A friend of mine recently went to work at a well known car dealership in Colorado Springs with a good reputation, not a buy here, pay here thing, but a real dealership. Their commission structure is that they get no commission until they reach 12 cars. If you sell under 12 cars, you get paid minimum wage. Oh, and hey, fun fact, car salespeople are exempt from overtime I just found out. If you get 12 cars, your pay is 4500. If you get 14 cars it goes to 8000 and if you get 18 cars it goes to 11000. Sounds great, right? There's some money to be made.
When he got hired there were 6 sales people between 2 stores and they averaged about 55 cars on each lot. That's 110 divided by 6 plus him, so 7 people, so 15.5 cars per person so everyone could make money. WELL… the month before everyone sold like 16 or 18 cars or more because they had a really good month so the shady ass owners decided they didn't like paying all that commission and decided to hire 6 MORE PEOPLE. They weren't short staffed. Customers weren't waiting and complaining about poor or slow service. There were just enough customers that everyone was busy but no one was overworked.
Now let's do the math. 110 divided by 13 is 8 cars a person. That means NO ONE GETS COMMISSION and everyone gets minimum wage. My friend worked 105 hours in a state with a minimum wage of 13.65 and his paycheck after taxes and the sales license that the car dealership is making him pay for himself (instead of absorbing it as a cost of doing business like any decent company) was $950. His rent is 1800 because Colorado Springs. He would make more working for McDonalds.
What the hell? It doesn't seem fair but I don't think there's anything illegal. Any input?
TL:DR: Owners didn't want to pay salespeople commission so they hired more salespeople so no one can get enough cars to make commission