I remember studying one of those. Can't remember the company off the top of my head, some retail electronics outfit. They sacked all their senior sales people on the floor to save money and ended up going out of business because people could find anybody to help them adequately when they were in the store with money.

I was just a high school kid stocking shelves, but knew as much or more about the computers as the fulltime commissioned sales people. I was constantly getting paged to assist a salesperson.

I would do all the work, explaining the product and helping the customer make a decision, and then the salesperson, would say "Thanks, I'll take it from here."

Also, their theft control was atrocious. The cameras were not on, the guy checking receipts at the door barely looked, and people just walked about with expensive stuff all the time.

Wasn't surprised when they folded.

I don't know if the industry as a whole has changed, or if the place the author worked is far on the bad end of the spectrum.

I spent most of my time watching TV in electronics, sometimes even took naps in the back. That company was destined for doom.

I'm not going to get into any long RS stories but in terms of sales averages, it went roughly like this as far as I can recall: Actual hourly wage was around the state minimum but you could make commissions and "SPIFF" bonuses for selling things like cell phone contracts (since they got a cut of those). The cell phone thing was straightforward - sell a phone contract, get a flat amount added to your paycheck.

But the commission thing was awful and things were set up so that it was incredibly difficult to get commission. You had to sell not only a certain amount, but rather your average for each day of a pay period had to be at a certain level in order to even qualify for commission. If you were unable to hit those goals every day, you got no commission, even if one of those days you sold thousands of dollars worth of merchandise.

So they would make sure to give everyone at least one or two short shifts a week or shifts during crappy hours so that it was nearly impossible to make commission. Combine this with the sales meetings you had to attend out of town every (month? can't remember) it was almost like you were losing money by working there.

Thankfully I found some other crap job that at least paid better and in time, I moved on to better things but man...that place was awful.

That they declared bankruptcy this year has been a tasty bit of schadenfreude.

My wife has talked about enjoying the merchandising aspect of her early jobs for a bakery and winery.

We were told stories of a sales associate that managed to make about $80k a year. He managed this by getting customers a RS credit card and loading up the customers' shopping cart full of stuff. He did this by telling the customers that their monthly/weekly credit card payments would be $X, which might seem like a reasonable amount to the unwise. The funny thing is, that guy's store wasn't even profitable (well, from what I heard).

Anyways, by the time I worked there, RS had transitioned to being a cell phone retailer more than anything else. I think I've been in a store maybe twice in the last 11 years.

You would not have anything to show for three years of that beyond a series of paystubs, but every day you would have seen the fruits of your work.

Laboring for years on something that ends up trashed and under corporate NDAs, with nothing to show beyond a series of paystubs, is different from that. Most of my friends who work for corporations have felt this at least once in their career, to be honest. It generally pays better than the retail job, at least.