GC is an extremely stressful and competitive environment for too little remuneration outside of the holiday season.
Pros
The best reason to work at GC is for the employee discounts and/or the medical benefits offered. The store managers at my location were in general positive and supportive. GC employment is also a great way for musicians offering private lessons to meet potential clients.
Cons
The commission structure is confusing and not always represented honestly before you start your training. You get minimum wage for the hours you work during any given month. The following month, you get a commission check based on a percentage of profit and a smaller percentage of total sales. This commission check not just a total of these percentages; it is a total of these minus the hourly you received the following month. So one is really only working for minimum wage unless you sell enough to make over minimum. I think I was in my second day of training before I fully understood this structure. Outside of the holiday season, the take home pay is not worth working there. Only the long-time sales people who have developed a client base and are grandfathered in at a higher percentage of total sales can make good money. The sales environment is very competitive on a unregulated sales floor. Sales associates often undercut other employees to get sales and are not always honest. The unregulated environment creates an experience that often works against customer service. For example, any sales person can greet as many customers as they want and spend a little time with each to claim them as their own. This is referred to as scooping. Another sales associate who may be working with customers in a more remote area of the store like the acoustic room may not be able scoop as many customers. When you are finished with your costumers, there is no incentive to help another associate who may be dividing time between four or more customers. As a result, customers often wait around for one employee who has scooped them while other employees are free. There is also no incentive to help customers with returns. Go into a GC one busy day and watch the sales staff avoid customers who have returns. While GC has great prices on big ticket gear, sales people make a lot of money on the extended coverage and add-ons, often not so much on the profit from big ticket items. You have to be very pushy about the extended coverage and add-ons to make good money from a sale. The computer system they use, 'Green Screen,' is a confusing dinosaur. The credit card machines often fail-- these two things can slow down a sale while you are trying to help a multitude of costumers on the floor. Management outside of the store level staff seems have little concern for giving their sales staff the tools to make sales quickly. Broken credit card machines take weeks to replace. The is a Kafkaesque process for taking cash which requires sales people to put cash from customers in their pocket and later turn it into a manager-- as if my pocket is more safe than the cash register. To get change to a costumer, you have to take it out of a till sometimes on the other side of the store. This also takes too much of a customer's time.
