Very Toxic - Sales Associate Guitar Center Employee Review

This place is a scam to the customer and the employee. I've worked at several independent music shops and fortunately know how a real music shop works. This place is angled towards the beginner, both in product and service. Being pushed and punished to sell the Pro Coverage is what has brought them to rock bottom. 1 in 3 of our sales must have the Coverage; if we were below 32% for the month its an automatic write-up, of which you get 3 before termination. They scam their employees out of commission. There are 3 metrics they look at that will put one at the maximum commission rate: a paltry 3% (the other shop I was at it was automatic 5% every sale, starting the first day, every check). 1. If your Pro Coverage is above 32% for the month. 2. Retention - the amount of returned sales you have for the month. 3. Sales per hour. This last one is very important for Full-time people, like myself. Even though I was Full-Time I made less than someone Part-Time because my sales gross was larger for the month (being there more, you sell more, must sell more PC, etc.) it was divided by the 40 hours a week, 160 hours a month. And what they don't tell you when you're hired is you only get your commission on the last paycheck of the month and it takes 2 months to start receiving commission. To get the 3% rate you have to sell about $350/hr. Even though I sold $35,000 one month, divide that by 160 I was at about $218 /hr and under 32% PC because more sales means more rejections so a lower commission rate. While someone who only works 20 hours a week and sells a little over half of what I do they get a higher commission rate because less transactions means a better pitch to the customer on the Pro Coverage. Can't have the 3% without the 32% ProCo attachment. The Pro Coverage isn't a bad idea but I've seen customers get burned by Asurion, headphones was a big one, instead of replacing a broken pair they often would tell the customer to fulfill the claim with the Manufacture's warranty first, negating everything we tell them in the pitch. Some employees would guilt the customer into buying it (i.e. Well if it breaks we can't help you, you're all on your own, its a bad idea not to buy it, etc.). I've seen plenty of Grandmas and Grandpas pressured into buying the coverage because the employee essentially will say, "Your grandson/granddaughter will break this in the next 2 years, buy the Coverage." To fulfill claims I've seen employees tell customers "If you break it they'll replace it but if there's one or 2 things not right with it, they'll fix it." Literally encouraging customers to destroy the item just to get a new one. Our Techs had to destroy some guitars, smashing them, just to fulfill the Pro Coverage claim. It was insane. It's like saying, one of the tuners broke on my headstock but I might as well break the guitar in half so I can get a new one. Some guys would clock out early to keep their sales per hour ratio higher than it should be. Because I was one of the few Full-time people I had lower sales per hour even though I was selling like crazy - lots of small sales, you could sell a >$1000 guitar once or twice week but its hard. I had instances where the Ops team would hand me a random case or bag to put the guitar in and I would say "That's not the case for this guitar, that's the wrong bag, etc." And the Ops team would say "Doesn't matter its what we have for it." Unless the customer was naive enough to finish the sale most of them rejected the sale because they know that's the incorrect case/bag for that nice $1000+ guitar. If a customer wanted to buy a guitar off the wall we had to find one in a box in the back first. Sometimes the customers would be OK with it but when they'd pull it out of the box, we'd have to tune it up and sell them on it again, which they would eventually say "I like the one I had first, from the wall." This is why they prey on beginners, the <$500 guitars, because they don't know what they're buying and they trust us to sell them something good. I remember one kid, sold him a Gibson, said he'd buy anything I told him to. Sold him the ProCo but was real with him on the other accessories (they always want us to push from most expensive to least, cables, tuners, etc.) There was so much stuff we had to push in a certain way I had several customers seem to get annoyed when they were just trying to buy a pack of strings and get out the door. The email sweepstakes are a scam too, our Managers forced us to ask every customer for their email for the sweepstakes so they could send them spam. Forced us everyday to sign someone up for a Gear Card - their finance program. It was sad really because it reminded me of Vegas - these people come to us with smiles, hoping for us to sell them dreams when really they're making us clean them out with snake oil. I unfortunately had a Manager that recognized I knew how to sell well and build a good relationship with the customer. He didn't like that. Didn't matter how much or what I sold, if it didn't have the Pro Coverage, wasn't on a Gear Card, didn't up sell a club card (String Club, Stick Club) I got a talking to. Don't get me started on the Used Gear program. Guitar Center has essentially become a Pawn Shop. Without Buy-Ins the business couldn't make it. Most other shops I worked at, they would only buy used gear if it was nice or appealed to them. GC will buy anything that works. It was a complete mess. We had overstocked inventories of used gear no one wanted and we had to sell to make room for new gear. The online orders for used gear are a joke. The pictures GC Ops posts online are terrible because they're given bad cameras to use in the first place. Sometimes the customer would email us for additional pictures which our Managers pawned off to us, making us use our phone data to upload pictures to our email account. I got to where I flat out refused to run up my personal data and said I'll only send the pics with the store camera from a store computer. The customer would get the additional pics but they would still be low quality. So people would call our store from across the country to buy some of our used gear, making us explain everything about the piece from every tiny scratch on it to how it plays, sounds, essentially transposing themselves into our place. Then after 20-30 minutes on the phone, time lost for other sales with customers in the store, they would say "Alright well I'll think about it, thanks." And then click. Even after offering to complete the sale for them, so we can get the commission numbers, they would rebuff us. We were never allowed to discuss commission but people would be completely oblivious to it. GC feeds off this ignorance. The most insulting thing my Managers would tell us is: "This stuff sells itself, the only thing you have to sell is Pro Coverage." A statement like this is very demoralizing for to a Salesperson. The used gear thing, GC pitches, is that if you trade in your used gear for a new piece, they take an additional 10% off the item you want, given it isn't on sale already. Makes sense right? For GC it does, for the staff it burdens them with unwanted gear that will live in the store for years to come, slowing down other sales. Thankfully they would price the used stuff relatively low so some of it would move quickly but not everything, I'd say about half. I didn't mind it at first but some days literally you will do more Buy-Ins than actually selling which hurts your numbers very fast. The Breaks were very bad too, I would work 5 or 6 hours before getting my break, so the Managers could take theirs first. A lot of days when I got back from break there would only be an hour or two left in the day. For someone there 5 or 6 days a week it really messed with my sleep schedule because I was forced to eat later. I've never worked somewhere, where the Managers blatantly didn't care about their employees at all. I really do believe they want to maintain high turnover so their employees don't get wise to their scams. They want someone straight out of high school, not the seasoned Salesperson with years of experience. That's why the sales are low and up selling their own products, services, is all that matters to them. Not actually selling a guitar to someone. I always prided myself on finding the right guitar for the right person because that results in fewer returns. They lean on the 45 day return policy just to get the customer out the door with something they don't want. All in all, a very toxic atmosphere I'm very happy I'm not in anymore.