Unpleasant Experience from Start to Finish - Anonymous employee Living Spaces Employee Review

They say it's a non commission sales environment but you do have sale targets. You need to make your goal if you want to keep your job and surpass it regularly if you want a promotion. In practice, it leads to a very cut throat competitive and hypocritical workplace. You'll have management and leads tell you its best to turn your ticket over to somebody else from another department once a guest is done shopping in yours so the guest always has an "expert" by their side but no one ever does this. You'll have leads and other coworkers happily make sales in your area but if you ever engage someone in theirs they'll complain like children. The management turns a blind eye to this. While you do have the pressure of a commission sales environment, you get almost none of the reward. There's a bonus system, but it's communal. No matter how you do, every sales person gets the same bonus. Depending on how the store does that month, it varies between a dollar to three dollars for every hour you worked. Just for comparison, their weekend sales targets are 6k to 9k per person per day. You'll have coworkers that steal your sales. You can dedicate a lot of time and effort on helping some guests and if you step away for just a little, you'll have a coworker swoop in and say "Oh, we're non commission. Let me write that up for you." and just like that, you wasted two hours. The management (and to a certain extent the operations people) play favorites. It doesn't matter if you buy into their whole corporate message and are a team player or any of that. If you don't suck up, you won't go anywhere. They also pressure you constantly on the radio, especially when the store is having a slow day, to "close the sale," which is their lingo for passive aggressively pressuring a guest into purchasing that day. When a guest doesn't want to purchase that day, the management assumes it's because you did something wrong. On a particularly slow day, a coworker announced on the radio his guest didn't plan on purchasing that day. A lead then called out on the radio and said he was gonna make the sale. Minutes later, he came back on and said the guest would not be purchasing that day. Then, the sales manager for that shift announced he would close the sale properly and again minutes later he came on and let us know the guests would not be purchasing that day. Lastly, the whole atmosphere is really fake. You have to suck up a lot and make big sales every day if you want to work your way up. Because of the high turnover (I'd say 70 percent quit/are fired, the other 30 are promoted), there's a sort of perpetual vacuum in the lower/middle management that's filled from within. I list this as a con because it really brings out the worst in some of your coworkers. So to sum things up, it's very cut throat, most people there are very hypocritical, some of the sales techniques they encourage are unethical, the management is pushy and they play favorites, the compensation is poor relative to what they expect from you, and it brings out he worst of some of your coworkers. If you have the patience to put up with these things, you can make it to lead pretty easily. Anything past that is going to require you to take the low road with all the bottom feeders.