TLDR: I worked a job selling newspaper ads with an incompetent and mean boss that paid pennies and I'm glad to be gone but I need a job
I quit my job over two months ago and am still looking for work (if some needs a “diversity token” bsba in marketing and management with 3 years experience and fantastic writing and people skills) but trying to look for a job is making me wonder if what comes next could be worse.
This was my first “real” job out of college, selling ads for a local newspaper. The newspaper is part of a big and obviously very old company, that had recently bought a bunch of local town/city newspapers in my state. And according to quite literally everyone in our maybe 50 person company, this made the job unbearable. Like, people who had been there for 15 – 30+ years quit because of the change, one lady cussed out our ceo to be fired and still wasn't, absolutely unbearable.
I was at the job for about 4 months and initially really liked it. Very lax for the most part, I could basically come in whenever as long as I got my work done. We also had to travel a lot, so some days I would leave straight from home and make my rounds and be done for the day, as long as I was able to be contacted.
Here's the primary issue: it didn't matter when you started work, it would take almost the entire day to do anything. There were days I would get to work at 7 am and not leave until 11 pm. We got no overtime, you could only get overtime if you were asked to come in on weekends, but that never happened and usually the entire team had to work weekends anyway. Or you could have it “authorized” a week in advance… there's no way to professionally and successfully say, “All of this work takes over 12 hours most days.”
We had meetings every Monday to catch up each other's activities. During one of these meetings, our boss said “we're not working hard enough” if we're leaving at 5pm (day is 8 – 5). The ads we sold were insanely expensive, it could cost as much as $2600 for a full page ad in a newspaper with ~5k subscribers. And boy did we lose subscribers every day. We also had a month and a half where the print was so horrible it was basically unreadable and looked 3D, it cost sales reps $100s each to accommodate angry advertisers but our ceo and boss didn't think it was a big deal.
We'd have “special sections” every month with discounted ads. And between 5 reps for all of the newspapers (I want to say there were 7 or 8) they asked us to bring in about 200k a month. We'd all have different quotas based on our progress, but we had to sell 70% of whatever number we got for the month to make commission, which also had a standard amount of $1350 regardless of what your goal was. They could pick any number, there was no real math to back it
You get the minimum commission your first 3 months, but after, you could be at 69.99999999999% and not see any extra. It was a trend to make commission every other month because they increase the goal just enough that you can't reach it again.
With the special sections, ads were discounted like crazy, so of course no one is going to buy an ad to run during the 2 weeks of the month they're not on sale. My boss never seemed to understand this. He thought we just weren't pushing hard enough. Sometimes we'd have 2-3 special sections a month, and my boss would make these horribly designed fliers for “business builders” that still no one wanted because it's NEWSPAPER ADS IN 2023.
Every newspaper had a website you could sell ads for too but the websites were hardly ever updated. Even when I quit in April our most recent obituaries were from November. The two editors were openly careless and disregarded people that came to see them with stories or events they wanted to run, and yet, every week the newspapers were filled with stories from towns sometimes an hour or two away from the town the paper's for because they “just didn't have enough stories.” The editor wouldn't meet anyone, even chamber of commerce reps, and we had one reporter getting paid less than me going to 9 different cities and writing. Our editor only ever wrote opinion pieces lol
This was mostly fine with me at the time because I just really needed a job. Like most, but like, jesus I needed to work and at a little over $11 an hour it was paying good, but I also worked at Ulta in 2021 and they paid me more.
I realized I had to quit fairly early on. My boss was only ever encouraging to a coworker that had jurisdiction over an entire county and another that had inherited clients after the woman before him quit after 33 years. According to my coworker she told the bosses that she “prays for the next person who has to shovel shit for you two assholes.” Pretty much everyone who quit cussed them out after lmao
My boss would come to me the first week of every month and be like “you're not selling enough :/ why” as if I was supposed to be miss supersale. This started because in my second month, HE gave me the wrong list of clients. I made a $3,000 sale. But when we recognized it wasn't in my “territory” the sale went to the coworker with jurisdiction over an entire county. I drove an hour and back for meetings, met with them several times, sat down and did complex math with my boss that if I closed my eyes I would assume is the smoking section of an old restaurant; became friends with the people. We were always told to sell into other papers, but because this coworker had already worked with the people MONTHS before (they never mentioned her) she got the sale. She did none of the work and the sale I made was over double what she initially had them at.
If you didn't start out way over your goal, he'd usually meet with everyone, but it was more often with me. I wasn't the only new person either. We had about 11 people quit before I came on, all from different departments. That number is now 17 if you count me, one of those being a woman who was hired a week after me and quit a week after me too (we worked in different cities, I barely knew her.)
My boss started meeting with me almost every week on the worst day possible: the day we make the most visits because the paper is out. He wants to meet at 9 am for 2 hours to “talk about my progress.” This news is given to me by him slamming his hand on a table and yelling at me. Mind you, I didn't do anything but not sale over 70%. Every month I was there I was selling right at my 70% by some miracle. He started off this same meeting by immediately coming into my office and saying that I'm “mean and condescending” because I sent an email with wording he “didn't like” (it was grammatically correct English about how we were promised a business directory that was already a month late getting to us, even though, like I said, he came every damn week.) He told me I need to take my therapy appointments less often (they are once a month or two over telehealth for 30 minutes, during lunch [but because the job is so easy you should be working then too!!]), and after all this, gives me a huge packet of health insurance forms that I had already done my first week there, tells me to fill them out again, and says, “I should've given this to you weeks ago. It'll take about a month to process.” I had already waited 90 days to get it.
Another kicker: I was in an car accident about a year ago now. I'm fine, but my car is fucked up, already old, and it's truly a blessing that I can still drive it just fine despite pouring money into it and not being able to afford a car atm. I don't know why but I told my boss this, and ever since, he had been asking me if I got a car, asking if I had family or friends' cars to borrow for work, and saying I needed to “get to it!” in terms of buying one. I thought about it today and I definitely put about 2500 miles on my car just from that job. We did get paid ~$1 per mile and $30/m for a phone bill.
This is so long I'll be surprised if anyone reads it. Like I said it's been months and honestly there's probably stuff I'm forgetting.
I would truly rather have my mental health than be there even though I still really need a job and it's been hell finding one for whatever reason. And after reading all this back, maybe I didn't overreact, but are all jobs like this, especially right now when I'm only a year out of college? Was I supposed to be good at math to not absolutely hate my career?