Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

And the two-way radio? “It sounds like those push-to-talk cell phones with all of the beeps and weird sounds it makes when sending/receiving. A conversation on one of those things sounds like NASA communicating with the space shuttle,” a different associate wrote.

“Battery life isn’t what it’s cracked up to be,” another complained. “And when it goes dead, you have to go to the computer room to get another battery.”

Yes, some of that grousing is based on what associates remember from using conventional phones and walkie-talkies, before the mobile POS devices arrived. But apparently no one primed associates’ expectations appropriately.

And the complaints don’t stop at the hardware level.

Training? “More extensive training would have helped a lot. All I got was ‘go watch the video.’ The video didn’t tell you jack about how to actually use the darn phone, it just told you why it was so great,” an associate wrote.

Another commented, “Apparently there is no mention of inventory in the instruction manual. In the meantime, I figured it out by pure chance (and was lucky enough to remember what I had done in order to show others how the function works). It was not difficult, but some of the steps certainly were not obvious.”

Yet another associate, visiting a store he didn’t work at, discovered employees who had no idea what to do with the phones, identified himself and quickly walked them through the basics. “Associates were handed this device on a Saturday (our busiest day of week) with zero basic training. Now they can at least use the radio and phone, and scan an item to see if they have it or what store might have it.”

Security? Apparently, some managers couldn’t (or wouldn’t) figure out how to do ordering—but with the new devices, only the managers’ logins were allowed to order. “We have some regular employees who do some of the ordering when the department head is not there,” wrote an associate. “Now they have to have their department head’s login, another impediment to efficiency.” That’s right—associates are being told to use their manager’s login, which is both a terrible security practice and grounds for termination.