Went in to the O store in Covent Garden and asked a young girl there where the X squared line were ,she looked blank for a few seconds then proceeded to take me to the radars and jawbones! when told they were metal she went straight to the probations ,inmates and such like!.With that my Fiance had had enough as she's in retail and just left the building to wait for me.... as for this girl I just told her not to worry and I would find them myself..... very disappointed....

Everybody has to begin somewhere.

If the girl is new to the job, the only thing that you can have against her is not to say "sorry, I don't know" instead of trying to look like she knows.
Sometimes, managers push their employee to answer question even if they no nothing about products.

sadly that is the norm over here, there used to be a couple of very knowledgeable guys in the cov gard store but they have long gone. i wore my ducati pit boss in there once and two different staff members said wow those are amazing are they oakley? i replied with yes and you sell them here...........

That's unfortunate, and all too common.

On the flip-side, I was slowly cruising by the Chicago airport O-Store between flights just to get a glance and a mid-20's girl working there was like "Nice Timebomb, want to try on the new version, it's amazing." I hardly even remembered that I was wearing my original Stealth TB and she saw it right away.

Long story short, there are still employees out there that know what's up.

In my experience, the knowledge is Covent Garden is the exception rather than the norm for O Stores. A lot of O Stores, generally speaking, seem to have knowledgeable staff that knows their stuff and their knowledge seems to be improving as the years go by. Certainly not all O Store folks have "Collector-level" expertise or even the same level of enthusiasm, but I generally find most of them know their stuff and are excited to learn more.

I have no doubt the knowledge in NON UK O-stores is much better but here we have only have 2 O-stores, covent garden are bad but westfield are worse, MUCH worse! its a shame but i live with it.

At least you have 2 O-Store, unlike Paris who have none -_-

Went in to the O store in Covent Garden and asked a young girl there where the X squared line were ,she looked blank for a few seconds then proceeded to take me to the radars and jawbones!

That's bad... very, very bad.

Although they may not know everything, they should know which products they sell at the store. And if they are not certain, they need to at least ask someone who knows.

the south africans working at the WEstfied white city london o store are no better. horrible store.

I guess I'm lucky. The local O-Store I frequent(although not much recently), everyone there knows their stuff.
Even the new folks. I guess it's hit or miss depending on your region.

I know those guys

If anybody's ever in Montreal, the O-Store there is amazing!

Managers are O-nuts & triathletes
Staff is mostly all O-nuts
Store is HUGE

Killer store
I hear tons of good feedback

The O store in fashion show mall in Las Vegas was the same for me. The guy had no clue what the artist series was. The entire series. I asked if they had anything and he didn't know what they were. He then apologized, but claimed it was because he just transferred from the vault store at the outlets.

The people at that store are generally very knowledgeable. The vault store people in Vegas can't spell their own name generally. Assuming he rose to be king idiot at the Vault and maybe got moved to the O store?

i'm agree freesh

to mtl o-store is very nice

i wore my ducati pit boss in there once and two different staff members said wow those are amazing are they oakley? i replied with yes and you sell them here...........

Funny but sad, glad to have the Montreal o-store like Alex said, they always do a great job.

At the end of the day, it's still retail. Some stores have a higher turnover, while others don't. Just because someone has the knowledge, it doesn't mean they can make that sale. In the long run, it all comes down to money. :|

I've had this experience over the phone. Nobody really knew when the Shaun White Polished 24K frogskins were going to release. One day all of a sudden, they were available on oakley.com when rumor was that they weren't releasing until August. This was in June. I called oakley and asked if this was legit, and the person helping me said he was not sure if the release date is correct and to hold off on placing the order. I went ahead and took my chances, placed the order, and 2 days later I get shipping confirmation.

There were some factors (that I will not go into) that were out side of both O-Stores, OPD's, and even Telsales hands that made it very hard to know any accurate info on the 24k Holbrook.

Yeah, I can +1 on that. My retailer was calling Oakley on the Goldbrooks for a while. All he kept getting was later and later release dates. Then folks starting landing them and he was none the wiser. Now that I think about it, I should probably tell him he can forget about asking for those.