This time, it's even longer, because someone errantly slapped them with a $200 cancellation fee. Voiding a cell phone contract is a process that takes an hour or so of waiting on the phone and talking to three or four different gatekeepers. I received about $40 for the sale on my last paycheck, and now they will take $40 out of my next paycheck. A couple comes in to return a pair of cell phones I sold them a couple weeks back. Two more employees walk out and don't come back.Ģ:00 p.m. (I worked at RadioShack for 43 months, and barely hit this mark once.)ġ2:00 p.m. One of us would have made approximately 23 cents on the sale (18 cents after taxes), except you don't start making any sales commission until you surpass a monthly sales figure that is usually unreachable and arbitrarily set. First customer! Someone just walked in and bought a cordless phone battery. She kind of turns toward the store, sees 11 of us just standing and staring at her, and turns a 180. This infuriates the manager, who at this juncture elects to fire one employee, right there on the spot, because her sweater is a shade of red that is inconsistent with the dress code.Ĩ:00 a.m. Nobody has been seen even walking past the store. No one is waiting on the other end.ħ:00 a.m. Six on one side of the store, six on the other side, pallbearers of an invisible casket. We all line up in expectation of hordes of customers. We show up an hour and a half before the store opens, as demanded by the district office. There was no explanation given for this, but it ensured that we would make a fraction of zero money.Ĥ:30 a.m. RadioShack is a corporation dedicated to the prolonged destruction of the individual, so it tripled our staff right before Black Friday, ensuring that no one would make any money.Īnd during this season, RadioShack also decided to abandon newspaper inserts, which had always been the lifeblood of its advertising. It was hard enough making much in the way of commissions when the sales were split between our usual staff of three or four employees. I really hope Black Fridays aren't like they were a decade ago, but I doubt much has changed.ĭuring the 2004 holiday season, I worked in a RadioShack situated in a dying mall with virtually no foot traffic. These are stories from my three and a half years as a RadioShack employee. RadioShack is a rotten place to work, generally not a very good place to shop, and an untenable business to run. Employees who make a few dimes over minimum wage are pressured, shamed, and yelled at as though they're brokering million-dollar deals. Lawyers have been sent to shut down websites that have bad things to say about RadioShack. Untold hours of labor haven't been paid for (when I quit, on good terms and with two weeks' notice, they withheld my final paychecks for months and wouldn't tell me why). Its store managers are worked so hard that they become unhappy, half-awake shadows of themselves. In scenarios like this one, there aren't happy stories or easy answers, and if this were any other company, I'd concede that, perhaps, opening on Thanksgiving is a regrettable but necessary stab at saving the company, employees and all.īut as this company has spent the last decade-plus trying to save itself, the happiness of the employees has always been the first to go overboard. It's very likely to go extinct soon, and I doubt there's anything its operators can do about it. RadioShack is a company of massive real estate and is peddling a business model that is completely unviable in 2014. to midnight on Thanksgiving, its stores will now close for a few hours in the middle of the day so that its folks can have a little bit of family time. Having Thanksgiving Day to themselves was one of them.Īfter some pushback from its employees, RadioShack gave in just a little: After originally planning to open from 8 a.m. Retail employees have very, very little in the way of perks, of things that are understood to be sacred.
Most RadioShack stores have just a handful of employees, most or all of whom will work Thanksgiving whether they want to or not. This isn't Walmart or a call center, in which volunteers who want overtime pay can be chosen first. RadioShack won't be the only store to open on Thanksgiving Day, but it might be the only one of its particular makeup to do so.
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