jobbite
I was borderline suicidal after spending a month with these clowns. I had never worked in car sales before, and was promised a "great training program". Well, training was sitting in a conference room reading car manuals all day long; until you finally figured out that there really was no training. The sooner you got out on the lot and started dealing with customers, the better. There are no shifts in this business, as you work from opening (9 am) to close (8 pm). This dealership was closed on Sundays, and you were allowed one other weekday off, but never Fridays or Saturdays. On a Tuesday you were lucky to meet and greet one customer. Closing a deal on that one customer was a near impossibility. You were also competing against 16 other salesmen, most of who had more experience, more tricks, and more ways of stealing the customer away from you. Out of the 55+ hours a week you worked this job you were busy with a customer maybe 10-15 hours. That leaves for a LOT of time walking the lot and contemplating 100 different ways to slit your wrists out of boredom. I had one salesman take me under his wing and show me the ropes. If it hadn't been for him I would have quit earlier. Too many salesmen, minus not enough customers = no ROI for all the time you wasted during the week. They basically hire 17 salesmen so that every customer on a busy Saturday is covered, because they don't want to leave any customer unattended on the lot, ever.
I ended up quitting this job after I caught management lying to customers. Promising impossible monthly payments that they knew they couldn't match, just to get the customer in the door. The old bait and switch routine is still commonly in use. Management could have cared less about you if they tried. You were left to figure it out for yourself, and they didn't care if you sank or swam, because they were getting the commission on every deal, no matter who brought it to them.
We were paid a $400 a week draw during our 4 weeks of "training". I never covered this, in selling 8 vehicles in a month. Vacation did not exist, nor any other benefits. We received pull checks that were random checks when we sold a specific model of new car. But you never knew what the check was (anywhere from $50 to $500 with most being around $100) per vehicle. Depending on what you sold the car for determined what you made in commission on the car, but out of all the cars I sold I generally received $150 per vehicle. Obviously not close to enough to feed your family on. The hours worked, versus the pay meant that you were working for right at minimum wage every week. Only two or three of the tops salesmen at the dealership made enough to support their families on. Obviously the turnover with the rest of the sales force was indicative of this.