhere else...
Romney saved a failing office supply company and turned it in to multi-billion dollar enterprise. That company? Staples.
He certainly can't do worse than the boob we have in the Oval Office right now, but I digress.
I *NEVER* saw anyone at those Dell mall kiosks checking out anything except the big screen monitors and TVs. The whole mall kiosk thing was a disaster. Anyone who didn't see this coming needs their head examined...
Am gonna head to the mall and tell them the bad news.
I work in a Direct Kiosk in Australia, and at the moment Dell isn't in big brand shops here and I dont think that will happen for quite some time as the shops with computers here and over saturated and the staff at most of these shops have no clue.
We do fantastic business being the first foray into a semi-retail presence for Dell, but if I were to wake up to no job tomorrow i'd be very upset Dell would have planned this for a long time and could have hinted so staff could start looking elsewhere, which is what happened when they moved a kiosk here in Australia, I suppose it is the American work ethic.
be warned, it started small with wal-mart here
I guess a lot more of my users are going to be asking me for advice on how to order their new computers. Ugh. I may support desktops day in and day out, but I've never bought a brand new one. MacBook (07), UMPC (06), Tablet PC (04) and laptop (01), yes. I build/rebuild my desktops. I'm better at fixing what the Powers decided the user should have at work; the Dellies had to have been better at getting past the the confused looks and helping the user figure out what he/she should have at home (I can't make them all buy Tablet PCs!). The kiosk-keepers surely wouldn't have started screaming when a kind, hard-working individual said, "So I have to get XP?" after they'd explained for five minutes that Word is a part of Office and doesn't come with Vista. I'm not, you know, saying that I personally know of anyone who would lose it like that...do I hear my feed reader calling me?
And you believe 64,000 a week is big money when you are talking about a multi billion dollar company?
I suppose you believe DELL was reproducing those gains everywhere?
We were in the top ten as far as kiosk sales, but the point I was trying to make was that the kiosks were profitable and were not pointless. Either way it is a moot point since they no longer exist.
Actually the kiosks made a lot of money for dell, not as much compared to phone and online sales but still, do you know how many people bought their first computer off of me? They had no clue, and we did "up sale" but our up sales consisted of, sorry this $399 computer is not going to run CAD well at all for you sir.
I have also setup a web forum if any of us former reps are looking here http://www.yoursainthere.com for us to get together and find jobs etc.
As to how many fired today Based on our last DRUMS report and figuring managers and operations people who also lost their jobs today. 800 or so.
I think I need to clarify a bit....I am not mad at Dell about losing my job, I am mad about how they did it. I mean, many people have spent years at Dell, and with no warning, Dell just tells them all to pretty much go **** themselves....With the fact that they removed the kiosks before telling employees about anything, you know there was some employees coming in to work just like any other day just to walk into thier mall and see that thier place of work....is gone. I didn't even get a notice that there was going to be a conference call today, the one where they told us we were fired....someone else I worked with found out and contacted me.
I worked at various DDS locations throughout my tenure with Dell, and I have to echo one important thing mentioned here that people are not getting:
The kiosks were not designed for the tech guru. They were designed for the average home customer that didn't know what to click on when they went into the configurator. And in that regard they were EXTREMELY helpful to customers.
At the locations I was the Lead of and the others I worked at, most of the staff were knowledgeable and engaging. However, of course there were always exceptions to the rule. Spherion, the temp agency Dell worked with, was often notorious for hiring bad reps who were there because the pay was much better and the work was much easier than working a Best Buy.
Many of the Dell employees, especially the Dell-badged reps, deeply cared about their jobs and their kiosks they worked at. They did not scream "Apple sucks!" and thought the "No one wants an Apple for Halloween" was funny but not necessarily the direction Dell should have went (even though Apple's whole campaign is bashing companies like Dell, but that's neither here nor there). In fact, if you were a GOOD sales rep you'd know that you'd get a lot more sales if you didn't outright bash the competition, but complimented in addition to giving them a downside, as well as recommending your own product. Yes it sounds strange but it did work and we were all proud to wear the "Dell" logo on our chests.
When they announced Walmart, we were startled. When they announced Staples, we were scared. When they announced Best Buy, we shit our pants. Yet through this, management echoed that there would always be a need for our type of sales, and even if the kiosk did "change" in format that the good ones would be brought forward. So we strove to be the "good ones" if something did go down, and we were reassured and went about our job. In the end though, EVERYONE was let go, up to high-level management, marketing, ops, and training. No one was brought forward - not the good ones, the bad ones, or the ones in between.
Kiosks OUTSIDE the US may be safe, but other positions are not. Dell is in the process of a phased shutdown of their Edmonton, Alberta, Canada shutdown. 900 jobs are being terminated locally, with Alberta's hot economy and the increased value of the Canadian dollar offered as excuses.
It would seem Dell is undergoing a significant restructuring for supply chain and customer service operations.
Every lay off is pretty much silent until it happens. Face it, no one likes losing a job and giving them a few days to plot revenge just isn't a smart idea. It sucks, but it is the world we live in now.
But Dell badged folks shoud have got some kind of package, I would hope. Temps, I can understand, it is the nature of the job, but otherwise, please tell me you guys got something.
ya know when u think about it,dell lost when they fired the dude that got stoned, and busted for a little amount of weed in ny city he was thier main pr person