Extra February Blog

The time has finally come, we finally have food to eat! We aren't starving anymore, so that's good. Anyways, I have talked to my mentor Jason about teaching me more of the business size of a comic store. He agreed to show me. Also, he agreed to show me how to do some computer work (order merchandise, check if we have stuff in stock, etc.) so it can help me more with my final presentation. My first mentor, Kevin, is finally coming back after being gone for three months. He is returning in about two weeks, and I have no idea if he will become my mentor again. I like Jason better though as a mentor.

We will see how things work out in the end, but hopefully I can keep Jason as a mentor.

Blog 16: Answer 2

1. What is the best way to achieve customer satisfaction for a comic store?

2. My first answer is to always know your product and always knowing what your customers want.

3. My second answer is to grow close relationships with your customers and always have them be involved in what you are doing.

4. -When you are nice with customers they tend to give you good reviews and would want to come back to your store

     -Get to know your customers personally, it shows that you actually care for them and are interested in them as a person

     -When you are not nice to customers they tend to act the same way towards you and can possibly lead to a bad review on your store and rumors that talk trash about you personally

5. The best printed source that supports my answer is my Interview #3

6. Other sources that help supports my answers are "6 Keys to Improving Your Customer Service Skills" and "10 Ways to Make Customers Fall in Love With Your Business."

7. Customers are a very important factor in your store/business, they are the ones that keep you in business. So make sure you pay them back with the respect that they deserve.

Blog 15: Independent Component 2 Approval

1. What I plan to do for my independent component 2 is to do more mentorship hours at my mentorship.

2. I will be doing the same thing like for what I did for independent component 1 and my regular hours, I will go to JPM Comics and do the hours necessary to reach the 30 hour mark for independent component 2.

3. It will help me learn even more things about the store and maybe even expand into new work (ordering new merchandise/products or learning to use the database) to do than just doing almost the same thing every time I am there.

Blog 14: Independent Component 1

• Literal

(a) "I, Gabriel Marquez, affirm that I completed my independent component which represents 31 hours of work."

(b) The sources I used for my independent component is doing more mentorship with Jason Cox, who is now my current mentor.

(c) Look at Mentorship Hours link on my blog.

(d) While doing my independent component with Jason, he continued to show me the basics of running the store (JPM Comics) from where my first mentor, Kevin Mitchell, left off before he left due to foot injuries. I have learned a lot more about the basics of the store and the even learning the tips and secrets to use when using the register or to restocking the shelfs. I had even met the owner of the store, Pierre, and he has been very helpful and supportive when it comes to my senior project. I am learning currently on how to close the store since I stay until closing time (7 pm) and have opened the store once (opening time is 12 pm) and opening the store is a lot faster then closing it. I hope to learn soon on how to order comics and other merchandise and learn to use our database better because I do have some information on how to it, but not that much hands on experience. It also helped me a lot to get to know most of the regular customers that go in every week. We have built rather friendly relationships to one another which is very important to do when working at a store that involves retail.

• Interpretive

As you can tell, this is a picture from inside of the store.

This is the "front desk" of JPM Comics where I actually sit most of the time because I work the register a lot of the time I am there. As you can see by the register, it is my first mentor Kevin before he left. (In the red shirt)

JPM Comics also sell "statues" (as seen above) and action figures/toys. Unfortunately, I do not get to sell much of the statues or any of the toys since we rarely get people wanting to buy them and since they can be very expensive.

• Applied

By doing more mentorship hours with Jason, he helped me get another point of view of the way things are run from what Kevin thought. I could use both sides of information and put them together so I can get the best knowledge of what I am doing. What both Kevin and Jason did to help me out was for me to work register as one of my main jobs to actually experience talking and interacting with the customers and engage into conversations. This helped me with one of my answers "Get to know your customers" because they aloud me to have the very helpful experience. Another thing that is very helpful is that they let me take comics of the shelves and read them and just put them back. This is a way to keep up with popular titles (Spider-Man, Batman, etc.) and to let the customers know my feedback and recommendation on what to read or not. This would fall under my answer "Knowing your products."