Cutting your better paid sales people not only leaves you with poor quality on the floor, but also leaves you with no one with experience to train the newbies coming into the system.
Retail Sales has such a high turnover, so you have untrained and inexperienced people feeling their way blindly through the process, and in less than amonth or two, they are training the next batch... not a pleasant cycle.
Stepping over dollars to get to dimes.... same old story.
At my last retail job, your salary was based entirely on sales numbers. Supposedly, this was to reward the top salespeople, but in reality things didn’t work that way. Frequently, those top salespeople were not helpful to customers, and would stand around telling everyone walking down the aisle “Let me know when you are ready”. When someone else actually helped that customer and were about to ring them up, the “top” salesperson would suddenly reappear and announce “That’s MY customer” and take the sale. If they did help a customer, they would hound them until the customer got fed up and left everything on the counter. They would also leave their other responsibilities, such as restocking and markdowns, for others to do, no matter how often they were told to get to work. The result was that good, hard working, knowledgeable employees would get pay cuts or quit out of frustration while the “top” salespeople would get rewarded. It wasn’t worth the effort to do a good job, and then get screwed by both management and co-workers. Complaining did no good, because management was not going to fire their “best” people. These “top” salespeople actually hurt business, because customers would frequently leave rather than put up with the fighting and harassment that took place on the sales floor. Of course, sales goals kept increasing, regardless of past performance or factors like a bad economy or crappy merchandise that nobody wanted to buy, so the longer someone stayed there, the harder it was to reach their goals. Eventually everyone would peak out unless they stole sales from other salespeople. I suspect that top management really wanted people to reach a point where they couldn’t get any more raises, or start getting pay cuts, so that they would eventually leave, to be replaced with someone new getting paid several dollars an hour less.