While pay is decent, many new hires are offered more or the same as employees who have been there for years are making. Upping what you offer new hires is great but give your loyal employees compensation. People aren't supposed to talk about their salaries, but they do and finding out that a new hire is making that took you years to work up to is frustrating and leads to resentment.
Annual raises are not good. You're evaluated in the spring and don't receive your raise until the fall. The determinations used on how much to give are designed to allow the company to give you very little compensation.
Over time is very rarely allowed. You might have to drive 3 hours round trip to help another center out or attend a meeting but you're expected to cut hours elsewhere and then criticized if you didn't get everything done that week.
Upper management doesn't care about employee morale. There is never anything done for the employees except the annual Christmas party and you're expected to spend money traveling to it and buy presents or contribute. An exciting day is when you get to go out to do a marketing event and the company might allow you to dress casually.
Unrealistic expectations from DDOs and above
Work hours are not good if you want to have a life
High turnover because center employees are not respected
Expected to drop everything and travel to other centers to cover
Upper management doesn't follow Advance America's creed
They keep adding products that customers aren't interested in.
ETax STARTING at $79 is false advertising or I guess a more appropriate term would be Bait n Switch because no one's is ever $79. However, we were expected to obtain unrealistic amounts of returns and criticized when customers chose to go somewhere cheaper. Come on! They could do it online for free and upper management expected us to "persuade" them to do their taxes with us.
Company doesn't have TV commercials like Check Into Cash or Check N' Go. Instead we're giving a $50/month local store marketing budget and supposed to establish business partners and aggressively pursue them and repeatedly return to their business to harass them because the DDOs don't think the business partners are sending us enough business.
Shady operations. The Operations Manual or in recent changes, the PIQ, states one way of conducting business but RDOs and DDOs tell you something else.
DDOs are given too much leeway and can get away with unethical behavior as long as they are putting out good numbers.
They demand that you tell customers about dual loans with nearby Advance Americas. Often getting people in over their heads by over extending them and then giving them no options when they can't pay back an amount they couldn't afford in the first place.
Expects you to collect a certain amount of bad debt yet they won't give you the tools to do it. Internet access that could provide you with phone numbers or information is limited because the company won't allow access to anything but 411 (which is often incorrect or down) and their training site.
Upper management is condescending and out of touch with daily center operations and customer needs.
Training site is worthless. It spouts useless information and scenarios that don't pertain to real life and are virtually no help in training new employees. What little training during those 2 weeks an employee receives is not enough because a majority of the time is spent on the computer taking these test instead of learning practical information like how to actually wait on customers, do things on the computer, and daily operations of the center. This leads to a very high turnover rate.
Encouraged to take part in The Community a company moderated forum to exchange ideas. However, if someone posts anything (not talking about insults, cursing, or inappropriate) that is not happy happy joy about the company, the thread is locked. The only thing they want posted is how great the company is not anything that might be a legitimate question or concern. Freedom of speech does not exist in Advance America unless you're upper management then you can say or do whatever you want.
