The pay was horrible. At first, I was getting better than minimum wage, but as minimum wage increased, my pay didn't so that I was eventually relying on sales incentives to make MW. If you want to know how much to expect to make, take a livable wage from ten years ago. If you're lucky, you might get two thirds of that, and that's with sales incentives.
Also, seeing my district manager in the store usually meant that our district was getting a visit from corporate. Our store didn't usually get a visit, though.
As for contests, you can forget about winning any if you get stuck in a slow store. Having worked there for almost 4 years, I can count on one hand the number of times I saw someone from our store even make any of the lists, let alone win. Bear in mind that most of the manufacturers had something going at any given time. I hate to sound bitter, but there was no chance for me to sell enough to win, even if I got all of the store sales put under my number.
At first, Lab people got raises for advancements. They got rid of those and I only ever got one raise, which was mostly my fault. I should have completed them sooner.
A big down side to being slow was that we could never get the cameras people wanted. We could special order them, but people usually had a plane to catch and didn't want to wait 2-3 days to get their stuff. I'm not saying that every store should have every camera, but we should have at least had some of the more-expensive ones.
