Pros
Access to insane gear discounts and a wealth of intelligent, kind, and talented colleagues; genuinely edifying "office hours" with manufacturers and reps; and the beautiful wide world of musicians I got to use my knowledge and talent to help. Friends were made, and good times were had. Even when no one ever quite knows what management's got up their sleeves. Frequently, that's what we bonded over. Not great...
Cons
They used to respect and support their salespeople, but no longer. When I signed on, we were treated with respect—we really were! And I don't want to directly blame the buyout by Providence, but over the course of '22-23 after it happened, the company went from a supportive, honest, open place where managers and colleagues had my back to a constant source of anxiety and stress; honest mistakes became grounds for termination when the same mistakes used to just be a matter of "sorry boss won't do it again." Again, it's not really the managers' fault themselves, but as a collective, the leadership of the company made it extremely clear that they didn't trust us or have our backs. By the time I left, managers had been actively gaslighting everyone in the department for a year or more in a pathetic attempt to make us think nothing was wrong. We began getting paid less for the same work (they'll argue that point because it was a lot more complicated than that, but some of us did the math and it's pretty damning), morale plummeted, downright insulting attendance and phone-stat standards were implemented (hence the newly fertile grounds for termination), and tenured SEs began leaving right and left. They're knowingly replacing us with people of lower caliber, maybe hoping to increase the chances they'll be satisfied to be treated like just any other retail worker. "We have a slide!!!" isn't enough. Sweetwater, you made me risk my safety at least once a year to drive there during horrific storms while bragging that you've only had to close twice in 40 years. Yeah. That number is nothing to be proud of. Shame on you. And you, prospective employee, can forget about trying to change any of this. When I was hired, there was a decent amount of productive dialog between management and salespeople. Now, if SEs try to talk to their coaches about anything of the sort, absolutely nothing gets done. I, like most of us, got writeups that any decent person would agree should've been expunged, but I was summarily shut down every single time I tried to have that conversation. "Rules are rules" - even when they make no sense, didn't exist when I was hired, and directly contradict the company's "do the right thing" policy. Interdepartmental communication also broke WAY down during this growing-pains stage, making simple tasks take hours multiple times a day, in addition to the fact that the company is still clinging to software from the early 90s to drive the entire business (seriously - entire). I'd be able to deal with things like this... if management had still been on my team. But as of early '22, they weren't. It's particularly upsetting that things have gone this way because there's no way all of the sales managers like it. Indeed, there are managers who never would've made it through the year while they were SEs, had the new standards been in place. Even I would've been fired when I was new because of the specific standards they set for new rollouts, and I was doing quite well by the time my book of business matured. I'm deeply disappointed. I really believed in what this company was doing when I joined. I wanted to retire there. But when the only policy was "do the right thing" and I no longer felt that I had the same definition of "the right thing" as management, I had no choice but to leave. Within a few years, at this rate, the best sales floor in the industry will be little more than a normal call center.