Quote:
Originally Posted by fastfredracing
The guy I deal with at advance, broke 1 million dollars in sales last year, by himself.
He made $37k
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Back in the early 90s, I worked for a retail parts place that was doing well, but over extended themselves trying to grow and were purchased by Advance, I'm pretty sure.
I started at $4.50/hr in 1992. A few months later, the district manager saw me working with a customer to find a hard to find part for an old car and told the manager to give me a raise. I went to $5.50/hr. I worked my way up and after a little over 2 years, I was a manager. I think I had been making $7.something an hour, and when I got promoted, I was paid $21k/yr plus bonuses. The first 3-4 months, I nailed the sales goal and made the sales bonus (and the expenses bonus), so they finally jacked the sales goal up to an artificially high number so I couldn't touch it and left it that way for a few months. Then they'd drop the number down so I could hit it once or twice, then they'd raise it again. It was REALLY obvious that they were changing my goal in order to only pay me a certain amount of bonus. I was able to get the controllable expenses bonus most months. I think the first year, I made about $25k or $26k. I didn't feel too bad about that level of pay at the time. For a young kid, I was doing OK.
What I didn't like, was the fact that as a manager, my set schedule was 55hrs per week. Mon, Tue, Thur, Fri, Sat were 10 hour days and Wed was a 5 hour day. I was also told that most managers couldn't do the job in that amount of time, and I should expect to work 60-65hrs/week. I did. I actually enjoyed a lot of aspects of the job and had a bunch of great folks working for me. I usually put in anywhere from 60-75hrs/week depending upon what was going on. When we were given extra work, like rearranging the store, we were told that we couldn't increase the hours that the hourly employees were working and if more hours were needed, we needed to put those hours in ourselves.
When my dad retired, he went to work part time at a Scotty's hardware. The manager was 40-ish with a couple of daughters. Dad said the guy was making something like $25-30k per year. Before long, they cut his pay to $21k per year, and eventually Scotty's closed. My dad said that guy busted his butt. He told me one time that I was visiting him that he thought when I told him the retail auto parts job was crap and no way to live, that I was just being a pussy. But then after working at Scotty's, he was actually really glad that I'd left that behind.