Pros
- Great place for rough characters (sales floor) to learn how to be less rough and get promoted to manage other ruffians for slightly more pay and then call it "career development." In other words, if you're unprofessional, loud-mouthed and abrasive, their sales floor is for you! (I have met plenty of great sales reps with very kind hearts, but your chances of that are low.) - There are some great people working in upper management, but as a sales consultant you'll not have many chances to talk to them or be noticed by them among a sea of people who are awful—but doing much better than you in sales, of course! - Tuition reimbursement for applicable classes you're taking is great if you can last for a year, which their abysmally confusing attendance system & ass-backwards PTO "system" probably won't allow you to do (ask anyone how many employees were fired from their "points system"—go ahead, do it.) - Good base pay in most areas of the US from what I know (got +$5 an hour more than people at the nearby Target doing essentially the same job)
Cons
- The company has upcoming technology that could put them far ahead sometime soon, but is falling behind Verizon because their of their BROKEN ideas about how to operate especially when working with customers! - No retail stores are following what is taught in training, nor should they be—it's unrealistic, uninformed, misrepresented and damn-near impossible to uphold. Take your month of training and throw it out the nearest window. - Expect to have to learn how to use over 10 employee apps, all with annoying flaws that go unfixed, to be able to manage your workplace needs while employed. Retail sales consultants waste about 20 minutes a day logging into confusingly-named employee apps to punch in/out, manage their PTO, benefits, business leads, etc. It's literally a labyrinth to do anything related to your employment—if you can even remember how to get to half of it. - Managers can be acidic scum or angelic mentors you'll treasure for your whole life. Better ask which ones will be at your store location before you accept working there. - Compensation is getting worse and worse, which would be fine since the base pay is so great (for how easy the job is), but any time you just lay back and take the base pay (because the comp is so low so why would you care about trying to bother your customers about apps and services which are buggy, outdated and undesirable?) you're "coached" or in other words brainwashed into embracing how badly you "need" the compensation which is at an all-time unfair low (see next point) - Retail employees went on strike for the first time in history of AT&T like a month or two ago, and they're threatening to do it again right now. Take that as a sign. What's worse is you have to attend the strikes or you'll be penalized by the union. Heads-up: going on strike means standing there all day without pay. I worked at an entire 3 day weekend for the union out of the four days I worked (part time) that week, and got paid nothing, and the strike didn't even help. If you're a near-broke college student, realize how big of an impact all this on-strike stuff can make on your well-being. The union won't care, AT&T won't care, your entire life amounts to one drop of the mud they're slinging at each other at your expense. — oh, and you have to PAY to be in the very union which doesn't actually help you, by the way. - Verizon is overtaking AT&T in most departments. This makes management crack down and make you "try harder" to offer inferior products and services to customers. It's beating a dead horse. Verizon also has more interesting job openings (like Virtual Reality photographer at sports events, for example!) and AT&T's TV services are being surpassed by Netflix, Hulu Live, Sling TV, Youtube TV, and other on-demand/live-TV services which have an app infrastructure that gets a rating higher than "2.9" on app stores for a product which costs MORE than its competitors. Are you kidding me? How am I supposed to increase your customer service ratings by pushing products people hate?! How about fix your products and services, and your broken mentality while you're at it! - One third of your job is waiting extremely long on the customer support phone line FOR your customer instead of them doing it for themselves in the comfort of their own home. But, you know, you're supposed to be selling during all that time. Good luck.
