Yes, it is true. I once worked at the SONY Store in NYC. For tech and TV lovers I am sure this sounds like a dream job, but believe me, it was a nightmare. Here are my reasons for hating my time working at SONY NYC.
Infantile customers
I had my fair share of bad customers and my fair share of good ones, but something about SONY electronics makes the bad ones a special kind of stupid. I recall one instance when some imbecile decided to double park his SUV outside of the store in the middle of Manhattan rush hour so as to be able to pick up his flatscreen quickly. Of course, he got a ticket by the time I was able to bring the TV to his car. He then spent another hour demanding that the store compensate him for MY incompetence. His argument was that if I was faster obtaining the TV he would never have gotten the ticket. Despite the fact that HAD HE NOT BROKEN THE LAW HE WOULD HAVE NEVER GOTTEN THE TICKET!
Supervisors
That brings me to the supervisors. Not only did they pressure me to agree to pay the guy's ticket (I never did). But they just sucked overall in how they did things. Never gave anyone any room to work and they couldn't run a nose let alone a retail electronics store. To illustrate how stupid and bad these people are I will describe a run in I had with a supervisor whom I will refer to as "Sunday." I had been working for SONY for about two weeks and every day I put on the all black uniform as Sunday had instructed me when I was hired. On this particular day, Sunday came up to me and said: "we need to talk." Then he proceeded to reprimand me about my pants of all things! He accused me of taking advantage of his leniency. You see his problem was that my pants were the wrong material. They were black of course, but they were jeans not slacks (he never specified by the way). I laughed out loud at him. Then I told him, "If you can find me ONE customer who refuses to purchase a TV because of the nonconformity of my pants when I bring it to them I will quit that same day." Then he wrote me up for insubordination. LOL
The joke that is security
The worst part of my tour of duty at this electronic island of misfits was store security. They installed this goofy punch card system to keep track of merchandise. Whenever I brought anything anywhere I had to get a ticket and have it punched then hand it to a supervisor. The problem was keeping track of all these random pieces of paper while running around a crowded store holding a TV proved to be a job and a half and most of the time you had to spend an hour off of your shift looking around the store floor like a demented idiot for a yellow piece of paper. That system might have been tolerable and even practical if it wasn't for the fact that they didn't care all that much about the merchandise anyway. Camera lenses would be thrown, TVs would often get dropped from the high places they stored them. Forget about laptops and computers they would get treated like they're packaging was made of solid granite. But the security fun doesn't end there. This is how dedicated these halfwits are: For nearly have my time there (3 months) I was leaving the same way I had come in at the end of my shift (the front door) and no one ever batted an eye or told me different. Then one day by happenstance I mentioned how I was leaving to Sunday (that beam of job-related joy) and he said "What? What?! Oh my God! That is not good!" evidently there was an employee exit that no one ever told me about. The first time I left that way and submitted to search I remember thinking "This is freaking retarded! Anyone can just steal anything and walk out the front door! I could have been walking out with unprocessed high-end electronics five days a week for months with no one knowing a damn thing. They are so lucky I am not a criminal."
Well there you have it, and for all those reasons and then some I say...