The following is not so much of a rant as it is a public service message to my friends here at Seibertron who live in Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio. It is in regards to a company known as ABC Warehouse. If you are looking for a job OR looking for new appliances and/or electronics, this is stuff that you really need to know! It is not an attempt to funnel business to my current place of employment, and so to play it cool, I will simply refer to where I work now as "the other store".
To begin, let me give you a little background on my sad tale.
I worked at the "other" store for 16 years selling major home appliances. During that time I enjoyed enough success to fund my toy addiction, finance a few cars, and finally buy a home for my wife and I. When 911 hit and the economy started to crumble, several corporate changes occurred that drove down the income of my department, taking me from comfortable to desperate in six short years. Firstly, my department was sectioned off into separate entities, whereby stoves and dishwashers stood alone, fridges stood alone, and washers/dryers did the same. Despite having experience in everything, people could only sell in those individual areas anymore. Floor flooding occurred, and by 2006, there were 13 of us commission-only sales people crammed into stoves and dishwashers, fighting over the few customers who happened to wander in from the mall!
My pay was half of what it was, and so on the advice of someone who I trusted to know what hey were talking about, I reluctantly left the "other" company and applied at ABC Warehouse, an independent appliance and electronics store native to Michigan. The store manager gave me the old "visit exotic ports and have your own condo" hype that one would hear at an army recruiter, and by the end of the interview I was like, WOW! He spoke of how you can sell anything in the whole store, rather than being restricted to one department, and how their lowest guy was taking home $500.00 a week. I was ready for a change, any change, so I gave my two weeks and explained in a very apologetic manner to my store manager why I had to make this move.
That said, here is what you should all know before you apply for employment or buy from there:
I started on the "Majors" floor, selling TVs and appliances mainly because of my 16 yrs experience. Otherwise I would have started in "Home Audio" or "Car Audio" where most applicants die within the first week. First, as with the "other" company, ABC is commission only. There is an hourly "draw", which means that if you do not make a certain dollar per hour at the end of the week, they front you the money, then take it back the moment you manage to make any commission the next week. Now one can build up a LOT of draw working 12 hours a day (yes, 12!), 5 days a week, so much that it is nearly impossible to stay ahead of it (and they keep raising it, I think it's $11 now). In fact they run purges every few months where they hunt down and fire anyone who has built up a certain amount of draw. And their are a lot of them.
Secondly, they have a fancy way of determining commissions. Every appliance and TV has a "sticker" price right on it. Your typical ABC customer, however, knows that you have the ability to "wheel and deal". You go to the computer and look at what "cost" (which is an inflated cost-the owner has it padded up at LEAST 10%) is and what sticker is, and the amount in between the two is the margin. You get a paltry 25% of that margin, known as profit.
Typically, by the time the customer beats you into the ground, you will likely have very little left for your commission. Giving the customer 0% financing comes off of YOUR commission, not the company's take, and so 12 months same as cash at 12% of the margin could DESTROY your whole stake in the deal leaving you with nothing. Each piece has a different margin depending on what kind of deal Gordy (the owner) got on the merchandise, and the margin on products change almost daily, making it hard to know what to take a customer to on any given day. You could spend 3 hours selling $5000.00 worth of stuff and still end up with $25.00 or so for all your trouble. Many items (mostly around the Holidays), such as TVs carry often substantial spiffs, but also require that you do not go below a "minimum sell". If you can't trick your customer into staying at that price, you get NADA! Also, only about half of the items in the store are actually IN stock, which makes it a nightmare to know where to go. This also changes like the wind.
I asked the district manager about this once and he said " well, son, its like this. Most of what you see here is just smoke and mirrors to make our selection seem impressive to the customers. It's your job to SWITCH them onto items that you know are in stock and that have the highest margin."
So much for determining and satisfying a customer's needs!
The greatest brand since sliced bread changed from week to week based on profit and stock! It made me physically ill to lie to customers like that, so I wasn't successful like the slimy high rollers that brought home thousands. Hell, I barely made $300.00 a week. And forget an extra job or schooling. They put you on a fixed rotational schedule that makes it impossible. And it is not up for discussion.
They teach you to inflate the cost of installation, where say the contractor only charges $80.00 for a dishwasher install, and you get to tell the customer any price you want. The installer then comes in and pays you cash under the table for the difference. "Hey Joe, I paid $150 and got this installed professionally!" "What, Frank? I paid them $125 to do the same thing! You got ripped!"
The "UP" system was a real treat too, whereby you put your name on a list with the other sales guys and when your turn came you stood up by the door (freezing yer arse off in winter) waiting. And waiting. And waiting till someone meandered in only to tell you that he's just killing time till his wife is finished shopping at Kohl's, or stiff-arms you like you're a plague victim and tells you they don't want any help, not telling you what department they want so you at least know if you're off the up list or not. Either way, it invariably ended up with you writing your name at the bottom of the list again.
You are REQUIRED to T.O. (turn over) a customer that is going to walk, whereby you excuse yourself, grab one of your buddies who is low on the list, and return with him, telling the customer that he's your manager and that he might be able to give them a better deal. If your buddy manages to close the deal, you both get to split the remaining tiny bit of profit that's left. Yayyyy!
The managers say "take every deal even if its a short one, and if they're still walking, BURN EM'!". Burning is the practice of telling the walking customer that you "might" be able to save them such and such amount of money when the manager comes in (the manager is likely sitting right there at his desk). The amount is unrealistic and there is no intention of giving such a deal, yet it is supposed to poison a customers psychology while they are shopping elsewhere so that they are more inclined to return, upon which the customer is told that the "manager" could not give them that much off, but will give them some fractional amount off instead. By that time the customer is tired of looking around and relents. Nice, huh?
Every quarter is INVENTORY time, where on a Saturday where you normally go home at 5:30, you instead stay for 5 or 6 hours doing their inventory for NO PAY! Yes, you heard right. You still stay on the clock building up more draw, though, with NO way to offset it. Training meetings, such as they are, are mandatory, and are miles away at the Pontiac headquarters. Once again, NO PAY for your time, and no mileage compensation. Five hours LOST. And I'm not even going to go into the slop they serve at "lunch" during the meetings, where instead of using the money Whirlpool or Samsung gives them for our meal, Gordy pockets the cash and has some employee in the warehouse who happens to also be a caterer bring in a few platters of greasy garbage.
The day after Thanksgiving there gives "black friday" new meaning as it marks the start of the new schedule which works you the customary 12 hours a day, but with the lovely addition of it being 6 DAYS A WEEK until the first week in January. Upper management goes on about how "you make half of your whole years pay during this time". Now if the whole year's pay is CRAP, well, you see where I'm going. Black Friday itself is nightmarish and may even be beyond this poor writer's ability to describe accurately. Picture all the Japanese citizens running and screaming from Godzilla...yeah, I know Y'All-Mart had a trampling or two, but this is just plain obnoxious as people pull you this way and that for advertised TVs that have NOOOOO money in them and were only offered in limited quantities at those prices just to get the people in the store. You ring and ring and ring all day, only to find at the end that you only ended up with a paltry $50 bucks or so for a 16 hour day. You see, cost went up that day, and prices went down, so less margin to get 25% of! Gordy wins, employees don't, well except for managers who get a regular salary, commission, and a quarterly bonus for achieving sales goals.
Management is hired from within, and tends to be of the nefarious nature with questionable or colorful backgrounds. They remind me of mob lieutenents in the way they act and treat employees. Our district manager, for example, would ignore you entirely if you weren't one of the high rollers, and would even walk away from you when you were in the middle of a sentence. They also enjoyed privately bashing employees as well as customers and giggling about it when they THOUGHT nobody was listening.
If you have customer issues, or "grief" as they call it, you can forget about ANY support from management. It is all dumped on you, even the stuff beyond your control. Every single process in the company except for counting the money and physically delivering the merchandise is in your lap. YOU have to babysit your merchandise to make sure another store doesn't sell it before delivery, as well as safeguard every other step until it delivers, and YOU DON'T GET PAID UNTIL IT DELIVERS! It is not a team atmosphere, but every man for himself, as the managers are only sporadically available because they are allowed to sell too. The customer ultimately suffers, as getting a problem solved like a damaged appliance usually results in long waits, battles with the incompetent cut-rate service contractors ("so called factory authorized), or screaming fights right in the store between your customer and the manager with you in the middle (the manager then later bitches at you for bringing HIM into it!). Forget bringing in your tv or mp3 player for service...I can remember several times where the company LOST the customer's items, then fought with them about it for months! This even happened to employees!
The stores are filthy and not well maintained, where leaks in the roof, malfunctioning doors, and broken steps and masonry are not addressed until they become an issue with someone slipping or complaining to the police or city about it.
I wanted to go back to the "other" store after my second week there. My position was still open, my record was clean, and my benefits would have still been in effect. As it was, the (at the time) Store manager at the "other" store took it personally that I left and called me disloyal, promptly banning me from employment there and fixing it so I was rejected at any other branch. I spent 3 years of hell at ABC trying to find another job in a smashed and shattered economy, watching the $100 G I'd built up over 16 years in a 401k at the "other" company dwindle to nothing. I had to use it to pay bills and house payment cause $175 to $300 a week before taxes just wasn't doing it. I was depressed most of the time and started smoking again. I started taking anti-depressants, but fortunately, my wife put a stop to that. The only benefit I had at ABC was Blue Cross, which they make a HUGE deal about, but its the cheapest, crappiest form of Blue Cross they could get, and the rates rise exponentially every few months, it seems.
My "novel" here has a happy ending, though. The store manager at the "other" company was fired for being an idiot, and he was replaced by a really great guy. My old department lost 3 full timers to retirement, so I reapplied. My old team members couldn't say enough good things about me, which helped the new (also) department manager (another great dude!) make the decision to hire me. Our department is an open floor now and I can sell everything. I'm slowly but surely working my way back to full time status with medical, and It feels great to be back, making enough money to pay my bills for a FRACTION of the hours. I've learned a lot from this horrifying experience and at least feel that I have become a better, more sincere and open salesman from it. I have been back since the middle of April. My wife and I have gone from barely seeing each other to being able to hang out all the time and we can actually afford to go on dates to the movies and dinner now.
In closing, if you live in Michigan and were considering working for or purchasing something From ABC Warehouse, take it from someone who was trapped in the thick of it for three long years---DONT!!!! It's like Y'All-Mart with the high price of low cost.
If you don't live here or never heard of that company, I hope that you at least found this entertaining or interesting, as one always takes a chance of losing the reader when posts are long like this!
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