Last week, my boss called me into his office and offered me a promotion. Strangely, the promotion would either reduce my annual income by 20% or require me to work 10 extra hours per week in order to maintain my current income level.
In my current position, I’m what the grocery industry calls a vendor. I transport, sell, and merchandise product in grocery stores. Because it’s a sales position, I’m commissioned, and because I’m commissioned, I am incredibly efficient at my job so that I can make the maximum amount for the minimum amount of hours. I’m also very good at my job, consistently seeing highest sales growth and highest sales numbers of all the sales reps in my local market.
The supervisor role is hourly. My average hourly income, if I calculate one based on my pay and the number of hours I work is 20% higher than the hourly rate for supervisor I was offered.
I explained this to my boss, and I could tell he already knew it, but he asked me if I did the math right. I walked him through the math. He then told me how moving into higher supervisor positions that pay better would require me to work this lower supervisor position in order to climb the ladder. He also tried to gaslight me when I told him I wouldn’t be able to take a pay cut, that it just made no sense to me by arguing “it’s not a pay cut since you’d be working the 50 hours on average that supervisors do, so you’d make the same.” Told him that’s wrong, time is money, and that I’d be constantly asking myself what the hell I was doing spending so much more time at work with nothing to show for it.
I’m just baffled. I don’t know why anyone would be enticed by the offer. I don’t know why my supervisor is even in the position at this point. It genuinely made me lose respect for just about everyone in the company because if they all did something as idiotic as take a pay cut in order to do more work and carry more responsibility, then what other stupid things are they doing.
Needless to say, I turned the promotion down. Not about to be management and not even remotely tempted by a fucking pay cut.