No, it's retail sales. When's the last time you went to a Circuit City and asked anything of their "computer" sales staff? It was my experience that the only answers they knew were the ones posted by the sales manager on the bulletin board in the employee's lounge. It was also my experience that this week's computer specialist was a washer/dryer specialist last week, refrigerator and dishwasher specialist in the weeks before that, and that his career ambition was to work his way up through subscription satellite service equipment into video cameras and ultimately to make it all the way up to giant screen plasma televisions.

I don't see anyone offering to pay their grocer more for food. Instead I see people taking their shopping dollars to the store with the lowest prices. Why should an employer pay more than the "going rate" for nothing more than mediocre competance.

As an employee, it's your responsibility to make your employer unwilling to contemplate running his business without you. I've heard a lot of employees complain that they got paid just enough to motivate them to do only enough to not get fired. I've never once heard an employee say that he wanted to work hard enough to make his employer want to pay him more.

But I can tell you from personal experience, if you make yourself valuable enough, your employer will do what he needs to do to keep you.