It's not advertised as a sales job, but it is 100% a sales job. Your performance metrics and promotional requirements are based on how well you can extract money from people needing a car, mostly due to accidents. Performance is heavily tied to the demographics of your branch, where more affluent areas succeed with much more ease than those in poorer communities. Customers are lied to, coerced, and cheated out of money that they do not need to pay outside of what they came in for, and you are expected to sell on every transaction. If someone has to go borrow $50 from their grandma to pay the deposit for an insurance rental you are chastised for not gouging them for an extra $20 per day
The real anxiety for most comes from constantly juggling your fleet in order to maximize cars on the road. Walking into a day with 60 reservations and 10 cars is an every day occurrence. Constantly having to push back reservations or tell customers that we dont have the thing that they booked months in advance because the person that walked in 10 minutes ago came first.
Upper management promotions are very scarce and often require relocation, fairly bureaucratic. You need to be seen and heard by management to get promoted. High performing employees are not always chosen for advancement due to subjective selection standards. The work is very demanding, and the hours are long and uncertain. Employee burnout is very common. Branch managers and assistant managers (the ones who run the business) receive a very slim portion of the profits, the rest goes to the top.
