Not Great - Sales Representative Guitar Center Employee Review

-High employee turnover -Employees underpaid, even sales people that do well only earn 3% of commission max and an employee usually needs to sell a plus of $70,000 a month to make it into the highest commission tier -Very rarely do the sales people with good numbers make it into management -Company sometimes hire's employees with little to no musical background; history has shown that some of these people even make it into management; this slows down the whole team -Company policies are EXTREMELY arbitrary; rules depend on whoever is in charge at a given time or in what store one works -Company policies/ store policies (they are all arbitrary so it is always difficult to tell wether or not what you are doing is a company policy or just some store policy) often anger customers to the point in which they walk out and take their business elsewhere -Equipment in stores is always getting destroyed because either the corporation fails to update computer software, send new demo products to stores to replace old, non-functional ones, or the employees are constantly unplugging stuff to take cables off of certain products to demo other products for customers, leaving displays non-functional afterwards -Not enough demo cables to do every day tasks in a music store and the company penalizes stores from using store stock cables leaving employees with no way to demo gear -Company has allowed significant others (boyfriend and girlfriend) to make it into sales lead positions in the same store while punishing/ firing others for simply flirting on the job (this may not be the corporations fault, as much as it is the corporation allowing the wrong people to be put in management positions and then allowing this to happen) -Frequently scheduled for 10+ hour days with only an hour for lunch -Lunch breaks have been getting cut down to 30 minutes for employees on some days, leaving barely enough time to make it through the local lunch line -Company pays the people who sell 50%+ ProCoverage and a ton of credit card apps the same hourly pay as they pay people who can barely sell it at all -Company puts in no initiative to weed out bad employees who are not working as part of a team but are only there to pawn off the non-commission work to other employees while they take all the sales -Company never allows use of common sense in place of policy violation; company would prefer to anger customers before breaking policies which are arbitrary anyway (i.e. not allowing a person whom the employees in the store recognize and have seen before to pick up a package they ordered through one of the employees because the person may have forgotten his/her I.D. (for example)) - Company employs "sales leads" as people who do not work on commission to walk around and sell stuff with a bunch of sales people who do make commission; these "sales leads" have the power to discount items when the other sales reps do not; they are also held to a sales quota just as a standard sales rep -Company employs a separate sales force known as "GC Pro" that is authorized to do way larger discounts than all of the other commission based associates; the company will often lure employees to turn over their sales leads to GC Pro for a very small spiff ($25) on their paycheck; once these customers are turned over to GC Pro, they very rarely come back to deal with the standard sales associates as they cannot give as big of discounts and the company sees no ethical issue with this; they also do not tell the sales associates that GC Pro can do much larger discounts and certainly do not tell them that their customers probably will not be coming back to work with them once they've been turned over to GC Pro -Sales reps at the call center (even new employees) can do way bigger discounts than in store employees (sometimes even in store managers) and often steal deals from store associates when a customer calls in and says that cannot be given a discount in store; often it is not even the sales reps fault a discount cannot be given as a manager doesn't allow it, but then the customer will be given a discount through the call center and buy it, even if they had spent hours being helped by the sales associate in store who will now make no commission on the sale; the company does nothing to stop this, or give the in store associates the same discount authorizations to level the playing field -Employees are often stuck at work late after hours to do frivolous tasks like tuck price tags behind the strings of the guitars, even though the sales reps commission pay rate is based on sales per hour; no sales can be made after hours and a sales associate must maintain an average sales per hour of at least $450 just to stay in the 3% commission tier -Sales reps cannot do anything without the approval of a supervisor; a supervisor is even required to unlock a dynamic microphone at the $100 price point which makes everything move unnecessarily slow -Even good decisions made at the higher corporate level are sometimes fought by and not carried out by the lower level store managers to its fullest extent (I,e, they recently gave lots of sales reps who have sold millions of dollars for the company higher computer authorizations so that managers would not be needed to assist the more experienced employees as much, but a lot of lower level managers try to fight it and not allow their reps to use them -Even the really good in store sales reps that have these higher computer authorizations still do not have the ability to discount items at all without a manager, putting even their more experienced sales reps in a position where they are not at a level playing field with someone who may have just started working for the company at the call center -Whenever an employee transfers to another store, it is like working for an entirely new company