Where do I start?
1) Management
I was blessed with a better store manager and sales team at my location than I ever could have asked for. We were a quintessential team, had a great rapport with our customers, and most importantly we had fun. My district manager was very strict but mainly due to the stress put on by his superiors, otherwise was a very accessible and reasonable person as well.
That being said, these individuals were the only reason I lasted this long. The current CEO and other decision makers can kick rocks for several reasons. Sales goals are increasingly harder to attain and we as reps are rarely given the tools to meet them. There is a huge disconnect between the DM's/SL's/Reps and everyone above us. Most of them have never sold face to face with customers or are so far removed from being there that they are completely out of touch with our day to day challenges. The majority of our upper management wouldn't last 15 minutes in a store doing what we do everyday. Don't believe me look no further than our current CEO's history of failed business ventures. Want to rent a movie from Blockbuster? How about take a trip to Radio Shack for some electronic goods? Yea me neither..
2) Commissions & Compensation
A Wireless never got off to the best start with me. Within my first 2 months as an employee I took a total of three, count em, three pay cuts! Isn't that just wonderful? You can imagine how excited I was to be employed here as a new sales representative. For those of you that don't know, A Wireless employees make a certain amount of profit for the company on every phone that they sell. You are then, every two weeks, given a percentage of that profit as commission. Not only was the cut of profit I make for this company reduced numerous times, the logic behind it every time was "we pay you too much". Greed at its finest. It has now gotten to a point where the profit generated on every phone we sell is half of what it used to be, so its therefore twice as hard to make money as before. Having said this, you would think at the very least this fine company would allow us to continue to work overtime, as we always have. But alas, that has been taken away for reps as well, so there's literally no way to make up for the dollars we've lost, or even come close. Their pathetic way of making up for it was adding bonuses for NPS scores and conversion rate. Anyone that has worked with the NPS (net promoter score) system knows that its a scam that benefits everyone but the employees that deal directly with customers, seeing as it allows customers to dictate your pay regardless of the quality of service that you provide. Accessory goals are outrageous. The selection is horrible as it stands and the company refuses to set them at prices that are competitive with the corporate Verizon stores down the street, let alone anywhere else. A few months ago they opened up an "Endless Aisle" order system for accessories as justification for their ridiculous accessory goals. This system was designed to allow us to special order any accessory that we didn't have in store and thus allow for limitless selection. The first three items I ordered on Endless Aisle never went through. It is nowhere near close to being functional despite being up and running for months, and the selection is still terrible. Yet in spite of all this we have to sell customers about $100 worth of accessories AT MINIMUM per phone and tablet that goes out. The company is so cheap reps need manager overrides to even discount accessories one cent, even though the majority of our customers are entitled by Verizon to 25% accessory discounts.
3) Work Environment
The company initiatives change constantly and on a whim with seemingly no direct correlation or sensible reason at all. One day tablets are an afterthought, the next your job security is being threatened over how many you can sell. Never mind that we don't make any money on them as it is. At one point I was required to enroll customers in three different forms of device insurance over the course of a month because the company couldn't make up its mind which one they wanted us to sell. The sales pitches have to constantly change and you're often forced to tell flat out lies to customers to meet petty short term goals. I've always found a way to roll with the punches but it gets increasingly more difficult each time. At any given moment there's about 30 different things you can seemingly be written up for, regardless of your tenure or track record. Unless your district manager believes in it, there is rarely any praise for your successes (outside of NPS scores), but you can count on an email or a phone call the minute that you slip up. On the biggest sales days of the year you can count on something to go wrong. In 2014 on iPhone 6 launch day we were sent a whopping total of 8 iPhones. Took two months before we had a consistent stream of iPhone 6 inventory. Black Friday 2015 our order system crashed for 4-5 hours in the middle of the afternoon. These are the kind of days in retail that you can't recover from.
4) Opportunity for Advancement
You can count on a limited amount of opportunities to move up to Store Manager/Sales Leader as a rep, however you are encouraged to apply for positions that are not the best fit for you; and if you do not, your name is soiled amongst the ranks of the district managers looking to potentially hire you. I was asked to apply for an assistant manager role that would have been double the work for similar pay, and a store manager position that was a 90 minute drive from my home, to which I declined politely for obvious reasons. Later on when store manager openings came up that I was qualified and willing to apply for, the positions were filled without any kind of formal interview process that you would expect. There is a complete lack of communication, consistency, and professionalism in the way promotions are handled.
Overall, this company went down the gutter when it was merged with Z Wireless. Former CEO Rich Balot at least gave you some sense that he was trying to provide the best work environment possible, the clowns he sold it to only care about generating a profit for the company as a whole. They have resorted to a compensation structure that pits the interests of sales reps and managers against each other, thus creating an environment where it is near impossible for anyone to maximize their commissions; but its all good for them because its just less money that they have to pay us right? Combine that with the fact that Verizon as a company has completely eliminated discounts on phones with their Device Payment upgrades, thus making it to where no one is in a rush to buy new phones unless absolutely needed, and you have a system that is designed for us to fail.
