Pros
- the pay is anywhere from very good to great. good hourly pay, coupled with commissions and the potential to make a very good commission check (I said potential though). - excellent 401k, medical insurance, just all around great benefits. - a free work phone and a 50% discount on your personal account - the actual wireless industry is actually very fun/interesting, you'll be working with cel phones, tablets, technology in general. I suppose this is a preference thing but for me I found the industry to be very interesting. - I worked with some of the coolest people imaginable during my time. There will certainly still be an occasional bad apple, a shady backstabber or cherry picker, etc. but for the most part they are a minority. The number of really cool people you will work with should far outweigh the scum.
Cons
oh maaaan where to begin? - it's retail. honestly, you should know what you're getting if you work retail but the hours are all over the map. you will work weekends, you will work holidays, you will work evenings. it never bothered me that much but it likely will many others. - the work/life balance is a joke. Verizon stresses how much it tries to promote a healthy work/life balance but that is complete crap. if you have a family, expect to not see them much. If you secretly hate your family that might be fine for you I suppose. - The computer systems are a joke. I never, in a 1000 years, would've imagined a company as large as VZW, with an image of being a leader in technology would use such goddawful computer systems. They are the slowest things imaginable and are always glitching up or giving you an error message while processing. Understand, this is not because you did something wrong or processed something incorrectly, it simply decides to screw up at any time for no reason at all. This is extremely bad when you have an impatient customer who has already spent an hour in your store (or more) and you have to start all over processing their order. - Micromanagement up the wazoo. I hope you like managers hovering over your shoulder while you engage with customers, observations during your transactions, being grilled in the back while you grab a phone or accessories on the customer and their life story and what they're buying and why they're not buying more. If so, then every day is gonna feel like Christmas at Verizon Wireless. - Absurdly high quotas. I watched while quotas went from tough but attainable to "what the hell are they thinking" during my time with Verizon. Simply put, the standards that the company hold you to are insanely high, the stress level is always through the roof, and it is my opinion that in order to truly hit these goals with any consistency you are going to have to lie to customers, mislead them, withhold information, and do other shady and unethical things you will not enjoy doing. And sadly, in 6 months, the expectations are going to be EVEN HIGHER! -Confusing commission structure. For the last year or so of my time at Verizon, I can honestly say I have not how I even got paid. The company changes things all the time (which isn't in and of itself a bad thing) and commissions (which was always confusing) got to a point where there were so many transactions I processed where I didn't know how it affected my paycheck. - Too much tech work and non-payable work. As a sales rep you will spend probably about 75% of your time (or more) handling customer service issues, answering billing questions, fixing phones, on the phone with customer service, troubleshooting network issues, dealing with escalations, and more fun non-payable situations. Still gotta hit that quota though. - Constantly changing policies with no communication to employees. I understand the bigger a company is, the harder it is for everyone to stay on the same page but geez this place was bad. The dissemination of information in this company is a joke. Policies are always changing or being altered with no one bothering to tell the grunts on the front lines (that's you btw) or it gets sent out in an e-mail (which you're never given time to check) which you'll never read and which gets lost in the hundreds of e-mails you receive daily (99% of which are a complete waste of time and serve to dilute your e-mails so that when you actually get an e-mail that's important you probably skim right over it and miss it). - Management is hit or miss. I will admit, I had the fortune to work with some very good managers. I also had the misfortune to work with some of the most incompetent buffoons you can imagine. Most of the managers are promoted based on prior sales success and who they knew (and sucked up to). The problem with this is that a good sales rep does not necessarily equal a good manager (and I question the good sales rep aspect with some of these people). - Believe me when I say Verizon does not care about you, the employee, or their customers. You will come to learn that soon enough. They care about numbers, and about making money and selling everything in the store to every sucker that walks through those doors. - Corrupt and immoral management (and upper management). - Constantly out of stock of the things you're supposed to sell (not just at the store level but also in the warehouses, i.e. you can't even order it for the customer).