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."

Extra January Blog

This month was really the as every other month. I am still learning to close down the store. I am starting to learn the regular customers names and begin to grow friendly relationships with them. They are also getting to know me very well. We fixed the TV in the store so now they customers (and us) can watch movies and enjoy our time while we work. Next we are going to try to clean up the mini-fridge and microwave so we can actually eat while we are there and not starve during the day.

I still work the register and so little things here and there. Like restock the quarter bins, return comics, and do bags and boards. My mentor has recently showed how to set up the way the new books come in every week. I may learn soon how to open up the store.

Blog 13: Lesson 2 Reflection

1. The thing I am most proud of in my presentation is that I felt like I was able to get a majority (I hope everyone) interested in my topic and was able to grab their attention. Also, it was good to get a few laughs throughout the presentation as well.

2. A. I feel like I derserve a P on my presentation.
    B. I may not have cited my sources, but I think I said a lot of good information and got my point across.

3. I think my activity worked out better than I thought it would. At first, I thought less people would participate, but I got a few people to participate and it went well.

4. I would rehearse my PowerPoint more so I can give out my information out more smoothly.

5. My answer #2 would be grow close relationships with your customers, get to know them better.

Blog 12: Mentorship 10 Hours

1. I do my mentorship at JPM Comics in Glendora.

2. My contract is Jason Cox who is an employee at JPM, and has been working there for 8 years now.

3. I do not know exactly how many hours I have, but I should have a close count to around 40 hours. That is way past 10 hours.

4. During my mentorship I have learned to close down the store, learned some background on it, how to use the register, how to return comics, still in the process on learning how to order comics, how to interact with customers and to give the best service possible, how to restock the comics on the shelves, and have done other small things here and there.

Blog 11: Holiday Project Update

1. I think it is good to work on senior project during both breaks or when we have school. It really depends when you have available time to do your senior project, because you may be busy doing fun stuff over break or stuck during homework during school. During my break, I went to mentorship twice and did my usual four hours and actually extended it to 5 hours. 2 pm - 7pm.

2. When doing my senior project over break, I learned somewhat of how to close down the store once it is time to close (which is 7 pm). I am planning to learn how to open up the store next after I learned everything about closing down.

3. I would do my ten question interview for my EQ on my new mentor, Jason Cox. I have gotten to know him very well and we work great together too. It will also give me a chance to get a little more depth from him corresponding my EQ.