I read the negative reviews year, but took the job anyway, don't make the same mistake!
Pros
If you’re out of work, you can get hired here, and for at least 90 days you’ll make money. Can you set your own schedule? Maybe, maybe not. You’re expected to get a job done within a specified time frame, but you can be given jobs with little advance notice. And paid for travel? Yes, BUT - the company bases the mileage and drive time on Google Maps. You spend an extra half hour on the road because of an accident, weather, or normal Friday afternoon traffic? Google Maps isn’t accurate and your round trip is actually 10 miles longer? The company makes it needlessly complex to get the correct pay in those circumstances.
Cons
Too much non-scanning time required that isn’t paid, and it’s not easy to get the 800+ scans per hour that are required to put you in a pay scale higher than minimum wage after 90 days. The Data Collector position has a huge turnover, and that seems OK with the company. They do not provide much in the way of training, support, or incentive, and the district managers are too busy trying to hire new people in to be of much help. The initial pay for 90 days is acceptable for part time work, but the potential the company presents to earn $15 at piece rate is VERY questionable. While some might eventually reach the speed to earn that much during scanning, you still need to factor in all the non-productive downtime. You have to stop and get out of the way of customers, plus you can then lose your place and end up rescanning items. You’ll consistently be asked by customers where they can find this or that in the store. When you have to enter dual prices for items on sale, it really cuts into your speed. Waiting for the scanner to reboot when it has one of its frequent lockups costs you time, and therefore money. Plus, there is additional time you’ll need to put in at home with uploading scans, downloading jobs, logging in to the field portal to see if your reports transmitted, sending, reading, and answering emails – and lots of the emails will be urgent requests to take on extra jobs that are not being done because Data Collectors often do not stay long - leaving jobs incomplete or not even started and already late. And in my opinion, the Retail Data software in running in the scanning equipment could be far more efficient and helpful to the data collection process, but I doubt it's considered worthwhile to the company to support Data Collectors by investing money in improving the software I was a Data Collector for less than 6 months, but now I firmly believe the positive reviews on Glass Door for this company were biased by Retail Data.
