Do large box retailers, such as Sears and JC Penney, typically pay their sales people a commision based on their individual sales? I didn’t think so based on their utter lack of interest when I walk up to the cash register, but I noticed recently that they log into their cash register which means it would be easy to track individual sales if the stores wanted to. My WAG is that perhaps the particular department has a sales target and the team gets a bonus based on the department’s overall performance… but I have never worked in retail. Does anyone know for sure?
Most of them don’t but electronics stores sometimes do. Logging into a cash register can be used for different things but it is mainly a security measure. Customers can’t just sneak up and grab cash while no one is looking (anyone that has every been in these stores knows that there aren’t actually any employees working there most of the time). They can also be used to audit the employees themselves if cash goes missing.
In my college days during the last Dinosaur period (i.e., when the interwebtubes were a DARPA thingie) I worked in retail to pay bills. I was paid a flat per hour rate. However, we all had “sales targets” to meet. A sales target was nothing more than your bosses best guess of much much per hour one should be able to sell, based upon time of year, current sales trends, whatever stores sales were going on, etc. For example, during the slow periods I was expected to bring in $100 an hour in sales. On the other hand, during the Christmas holiday, my sales target was $750 to $1,000 in sales per hour.
Anyway, any sales above my predetermined target meant I also received a commission based on total sales, in addition to my base wage. Again, for example, if my sales target was $250 an hour for a six hour shift, and I brought in more than $1,500 in retail sales, anything more than that I earned an additional 10-15 percent. The key here is total sales. So if I sold a big ticket item worth $1,000 but my total sales for the day were less than the total sales target for the shift, I got squat extra.
With register logins it’s easy to track sales by individual salesperson, rate per hour, etc. Damned statistics. Some bean counter in the back room would issue a report of how poor sales were and the floor folks had to lift their game or possibly lose their jobs. Bean counters never spend time on the floor to observe you can’t make a sale if the store is devoid of customers. For that I blame store management (crappy goods, lousy advertising, seasonal issues, etc., all beyond the control of ordinary retail slaves).
I hope you meant “aren’t actually many employees…”
That’s not just because they’re usually assholes, it’s because many people will always hit 90% of whatever target their set. Accept a bad day without giving the staff a hard time and they won’t get off their arses when it does matter.
I agree that some companies don’t understand that and take it too far however.
One of my friends used to work at Jewelry in Sears, and had said that she received commission, but it was one of the few departments that paid commissions.
As far as I know, the major appliance sales staff at Sears still works on commission, but I don’t know if it’s 100% commission or the kind of base/bonus system that Duckster discusses.
I do know that the big ticket departments (furniture, appliances and fine jewelry) were the slowest to go over to straight pay, because the sales staff in those departments believed one good sale could earn them more than a week’s salary.
Some stores offer commision and some don’t. As noted already, sometimes one department will offer it when others don’t.
Logging into the register can be a good tool for measuring productivity. Too many managers and bean counters consider the stats to be the *only * measure of productivity. As a long time retail manager, bad management is a serious pet peave of mine. The thing I’ve never fully understood is why small business owners give crappy service. They need good customer service more than the big box stores! Aaargh!
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At Walgreens, Photo lab and Cosmetics personnel get commissions from sales of certain hot-ticket items, and Photo especially is encouraged to upsell those.
My aunt retired last month after 30 years or so at JC Penney. I’m not sure what exactly her department was called - she sold primarily curtains and blinds and such, I believe. I am told that she made a hefty commission, which was most or all of her pay.
Furniture and interior design items are typically purchased by the store at 50% or so of their retail value, which makes them high profit items and makes it very worthwhile for the store to have them sold by good commisioned sales professionals.
Consumer electronics items are different, the store is buying them for about 80% ( or lately, closer to 90%) of their retail price tag, which makes it difficult to get enough profit margin to pay decent commissions, especially on a percentage basis.
Yep. That’s why places like Best Buy push the extended service plan so hard, it’s where they make their money. IIRC, they get commision on the plans.
This may have changed since I worked there a few years ago, but at that time, we were not paid commission on anything – sales or service plans.
Circuit City used to pay commission; when I left Best Buy to work there, they had ceased all commissioned sales. This was a few years back, as well.
When I worked in a large department store that is now (like so many others) a Macy’s, the only departments that had commissioned sales people were cosmetics/perfume and fine jewelry. I was a part time temp worker in the “pool” which meant I wasn’t assigned to any particular department but filled in where needed. I was not permitted to work in commissioned departments.
Each employee’s sales were tracked by logging into the registers. We were supposed to hit a particular sales quota per shift, but this didn’t affect our pay. It just proved we hadn’t crawled inside a rack to take a nap.
I once worked an eight hour shift in housewares with only a single customer. Those towels were never folded so perfectly before or since. I doubt I made my quota that day.
A friend of mine sells major appliances at Sears. It is pure commission. They actually get a couple of weeks of paid vacation a year. The pay they get is based on average commission over the previous few months.
I worked at Montgomery Ward in college. There were a number of commissioned departments. Major appliances, Sewing machines and Vacuum cleaners, Mechanical (Water heaters, furnaces, air conditioners), Shoes, Jewelry…and couple more that…Oh yeah, tires and car batteries.
Commissioned sales staff were on on straight commission except:
-They were guaranteed minimum wage (3.35/hr back then) if they didn’t have that in sales, BUT it was a “loan” of sorts, so they would take it back out of your commissions (in excess of 3.35/hr) up to 3 months later.
-There was a provision for hourly pay for work (stocking and such like) that precluded sales work.
I worked in hardware for several years, then transferred to Shoes to get the commission. I averaged around $8/hr, which was OK for shit work in the early 80s.
I worked at Walmart and we had to log into our registers to make a sale. As Shagnasty pointed out, partially it was a security thing, but it was also used to track productivity. At the end of a certain period (week? month? can’t remember) the higher-ups posted a print out of all the cashier with their scan rate - so you could see how many items you scanned per minute. While many coworkers claimed you could be fired for a low scan rate, I never heard of this actually happening. Most people were fired for things like showing up drunk or stealing a Nintendo from Electronics and trying to sell it to a guy in Automotive. We were just supposed to monitor out scan rate and ‘strive to do better’ :rolleyes:. You can imagine how much this motivated us.
And the add-ons. Don’t forget the add-ons.
If you sell a laptop - you need to sell blank dvds, a bag, a memory stick and Norton to go with it - all of which have a 50% (or higher margin). Then if you sell a printer as well - you need to sell a USB cable and extra cartridges with that.
If it’s a camera, then it’s memory cards, cases and battery chargers.
With TVs it’s stands/wall mounts, and leads - or, even better - ‘premium’ Belkin leads with Super-Duper-Hyper Quad Shielding and the like!
A lot of stores track their salespeople’s strike rates of ‘attaching’ certain add-ons to certain sales. For example, in my chain, the memory card-with-camera target is 80%. A little tricky when you’re trying to sell a 2GB SD card for £20 to someone who points out that they could get one online for about £5. So, you need to hit an 80% strike rate, but you’d better not use discount to do it, because otherwise you’re hurting the chain’s profit. sigh Retail is fun.
My chain also got rid of personal commission about a year and a half ago. Mainly so we could proudly state to customers that because we’re not on commission we are “impartial”. It fools no-one. But the company don’t have to pay us as much money, so it’s not all bad.
What…no wireless internet service package???