A dead end job. - Relief Manager Public Storage Employee Review

Hooo boy. First off, the company used to be better. Go back 5 or 6 years and the bonuses and PTO payouts were MUCH better. Old time employees who'd been there a decade or more told stories of how there used to be company parties and trips to baseball games. No more. Over time, the company has shed practically every benefit. Bonuses used to be a major perk every quarter. Now they're a joke. Not even everyone gets one, and those who do generally get the lowest tier. Since it's based on DM preference rather than your numbers, if the DM doesn't like you, you aren't getting a bonus. PTO benefits have also been cut, and health costs have risen. All the while they ask more and more of the property level staff while telling them about how the company is puking money. It's great coming home to your little apartment broke, tired, and dirty knowing that you just made your company thousands of dollars that you'll never see. The job is a thankless, dirty one. You will usually work alone. This means you have to close the office to do anything outside (and you will be doing things outside), which will generally lead to angry customers. I was cursed out on several occasions by people who had to wait for me to return from a bank run or lunch. Speaking of lunch, many properties don't have break rooms. Since we wear uniforms, eating in your car is out (unless you like people knocking on your window!), so you have to eat in the office with people trying to peer through the door at you. I often ate sitting on the floor or in the bathroom to avoid this, as if customers catch sight of you, they'll start banging on the door. One of my coworkers actually got in trouble for ignoring a customer while on his state-mandated lunch break because the customer saw him and called customer service to complain. Explain that! There's no security. I dealt with transients, people with mental problems, and tweakers. As a rather petite woman, I was afraid to do lock checks on dark evenings, and I have no idea how people in the northern parts of the country do this job during the winter because of how early it gets dark. The properties are poorly lit so there are ample opportunities for something bad to happen. I carried mace. The properties are falling apart because the DMs aren't given money to order repairs. Doors were broken and difficult to open, parking lots were pitted, there were plumbing issues (three times this resulted in us having no bathroom), lighting issues, tripping hazards... You name it. We had elevators break, doors to buildings break... It was just unsafe. The equipment we're given are not designed for the heavy amount of work we do (sweeping out a 10x30 space with an office broom is awful). Most properties in my district had their golf carts taken away because the properties were "too small". I was often logging 3 miles plus on my pedometer, so I have no idea where they got this idea. Customers would show up in the rain and then complain that they had to walk to the space they wanted to rent. I had customers whine about having to walk in the heat of summer too. Good luck if you get someone who has a hurt leg or is old. We're not supposed to use our cars (though I often did). Customers are slobs and will leave cigarette butts and discarded furniture everywhere. I have dragged more dirty, gross mattresses to the dumpster than I care to remember. You will also come in contact with animal and human urine and feces. "Pee bottles" are a common occurrence. Without a golf cart, you'll be walking around with a garbage bag and broom during your lock check. If you find an empty space, congratulations! You get to trek back to the company space to get your kit to clean it. The company only wants you out of the office for 15 minutes at a time, by the way, so have fun doing this on days when you're alone. What ended up happening was that a lot of us just stopped cleaning the spaces on weekdays. If I had to rent it, I'd offer to clean it for the customer, but we generally would clean on Saturdays, when we had double coverage (if we were lucky enough to get it) Customers did the stupidest things, and then would get angry at you for it. They would move out without telling you and leave their lock on their space, expecting us to magically know they're done. They'd dump garbage and food on the property. They'd break into the restroom after hours and make a mess. Then they would complain about the property looking messy. They'll show up to rent a space with 5 minutes until the end of the day after you called them a hundred times throughout the day to schedule them an appointment. They'd wait until the last second to pay their bill and then would get mad at us if we were out to lunch or at the bank. Field staff have loads of metrics they're supposed to meet, as I hinted at above. Most are now clustered around sales of overpriced merchandise. Meeting them can be very easy or very hard depending on what property you're at and how busy you are. Slow property in a good area? Piece of cake. Busy property in the ghetto? Good luck. The company thinks that every property is the same regardless of location or clientele, so expect no sympathy from your bosses. You also have to sell locks and insurance, and both are overpriced. The locks are cheap Chinese steel with keys that often get stuck. We would open all of the locks up when we received them and test the keys just to make sure the locks weren't broken. The insurance is absolute junk. It barely covers anything and the limitations are ridiculous (if someone breaks into your space and steals your lock, guess what? Your insurance won't cover it because the lock is missing.) The worst thing in the world that can happen to you is getting stuck with a "dud", a person who wants to just move in and brings their own lock and refuses insurance or merchandise. Since there are no incentives for actually renting units, these people count against you. It pits you against your customer and makes you get angry with people just for being money smart. Left a bad taste in my mouth. GOOGLE REVIEWS. First it was 1 a month, then 2, then 4. They will harass you to no end if you don't meet your quotas. This especially sucks if you work multiple properties. You may work hard to meet the quota at one property just to rotate into one that has 0 reviews the next day. Guess what? You're going to get accusatory emails asking why you aren't doing your job right. Oh, AND you get to do calls! You will be on the phone almost as much as you're outside. You have prorate calls, auction calls, collection calls, confirmation calls, follow up calls... So many calls. Depending on your property, you may be doing 100+ calls a week. It's mind numbing, incredibly boring work, and you'll get sick of talking to the same people week after week. If you end up with lots of people who can't pay? That's your fault. One of our scripts for delinquency literally had us suggesting they borrow money from a friend or family member to pay their storage bill. You can guess how most people reacted to that. Since the job is miserable and pays near minimum wage, a lot of people don't actually do their jobs. Since the temptation to be lazy is strong, if you're not lazy you're going to be picking up the slack. Think that all sounds bad? Well, you get to do all of the above with scripts. That's right, PS has written scripts for practically every interaction you have with a customer. You'll rarely use them with real customers (oftentimes the customer would derail the script within two lines. It's hard to stick to a script when the other party isn't), but you'd better know them because the DMs will quiz you. This can happen at any time. They show up monthly to tour the property, but you can also get called out on conference calls. PLUS, they send out secret shoppers. Don't screw up a script on a secret shop, or you can be written up. This whole situation makes the job much more stressful than it needs to be. We on the ground knew how to do our jobs, but the company insisted we do it THEIR way, which was nearly impossible for some people. My numbers went down when using the scripts. Having a system that works that you're afraid to use makes the job nervewracking. The icing on the cake is that there's no room to advance. They don't hire from within, even if you have a degree. They also won't allow you to list your DM as a reference on a job application, and if you do, you will immediately have a target on your back. The moment PS knows you want out, they'll try to hack you off like a diseased limb. It is the literal definition of a dead end job.