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Comment by pud | Hacker News Reader

I worked at Radio Shack.

I was in high school and lived with my folks. I had almost no expenses. It didn't occur to me until much later what a bummer it all was.

- You get paid commission, something like 1% per sale. Commission was pointless because almost everyone already knew what they needed (AA batteries or a headphone adapter...).

- If your commission didn't add up to minimum wage, you got minimum wage. Since it was nearly impossible to sell $800/hr at Radio Shack, everyone made minimum wage.

- There was a computer screen in the back room that showed a leaderboard of on-duty employees, and how much each sold for the day in real-time. So even though everyone was making minimum wage, the employees were pitted against each other. This made every employee your enemy.

- If somehow you made a commission for the day, when the item was ever returned, they dock the commission from your next paycheck. So you ended up making less than minimum wage.

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This is funny to me because, as a young customer, I distinctly remember thinking, "God, I hate coming to this *$#%@ store. The sales people seem like they're not plugged in. I'm trying to buy an <xyz> and they keep trying to get me to buy an <abc> which has nothing to do with what I'm looking for. What are they smoking? They're not even listening to me!"

I had no notion of selling on commission, but I did understand selling someone a bill of goods rather than what they wanted or needed. And that's about when I stopped shopping there.

I grew up loving my visits to Radio Shack for hobby electronics when I was a kid. It seemed like a place that would be a straight up dream job. Eventually, I worked at a Radio Shack up in Canada to pay for University and I felt the pain of this stupid competition with your coworkers to make $1 more in pay day to day only to have someone return some high commission item days later and put you on the shit list again. If the commission went into negative territory where I live, they still had to pay minimum wage. Commissions were just a bonus and usually only available during Christmas when the malls are busy. I usually went for the "spiffs," which were some kind of payout based on selling special/discontinued goods and often paid better than having to stretch to a 2000-3000 revenue day. Ahh retail. Don't miss it.

All true. I graduated with a EE degree during the dotcom bust, so I worked at RS for a few months.

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.

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