Pros
Good discounts on merchandise, great coworkers depending on where you're at, you meet new people and see all kinds of items, I learned a lot about gold and diamonds while working there. The commission and bonus program can make you a lot of money. Full time employees can get health, vision, dental, and 80 hours of PTO in addition to 40 hours of sick time. There is upward mobility, but who would want it?
Cons
Upper management is currently dictating that store managers work 50+ hours in a week. There is no overtime pay, due to this being a salaried position. There regularly were weeks where I would be in my shop 6 or 7 days. Hourly workers (pawnbrokers, assistant managers) are lucky to get 35-36 hours a week. Despite the long hours and hard work I put in, my district manager had the nerve to tell me "I don't think you really want to be here". Upper management in the state I worked in are professional micro-managers. First Cash has trouble keeping anyone around as a pawnbroker or assistant manager due to the low pay and constant nagging from upper management. They also do not communicate with their managers. I had one of my assistants resign to pursue a higher paying job. They gave upper management and myself 3 months notice. I was not told what the plan to replace this employee until days before it happened. All questions about the direction of the shop or the awful staffing issues are met with patronizing responses that boil down to "just trust us". Upper management will dictate how you schedule your people. They want everyone's days off to be random. My district manager had a meeting with me and a part time employee where the district manager asked the part timer to work when they had college classes. This employee quickly filed their resignation after that despite my best efforts to get them to stay. This was my only bilingual employee, and upper management made unreasonable demands that put them in a position where they had to chose between higher education or a menial job. It took my district manager a whole month after that to even contact HR about putting an ad up on Indeed for a bilingual pawnbroker. Another note on scheduling is that my district manager did not even know how to check schedules or time card punches before he met me. I'm not even kidding, he told me he would be keeping a close eye hours and scheduling and then in the same breath asked me how to check those things. He wasn't joking at all, the district manager in my area barely knew how to operate the V2 system we used for everything. The guy could barely manage to make a coherent email or text, so I guess it shouldn't have surprised me. The layaway goals are ridiculously high, upper management expects you to hit every commission booster month after month which is unrealistic. If you constantly hit every stretch goal, the budgets are wrong, plain and simple. They are obsessed with having signage everywhere. I put over 30 8.5x11 layaway signs up in my store (in addition to gondola toppers, 3x5 cards on shelf edges, and small layaway tags on every item over $50) and was told by my district manager that it was "a good start". The district manager in my area put no trust in his managers to run the shops. When corporate decided to put someone with no district manager experience directly above me, my job went from running the shop how I saw fit (and most importantly, making money), to instead being the person constantly calling and texting my district manager for permission to run my shop. What it all comes down to is this, upper management treats store managers like children. If that sounds like a good fit for you, go ahead and apply. How are employees supposed to respect a manager when his job is to constantly ask permission to do his job? How is a manager supposed to respect the people above him when there is zero communication about the direction of the shop?
