A company that is dying and trying all the wrong things to save itself
Pros
They pay is phenomenal if you are a decent sales person. I was raking in $20+/hr. on average months. Your co workers and local management are generally friendly people. If you produce numbers they like you a lot. Easy to trade shifts and get days that I really needed off (unless it was Nov/Dec).
Cons
The company is backwards and trying to save itself by doing everything wrong. People shop at Sears for a few reasons: Brands (Kenmore and Craftsman), Customer Service (great and friendly sales associates), and Service (Protection Plans and delivery). The company is slowly sabotaging all of these key aspects. Brands: Sears is bringing in more and more terrible brands that are going to break down or provide sub par results in order to make a quick buck. Seiki, RCA, and JVC electronics are bad, we do not warranty them for any meaningful time and they will break on you most of the time. Customer Service: They just fired the bottom 20% performing associates in appliances and mattresses based on solely numbers. Don't get me wrong, profit is important, but it's not everything. Often times raw numbers =/= best customer service. I personally knew a few of the associates that were let go and they were much better at running around addressing a customer's concern on a small sale like a water filter or microwave than some of the people we kept. Some of them even spent their sales time to solve customer issues that the managers couldn't solve (because softlines managers know absolutely NOTHING about hardlines and if your department manager is off for the day or on vacation no one else knows how to work the system). They are forcing the implementation of technology into sales. Some stores don't have registers and all sales are done through iPads. This would be fine except the iPads are slow and clunky, sometimes they don't even work. But the worst part is that if something happens to the iPad, the sales associate is apparently responsible for the cost of it. Which means I am basically carrying around a $500 ticking time bomb because after thousands of hours on the sales floor I am probably going to make a mistake and set it down a little too hard or drop it. Who doesn't drop handheld electronics? Why aren't these items insured by the company? Furthermore, the average Sears shopper is like 50+ years old. I don't want to be judgmental but that age bracket is not the best with dealing with digitized receipts and emails. You are forced to sign people up for credit cards with almost no compensation. Management doesn't seem to understand that in a full commissioned job sales associates are reluctant to do anything that doesn't make them money. Sears card apps pay you $2 each after your first 5 for the month. That's dirt, I make $500 in one TV sale that's way more engaging and easier to close than a 26% APR credit card. Opportunity for advancement is there but I don't know why anyone would do it. The position above Sales associate is department lead, which pays less and works harder. Assistant store managers get paid less than the top sales associates so the poor performers are the ones that get promoted, leading to incompetence. Product Service: The Sears Protection Plan used to be a great thing, but now it is obvious that the company could care less about it. It is the primary money maker for sales associates, but support for it has been falling more and more recently. 95% of my customer issues were related to service issues with these plans. Customers need to call 1-800 numbers, are put on hold for long periods of time, and are often hung up on. The service department is split into several sub departments so sometimes you'll sit on hold for 45 minutes only for them to tell you that you need to be transferred and put on hold again because the guy you previously talked to transferred you to the wrong department. Service appointments take weeks to be scheduled only for the tech to tell you that a few more appointments will be needed as he waits for ordered parts, this leads to customers with broken tvs for months and the sales associate takes the flak for this. Technicians are slobs, over my years with the company I consistently got the complaint that they tracked mud into the customer's home and left Styrofoam messes after unpacking parts. The MPA plan is good for 3 years or 5 years but during the first year we will go to the manufacturer to try and get a credit for the company. This means the customer, who has paid several hundred of dollars for this service, is caught in a bureaucratic battle between Sears and the manufacturer of the product. It sometimes takes up to 6 months to get a credit approved and the customer has to wait the whole time. Once again, you take all the blame for this yourself as you are the face of the company.
