CED uses a profit sharing type pay structure; base pay is way below industry average, but profit sharing can make up for it, if you work at the right location, and the branch manager thinks highly of you. Unfortunately, many locations struggle, with little or no help from upper management. The profit sharing structure gives little incentive for successful and experienced managers to remain at smaller, less lucrative locations. As a result, these smaller struggling locations face constant turnover at the manager position as their managers either quite due to low pay, or move up to a better paid location. Moral of the story: If you are working at a smaller, struggling location, get yourself transferred as quickly as you can prove yourself, or find a job elsewhere, because you are probably making far less than you should.
New managers are usually selected from the pool of "management trainees". They hire someone out of college, put them through some sales and product classes, give them token sales positions, and then make them managers of these struggling branches after only a couple of years. So, rather than picking managers from the more experienced and proven employees, they take the least experienced guy in the room, and make him boss. Which, with the latitude that managers have, can have disastrous results--assuming that branch hasn't already hit bottom.
CED could provide lots of room for employees to move up, but that usually hasn’t been the case. Promotions and new positions are filled by management at their discretions; open positions at the division level (group of around a dozen stores) are never posted, and even at your own store you didn’t know management was looking for somebody for a new position until they announce that someone else has been hired.
If you do a good job, you become “too valuable” to move to a new position, so successful, hardworking employees, are pigeonholed for decades at the same position, while less experienced new hires (often family members or trainees) are given the new challenges. CED relies heavily on personality profiling and intelligence testing, and this along with this tendency to hire new people to fill new positions results in a strange practice: If a new hire does a job poorly, but tested well, they tend to promote or move them until they find a position that fits your “abilities”--after all, they "tested well" so we must not have put them in the "right position".
Health insurance is really expensive. CED self-funds their health insurance, and pays a third party to merely administer the plan. I'm guessing that CED has an aging work force, because this doesn't seem to save them money; I could almost buy a cheaper plan out of my own pocket with better coverage. CED claims to pay more than $1,000 per month into their insurance pool; if that is the case, I could buy much better coverage for half of what it costs us combined.
