[awful]

That is probably true. I hired in for Christmas at RS while at junior college as sales person, around 1980. My experience was, at the time, 6800 machine programming and electronics but not C/S or operating systems. They gave us little to no training, I recall some sales self tutorials on the TRS-80 itself, but it was made clear to us we were there to sell things - and at Christmas it was chaos and (especially non-computer) items were flying off the shelves. I lived in a quite technical town and would get questions like "how many pages of memory" or "memory pages" does this have; when I could only refer to how many bytes, one customer stomped out in a huff. But ultimately difficult questions were to be referred to the regional specialist; knowledge was rare and it was not practical even in our town to have a computer scientist or programmer on staff; but people being people, they wanted answers now. Most were reasonable and those that knew enough about computers to ask the hard questions, say from their work, realized it likely took enthusiasts or specialists to answer - not salespeople. Apparently that changed after awhile, maybe when the Radio Shacks went to "Computer Centers" or some such thing.