Work/Life Balance: In order to make a decent living in this position, you needed to put in a lot of hours. These hours may not necessarily be inside the store or "on a shift", but to make the money you had to put in time. Add in frequent unpaid sales meetings, unpaid market meetings, and the extensive driving you will be doing between stores (you will work at more than one store and they will be in different cities and towns),to arrive to a very skewed work/life balance.
Compensation: Bad benefits/insurance. Chargebacks (money taken from your paycheck) on a phone are greater than the commission you earn on the phone. Other various deductions from your paychecks (items missing from the store, phones that people steal from the inventory, etc.) will turn what appeared to be a month in which you earned 4K in commissions into a substantially smaller amount. When you leave the company, they will hold 6 months worth of chargebacks from your last paychecks to protect the company. The chargeback withholding essentially insures that you will work roughly 1 whole month for free. Bonuses are often conveniently forgotten to be added to your check. Don't forget how much money you will be spending in gas going between the stores. I left for a job that actually paid less per month than what I averaged in my monthly commissions at cellular sales, but my monthly income is now higher.
Outlook: Contract cell phone sales are a dying breed. The cost of subsidizing the phones is getting to be too much for wireless providers to handle. Cellular Sales struggles to stay competitive in pricing of contract phones and relies more on the salesmanship of its reps to move its products. Customers are getting more savvy, though, many are purchasing phones from online and big box stores, then coming to cellular sales stores only when they have problems. The opportunities for growth within the company are limited, and the job does not shine that brightly on a resume. Many employers outside of the wireless industry see the job as just anther retail gig, not the "professional sales" job that management pitches the position as.
