The Haggler: Sales Incentives at Staples Draw Complaints — The Haggler

That’s right. Sell the mattress in the ad, and you’re gone.

How David Mamet is that?

This story came to mind recently, after the Haggler heard from several Staples employees who described some of the pressure they face from management when it comes to sales. But before we hear from the employees, let’s yield the floor to a customer who describes what this pressure looks like from the consumer side. Below is a condensed and edited excerpt from a Web site called my3cents.com, written by someone identified as JA2009. He is trying to buy an Acer computer for $449, as advertised by Staples in a newspaper.

Disaster ensues.

“Upon my arrival, I found an associate who informed me that the laptops were in stock. However, before he would get me one, he proceeded to try to sell me his ‘protection plan.’

“Now, for a number of reasons, including my own knowledge of computers, as well as ready access to free computer repair services, I declined this. The sales associate indicated that it was O.K., and then walked away to, I assumed, get my computer.

“He returned with the store’s general manager, who again proceeded to aggressively push the protection plan onto me. He was extremely rude, implying that I was ‘cheap’ for not adding the plan. He walked away when I finally maintained that I did not want it. Then I heard him call the sales associate over and tell him something. Moments later, the sales associate informed me that the laptop was not in stock after all.”

It gets worse. The would-be customer calls a second Staples, where a salesman says, yes, we have that $449 Acer.

“I walked in and found the exact person whom I spoke to eight minutes earlier. The store was virtually empty. I asked him if I had just spoken to him about the Acer laptop and he confirmed that he was the person. I asked him if they were indeed in stock, and he indicated that they were. I then asked if he could please go get one, because I definitely wanted one. And then, before he goes back to get one, he asks me if I want the service plan.”

You know the rest. After a quick check of inventory, the salesman returns to say the Acers are all gone.

THIS tale, by the way, is three years old, but you will find more recent variations of it on different consumer Web sites. The Haggler chose this one because it is detailed and because it contains no obscenities — rare in this genre.

What is happening here? Why aren’t these stores eager to sell computers, even if customers don’t also want to buy service plans?

Staples, as we will see, won’t answer that question. But according to employees, it has in place a set of incentives that make it unpleasant, to put it mildly, for staffers to sell a computer without a whole bunch of accessories, particularly a service plan.

Staples, explained a manager named Natasja Shah  in a series of conversations and e-mails, has a system called Market Basket that tracks how many dollars’ worth of add-ons each staffer sells.

“The average needs to be $200,” Ms. Shah said. In other words, each time you sell a computer, you need to sell, on average, $200 worth of other stuff. And that average is carefully tracked. Sales staffers who aren’t meeting their goals are coached, and if that doesn’t work, she and other employees said, there will be disciplinary action that can lead up to termination; underperformers can also end up with lots of night and weekends shifts or even a reduction in scheduled hours.

What happens to managers who can’t keep their storewide Market Basket numbers up?

“It’s not pretty,” said a manager who asked not to be identified, fearing repercussions. “There are these conference calls with district managers, and one of them once told a store manager, ‘If you can’t do the job, you can go sell fries at McDonald’s.’ ”

E-mail: haggler@nytimes.com. Keep it brief and family-friendly, include your hometown and go easy on the caps-lock key. Letters may be edited for clarity and length.

TV Sports: NBC Olympics Delay and Streaming Bring Complaints on Twitter

The past animosity rested on tape-delaying certain marquee sports into prime time. But now Twitter has turned into a fiery digital soapbox against NBC, as its users have merged their resentment over tape delay with problems viewing the live streams.

The outrage has been distilled, simply, into #nbcfail. It is difficult for now to determine if #nbcfail represents a tiny minority or is a sampling of a widespread problem.

NBC believes it is the former.

The ire of #nbcfail was stoked Sunday when Vivian Schiller, NBC’s recently hired chief digital officer, retweeted a message that said “the medal for most Olympic whining goes to everyone complaining about what happens every 4 yrs., tape delay.”

She approvingly added “+1” to the Twitter posting, which was written by Jonathan Wald, the executive producer of “Piers Morgan Tonight” on CNN.

Schiller, a former New York Times executive who resigned last year from NPR amid controversy, quickly became the corporate symbol of anger about tape-delaying sports and the opening ceremony. And she isn’t even in the sports division.

To a degree, she wasn’t wrong. Complaining about tape delay is an Olympic sport in its way.

But the fans aren’t wrong either in their dislike of tape delay, a vestige of 1960s Olympic television production pioneered by ABC’s Roone Arledge.

It has been an effective tool for all Olympic networks, which have rationalized its use with this mantra: we hold the marquee sports until prime time to harvest the highest rating and optimize our advertising so we can afford our ever-increasing rights fees.

But fans long upset with tape delay have reason to keep complaining. Major sports are always televised live. Why not the Olympics? And with the tools available to NBC — multiple networks and the Internet — an all-live Olympics is possible.

And in a digital age, aggrieved fans can take to social media to protest in a way that was never available until recently. And yet, even in a digital age, NBC’s Olympic economics are still based largely on prime time — and the returns so far from London are stellar: 40.7 million viewers for the opening ceremony and 28.7 million for the first night of competition Saturday. Are all those who hate tape delay not watching or are they reluctant parts of the audience, knowing there’s no other way to watch the Games?

Still, NBC cannot fully savor the success, at least not yet. By streaming all sports live to an audience more ravenous than ever for video content on computers, iPads and smartphones, NBC might have believed it had found a complaint cure-all. If no streams were held until the events aired on tape in prime time, how could anyone complain about delay? If fans absolutely had to see Michael Phelps swim live, they could see it. Up to 40 live streams are available at once. Such a fetching bonanza sounds ideal, doesn’t it?

But people want what they want when they want it — and they don’t want the video to freeze, skip, pixelate or buffer excessively. Some who wanted to watch Phelps race Ryan Lochte live (many hours before they raced, on delay, on NBC) were disappointed when the live streams seized up as if hexed by an NBC rival.

Twitter has lit up with similar complaints — some satisfied customers have tweeted, too — from fans who don’t want to hear that the trouble might be on their end: their broadband service’s bandwidth; the age of their computers and mobile devices; thunderstorms; the number of people in an apartment building also streaming; or interference in the ionosphere from Ryan Seacrest’s Freedom Tower-size pompadour.

NBC did nothing to caution fans that any of these problems might arise or that they might have an imperfect experience. Those helpful advisories should have been posted on nbcolympics.com next to where users sign in to access video. Perhaps nobody should have anticipated perfection; this is a huge undertaking that probably could not have been tested by millions of users to mimic the actual experience once the Games began.