A shiny new outlet in the cool looking Times Square Building, Reliance Digital welcomed me with confusion. First on my part, where I showed up on the wrong date, confusing the employees. I was taken to some guy who sent me to some lady (I’m a little bad with names.) The nice lady helped me clear my confusion without letting me feel embarrassed (though I was on the inside.)
Here I was geared up for my next visit; I went there after my lunch-time and reached there around theirs. By then the people
at the entrance recognised me and greeted me to the inside where I met this guy (Yes, apt), who was quite surprised to see me. He had no idea what I was talking about and when I showed him the print out he persistently tried calling the numbers for 10 continuous minutes as I awkwardly smiled. (Another Confusion.)
The numbers wouldn’t ring, the employee wouldn’t say a thing and me, well, all I could do was sing! …no really! The song selections were cool, at a point even ironic as you could hear ‘Sun raha hai na tu’ while he tried to call.
He gave up and forwarded me to the lady I had earlier met. Why didn’t he do that earlier? Well, cause she was having lunch. She recognised me not exactly instantly (Hey it’s the bearded guy with the print out again!) but she understood why I was there and forwarded me to a lady on the top floor to submit my print out.
A wild guess wouldn’t be needed to find out what happened next, the lady upstairs was out lunching and I was sent back down air-punching.
Yet far…
The same lady took my invite-print and when I asked for my tour, she asked me to feel free to stray around on my own. I obliged.
What she didn’t know that the Shivmeister (me) had already strayed around while she showed up. HA! (sighs)
Being extremely frank I would like to say that Reliance Digital is a pretty cool place, the people who work there (at least in the Times Square branch) are ignorant idiots. One may feel I’m being too harsh but when an employee in a tech-shop asks you to go to ‘Lamington Road’ to buy an accessory, you know the recruitment is screwed up. I even saw one customer being dismissed because he was looking for a memory card of an older smartphone *waves hand* “woh ban na bandh ho gaya hai”
The infrastructure, product placements are commendable, though. The cell-phones are well-spaced out so that you don’t have to shoulder tackle people for a preview. I was personally impressed with the number of options in the accessories racks and how well they were organised. I even found myself in the games section feeling like a kid again looking for the latest versions of my favourite old-time arcade/adventure games.
While I was checking out the external hard drives, a sales person came up and helped me find a product. He spoke pleasantly and was well informed about the products, but since I do my research well on tech, I realised that he perhaps didn’t know quite as much. Yet, a star in the evening sky!
As I last went to the Tablet section, a secluded, peaceful corner of the outlet. I saw a couple of interesting tab options and while I was comparing specs, two sales dudes standing next to the aisle found me funny or something that I was doing and one began whispering to another. Now, I might be being naive, but anyone would be if they saw two people talk like that.
So, only to have the sales execs to stop staring at me like I was a shop-lifter, I got the blue out of there.
Plus I also feel that my print-out would not be submitted to the ‘head-office’ as the lady indicated, for she handed it a confused employee constantly telling him to keep it “somewhere safe” but not in her file.
So my overall experience-
A not so happy experience.
Infrastructure – 4/5
Gadget Options – 3/5
Accessories – 4/5
Staff – 1/5
(for the nice lady at the entrance who took care of my umbrella.)
Quite Literary, Quite Literally! 