-Comission only, No hourly pay
-Grueling, Arbitrary Scheduling done entirely through mandatory unpaid Draft meetings every week. People picked shifts one at a time in order based on their total sales from the previous week. This might have been okay, if they didn't
A . Purposely not schedule enough shifts to go around
B. Use Total Sales instead of Sales Per Hour which punishes you for taking a day off, or for having drafted your schedule in a later round the previous week.
This results in a vicious cycle of drafting last, trying desperately to up your sales and killing it, only to be rewarded by drafting last again next week because 5 okay days of sales always beats 4 good days.
- Abusive time clock policies. If you are more than 7 minutes late, you have to give up a shift AND be sent to the bottom of the draft. One day, I just forgot to clock in and despite all my coworkers insisting to management that I was there on time and they could check the camera footage, I still was forced to give up a shift and you guessed it, draft last.
–Any missed day for any reason (except sickness) needs to be covered. If you can't find someone to take your shift, fuck you.
-Lost or stolen merchandise is taken out of the commission checks of everyone present the day it went missing, which is doubly insulting because we had to act as our own inventory people and do a complete inventory of every single item in the store including sim cards every single night.
-Monthly Punishment Trainings. What is a Punishment Training? That's what I like to call the mandatory Re-Training we had to attend whenever we failed to sell $10K in product a month. This number was the same nationally. In other words, I, in my rural town, am expected to sell the same amount of merchandise monthly, to avoid corrective action, as someone working in a midtown Manhattan store.
When you inevitably failed to meet this goal, you were ordered to attend that month's retraining. For me and my coworkers, that meant driving Over 4 hours away and with no compensation for our time, tolls, wear and tear, zilch. Nothing. They forced us to spend two nights away, generously putting us up in a hotel and making us share rooms with strangers from other stores, instead of giving us our own rooms or at least letting us room with people we knew. For an introvert like myself, it was uncomfortable to the point that one month I actually paid for my own hotel room so as to not be forced to sleep next to a stranger. If you were one second late to a retraining day, you would be fired on the spot. They once fired 4 people at once, because the driver of their carpool got pulled over on the way in.
The first day would be 9 hours in a classroom, where they would systematically break you down by endlessly telling you how reasonable and achievable the goals are, and then going around the room and basically forcing you to regurgitate their bullshit back at them one at a time in front of everybody. Ironically, they would always ask us “Who here thinks this is a Punishment? It's okay, be honest!” And then a couple people would timidly raise their hands. Then the presenter would proceed to tell us how this was all to help us, and it was really very benevolent of the company to send us all our here, pay for hotels, pay for training (the only time we actually got an hourly wage- $12.50). And then they'd call the individuals out who raised their hands and force you to say that you believed them.
The second day would be working the sales floor at this unfamiliar store, usually for 11 hours (before your long drive home). They would routinely pass out some sort of coldcall goal sheet, or some bullshit questions are at the beginning of the day. Then, when lunch would arrive they'd hold the food hostage until you completed whatever that day's stupid metric was, while you watched everyone else eating.
That all sucked, but one of the worst parts was that just because you were summoned to Punishment Training, that did not mean you were excused from your shifts. Oh no sir. You still had to get your shifts covered. At this shithole, the only way to talk someone into covering your shift was to do it unconditionally. You would always end up giving up both of your days off. All this to say, in exchange for the pleasure of driving four hours away to be shamed at a mandatory training for two days, I would have to give up my days off and work for 12 days straight.
-There'a so much more. I could go on and on about the indignities I endured there, or how they introduced a new scheduling system that was somehow even worse just before I left, but the point is FUCK Verizon Authorized Retailer Cellular Sales.