Quite interesting. My niece managed one about 10 yrs ago, she was forced to put in so much unpaid overtime she moved on to another chain.
When I was a manager, you got paid an hourly salary, plus commission, plus a bonus based on the profit of your store.
In 1986 they paid starting managers $5.02 an hour. This amount could vary with the amount of revenue your store generated and with how long you were with the company. This would equate to about $10 an hour today.
The commission was a whopping 2%, BUT only when your commission exceeded your hourly pay, so if I were paid $200 in a week hourly, my commissions didn’t kick in until I had sold $10,000 in that week. Since my store rarely did over $20K a month, I didn’t see any commissions. What about Christmas time? Oh, for the months of November and December they lowered your commission as a manager to .5%!
The profit bonus was where you could make real money. I believe that you received 10% of the net profit of your store. They would pay you 50% of the bonus you earned in the middle of the following month EXCEPT for the months of November and December where you got 20% and they held onto the other 80%. The bonus they withheld was kept until the end of the fiscal year (June 30th). They would then tally how much bonus you had earned during the year and subtract that which you had already been paid, and cut you a check for the difference. It wasn’t uncommon for managers in my district to get checks of over $40k. You had to be careful, however, not to earn too much bonus. In your employment contract Radio Shack reserved the right to terminate your employment at any time, for any reason. If you were not employed through June 30th, you did not receive a bonus check. I had a friend who was expecting a $65K check and when the District Manager came by on June 29th, he thought he was going to be congratulated. Instead, they fired him. They claimed he had allowed his inventory to get out of balance and there were veiled murmurings that he had stolen merchandise from the store. Years later, the District Manager (now no longer with the company) told me that a large percentage of the uncollectible bonuses went to the District Manager since they became “net profit” and they got a bonus based on the net profit of the district.
To top it all off, they would cap your hours as manager. I was told that I could not work for more that 56 hours a week. My store was open from 10 to 9, Monday through Friday, and 10 to 6 on Saturday, for a total of 63 hours. Additionally, managers were expected to be there an hour early and an hour late, meaning that I worked 75 hours a week. When I complained to my DM, he said that I should hire a part timer. Of course the part timer wasn’t authorized to open or close the store, so the only time I could take off was in the middle of the day. To make matters worse, I would find, hire and train the part timer and then, if they were any good at all, the DM would transfer them to another store.
It was probably the worst job I had in my life, but it did embolden me to leave for a commission only sales job, at which I did very well.