I worked for a certain used car dealership. Just got laid off yesterday. Here's what went down:
I was there for 3 months. I went through 2 interviews with them, the first they actually passed me up on. Got the “We're moving forward with other candidates” and everything email.
Got an email back from them a week or so later saying they wish to hear me out again.. hindsight was 20/20 with this one, should've gotten the hint.
The promise was decent, the delivery was not. This dealership opened brand new a year ago. Since then, they've been through almost 10 salespeople in turnover. I got hired on when there was 1 other salesperson when the store should be carrying 5 or more.
Again, hindsight was not working for me quite well. I was too blind with the package they offered.
They are the ONLY car sales company to offer a salary + store bonus compensation package. I thought great, coming out a commission only job within a dead market I thought it couldn't get better than that.
Overworked literally after week 1. I kept asking management repeatedly “is it always going to be like this, I didn't agree to stay after 2 hours every other night for a salaried job” and they kept placating me. I asked for a raise in my salary, they told me that they couldn't make exceptions to the rule every time something like this happens to a store… except I read that in the store policy surrounding their salary that they COULD do something like that. They just chose not to.
During my 3 months there, they hired 3 other people. 2 of them quit before I got fired. That other salesman that was there before me? He quit 2 weeks into me starting lol.
How my store bonus works is however many cars we sell out for the month, the salespeople get paid by the unit split between all the salespeople. Since I was the only salesperson around, I was going to be seeing a $5000 bonus… The caveat to that was I had to be employed up till the point of receiving said bonus out of payroll, which would've been two weeks into the following month.
I got fired a week before that payroll hit. I should've saw this coming when I overheard management saying they had help coming in this next following week. We hadn't received help since I first got hired on.
They had me on disciplinary action they took against me a week and a half ago prior to which they sat me down and told me about. Citing that I was skimming through their call workflow without actually calling out to customers (They have this call metric that all stores need to hit, regardless of how well staffed these stores are, and I was literally given advice by my AGM on how to skim through it cause he didn't want to get nasty emails lol). They had us staying late to do these phone calls just to hit the metric, even when it was nighttime. When I brought up how insane I thought that was, suddenly policy changed within the store and they claimed later on they never had us stay late for that.
I'm trying to see it as a blessing in disguise, I was going to end up leaving after I got that bonus.. but damn the timing on their part was just too good not to be suspicious about, especially since they could've fired me during that citation.
My boss was the “work until you die” type that was literally working himself to death and I thought Man.. I really don't want to be like this guy. We even had a conversation about it and he said “People from your generation see things as all about me. How's a company going to run when all people think is themselves?”
And all I could think to that was “One end of the torch is going to burn faster than the other. Why should the worker suffer when the company and the hire ups who have fuck you money thrive?”
At the end of the day, I'm glad I'm out of there. But don't think for a second that you're not expendable. I was the only qualified salesperson around and they still booted me, even when I helped them hit store budget (to which I'm not seeing the bonus of).
Fuck em'.