Pros
Pay, hours, advancement potential, uniform allowance, employee discount on storage
Cons
99% of store positions are assistant manager or manager. You'll be told these aren't sales jobs, but they are, with the added benefit of janitorial and collections calls. In the actual stores, expect to have to deal with homeless people attempting to live out of their units, having to clean up human waste when customers just poo or pee on the floor. Yes, human waste in addition to folks not cleaning up after their dogs if they bring them in when visiting the units. Depending on where you are working, this can happen rarely or often. Store need major repairs? Expect to field customer complaints for months while the bean counters try to justify or minimize the expense. When leasing to a customer, you're expected to NOT mention the periodic rent increases when signing a customer up unless they ask. If you don't mention it, you're more likely to get a sale. But then the customer calls back 4 months later angry when the first increase hits. Sure, point out to them then that it's in the contract and they should have read it closer, but at least you got the sale! Corporate does give you a few options to compromise on the rate at this point, but you're only allowed to do it so many times a month, and it's tracked and brought up in your yearly reviews, so you're discouraged from doing it. In general, before the pandemic it was a great job. Hours were regular, pay was good, great benefits, great coworkers on a local level and a supposedly good corporate culture. Then the pandemic hit and the deeper corporate culture began to show through. Yes, corporate took employee safety seriously, but got really, really callous on customer relations. Company initially suspended customer rate increases at start of pandemic, for about 6 months. Corporate bragged to the employees about what a great shape the company was in despite the pandemic. Then rate increases were reinstated, and rents often doubled at this point. The rationale was "to get the customers caught up to where the would have been" if increases hadn't been suspended. Keep in mind that nationally storage needs were at a premium at this point all across the industry. Basically, they jacked up prices just because they could. Why is this bad for you, the store-level employee or customer service rep? The company executives left it to the store crews and customer service reps to deal with the infuriated customers, basically told us to tell them we sympathized, but they were welcome to move out. This left a lot of customer feeling trapped since it's often a huge pain in the rear and/or expensive and the customers took it out on the staff. Corporate response: We understand and appreciate you dealing with it, but too bad, so sad. Customers trapped out of the country due to lockdown did not necessarily receive notice when autopay failed, or the subsequent legal notices of pending auction. Again, pissed off people who lost a lot of personal and valuable items with no recourse took it out on store staff and customer service reps. Yes, it's a business and people need to keep track of their own finances, it's not the company's job to do that for them, but this was an extremely unusual and international crisis. The company handled it very poorly, while bragging about taking care of customers by stopping rate increases for 6 months.