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Store Managers are a very different type of pay structure though. They're more like someone from Corporate vs Retail. They get paid massive bonuses based on num

by swozey 3y ago

Store Managers are a very different type of pay structure though. They're more like someone from Corporate vs Retail. They get paid massive bonuses based on numbers their stores hit. I worked at a few Home Depots and IIRC the store managers were clearing 150-250 while the assistant managers I think were in the 60-80k range. Then us floor staff were 9-15, maybe 20. This was 2008ish. I remember the biggest HD in my state or somewhere the manager was getting I think 500k-1mil+. You can infer it from the numbers the store does and their bonus percentage whatever that was. My mom was an HR director there so corporate as well and she made somwhere in 130-200+ not sure exact.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
>They get paid massive bonuses based on numbers their stores hit. Isn't that ... good? The demographic in every region or neighborhood is different and has different tastes, incomes and budgets, so it's your job as store manager to identify the needs of that demographic, and order merchandise and organize it on shelves, run sales, etc. in order to move as much of it as possible to maximize sales and profits. Sort of like targeted advertising but IRL and less privacy invasive. Paying based on this seems like the only way to incentivize this performance.
- LegitShady 3y ago
  In university before co-op, many years ago, I worked for home depot part time. the line employee profit share was really bad. the management profit share was better. They understaffed my department for long periods of time to make their numbers look better. They were making $15k/day in profit on my department but they wouldn't schedule a second employee so that there was someone there to help people when person #1 was on the saw, on the forklift, or covering lunch for the next department over too. I quit mid june after I realized they weren't hiring/scheduling more staff for the summer even though every day was very busy, constantly running between helping customers and taking care of other things. There are a lot of ways to make profit and show good metrics that aren't good for line employees.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    >There are a lot of ways to make profit and show good metrics that aren't good for line employees. Sure, but this is in line with every major (European) tech company I ever worked at. Pay employees peanuts and pay senior mangers amazing, therefore you were incentivized not to do well as an IC, but to put up with bullshit and fight your way to climb the corporate ladder to management, and then exploit the other poor schmucks who come below you with the same perverse incentive structure. Yes this leads to a huge turnover, unhappy workers, and to a lot of arguments, back-stabbings and fights. But their stocks were always rock solid and managers were always wealthy so I guess they saw that culture as a net win. It seems to be the M.O. with ever major company everywhere, I think it's called the "GE model". Paying ICs at the bottom great wages and incentivizing them with stock, is mostly unique to US/SV and new-age software start-ups from the Google/Facebook era, but rare everywhere else.
    - rightbyte 3y ago
      Ye it is strange that such anti-intuitive management style pays off. I have no clue why. I got this feeling that what's most important for a Big Bad Company is to be able to get well of with management of other Big Bad Companies to be able to land contracts.
      - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
        >Ye it is strange that such anti-intuitive management style pays off. I have no clue why. It works because it prays and exploits several flaws in our society and in human psychology like greed, wealth inequality, conformity of the masses to cultural norms, fear of missing out/of being left out, and the crabs in the bucket mentality, which leads to a rat race to the bottom form which it's difficult to check yourself out as an individual if the majority does it and is heavily vested in it. This isn't something big bad corporations have created, it s just something that has existed for hundreds of years, they're just exploiting. The same mechanism and behaviors were in place during the communist rule in my home country 35+ years ago, when people were fighting to climb up the party ranks, because that's what gave you the best QoL. Now it's climbing the corporate ranks.
- klyrs 3y ago
  > Isn't that ... good? For whom?
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    For everyone?
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - Shared404 3y ago
      FWIW I've seen managers burn down stores by pushing their employees to far in chase of those numbers. Perhaps it can work situationally, but I've not seen it anywhere I or any of my friends have worked.
      - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
        Managers burning out people chasing KPIs and promotions of their own careers, isn't anything new or exclusive to Walmart. I've seen it in every tech company I've ever worked at.
        olddustytrail 3y ago
        Then why on earth did you suggest it was good for everyone?
        FirmwareBurner 3y ago
        Slipped my mind.
      - golergka 3y ago
        If the manager burns the store down, wouldn't his KPI plummet and he get the boot eventually?
filmgirlcw 3y ago
+1 to everything you say here. The store manager track is very much a Corporate vs Retail (hourly) thing at least at the big chains. I worked retail in high school and college in the same era as you mentioned and even 20 years ago, a store manager at a Best Buy or a Costco was clearing $250k or more, at least in the wealthier-Atlanta area where I lived (I know a lot of HD employees being from Atlanta and my knowledge of corporate and sales manager salaries at HD aligns with yours too), as you said, based in part on bonuses related to store revenue (the Best Buy stores I worked at when I was 16 - 22 were two of the top-ranked stores in the southeast region by sales, with some departments being among the top 10 in the whole company). For some of the chains, I think that has decreased as in-store sales have shifted but places like Costco notoriously pay their store managers extremely well. Best Buy desperately wanted me to quit college and be fast-tracked into store or sales management (I would spend my summers as a manager of a department and they agreed to keep me at that elevated hourly wage even when I was part-time during the school year), trying to lure me with tales of just how much money the top of the foodchain people make, but I never took it seriously. Given the ebbs and flows of the economy (I graduated from college in 2008) and the collapse of the retail market from its early 2000s high in favor of ecommerce/Amazon, that was almost certainly the right decision -- but it was an instructive lesson for me at a young age about the very disparate differences in compensation between the hourly workers and the people at the top of those stores.
- eastbound 3y ago
  The Freakinomics book has a great chapter on how the police discovered accounting books of a NYC drug cartel, and its pay scale from the street watcher to the top lord was the same as at… McDonnalds (just the ratio, not the amounts). 20 years later, I reckon there was a lot of storytelling here advantaging the arguments of the right-wing, but I’d still be curious what are the true figures.
  - AtlasBarfed 3y ago
    I thought freakonomics also showed most foot soldiers made less than minimum wage.
subsubzero 3y ago
You are 100% spot on. Shrink was a huge factor for bonus payout(huge pay lever for mgmt in stores) as if you lived in a area that had high theft you never hit your bonus(shrink is the delta of actual vs. recorded inventory). That and the bonus also factored in sales volume, but shrink was a giant component of it. I remember when a few employees from a rural store came to help out they mentioned they had never not gotten a bonus, whereas my store - a urban store never received a bonus due to excessive shrink. But what I was getting at is there are positions that pay well if you hit your numbers, as a sales associate/dept. manager your pay was capped to really low numbers no matter what happened.
m463 3y ago
Home Depot stock has been very lucrative. Take a look at the historical values.
- missedthecue 3y ago
  Home Depot is the best performing stock in the S&P500 going back to 1981
  - throwaway2037 3y ago
    Literally, I Googled for: best performing stock in the S&P500 going back to 1981 The best I could find: Home Depot (HD) had the highest return in 1981 by a US stock in the S&P 500 (GSPC), returning 66.9%. [1] I think you are mistaken: That was the best single year return in 1981. It is not easy to find a single stock with the highest return since 1981. The best I could find was 20 years: Monster (energy drinks) [2] Other research shows the highest single year return on a stock ever was Qualcomm: +2620% in 1999 [3] [1] https://www.statmuse.com/money/ask/best-performing-stocks-in-the-sandp-1981 https://www.statmuse.com/money/ask/best-performing-stocks-in... [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/08/sp-500-stock-has-the-highest-return-over-the-past-20-years.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/08/sp-500-stock-has-the-highest... [3] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/top-sp-500-stocks-by-annual-returns/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/top-sp-500-stocks-by-annual...
    - missedthecue 3y ago
      Home depot has returned over a million percent since 1981. Compare that to Apple who is up about 150,000% since IPO and less since their S&P inclusion.
raydev 3y ago
> while the assistant managers I think were in the 60-80k range. Don't know how it was at Home Depot, and my experience at Walmart was ~20 years ago, but asst managers were in-building 10-12 hours/day, usually there 6 days a week for various reasons, and at that time were only making $50k salary to start. Unless there were other bonuses I was unaware of, it was absolutely not worth it. I wasn't making a living wage as an hourly associate, but they were super strict about me working beyond 40 hours, and when they "requested" beyond that (it was rare but never truly optional if I wanted to keep climbing) I was well compensated because they were terrified of lawsuits by that point. Small blessings.
- swozey 3y ago
  Yeah, asst managers lived a brutal life walking back and forth through the stores on walkie talkies all day long. I have a feeling its a lot of peoples first salaried jobs, they move up from front line to asst mgr so willing to take more abuse to not make $15/hr anymore. I was there at many points. I did that leaving HD, 12.50 to 40k in ops. I can picture the faces of all of my managers, ASMs. I can't picture the face of either of my store managers. I'm not sure I actually ever saw them. They definitely weren't in the store often. I loved my first store and HATED my second store. If you're full-time at HD you have no control of your hours at all. They'd schedule me to close 11pm-12am then open at 5am the next day at the second store. I just quit one day. I constantly got sick from getting no sleep. If you're part-time there you have 100% control of your hours. Tons of people in college who worked 2-4 hours a day. It was miserable watching them come and go.
hunter-gatherer 3y ago
I worked at Lowe's circa 2013 and this was my experience as well. One thing to note is that if you're ambitious and not incompetent, you can get pretty far career wise in retail. That was the impression I got anyways.
- swozey 3y ago
  I'm the op that worked at HD, I got out at like 20, but I have an ex who's climbing the ladder at Abercrombie (or whoever owns it) for the last 5-6 years and it seem so miserable. She's moving every 1-3 years because they transfer her to a new store, and because she's running the higher profit stores they send her to trash stores to try and fix them. She has no practically no vacation, has to fill in staff shortages, works every weekend. I think she's around 30-40k. So she's doing all this to eventually (6 years in now) break into the corporate world, where she'll then have to move 1000 miles away to I think Georgia. To... probably make 60k. I'm really curious where she'll be in 5-10 years, she's managed so many stores I feel like she'd go regional manager route or something. OR training would keep her at corporate instead.
  - wahnfrieden 3y ago
    Do you think she’s meeting the bar of ambitious and not incompetent? If so then why isn’t she reaping the rewards? Are the people working under her unambitious and incompetent?
    - swozey 3y ago
      I think corporate sees themselves on another planet from the peasants running the stores and to allow someone outside of the caste system of.. gasp, having a bachelors degrees/mbas in mass communication to work at HQ vs having worked in stores for the last 6 years bringing the company earnings is .. like a sympathy promotion if it ever happens. I don't think she'll ever wind up at corporate.
      - wahnfrieden 3y ago
anjel 3y ago
Radio shack store managers easily hit 60 (Strip Malls) to over 100k a year (Shopping malls) in the late 1970s, again thanks to performance bonuses so this is nothing new. Same long hours as retail, with way more reason to get out of bed each day. (60k in 1978 would be 280k in 2023 thanks to inflation)

by swozey 3y ago

FirmwareBurner 3y ago

>They get paid massive bonuses based on numbers their stores hit. Isn't that ... good? The demographic in every region or neighborhood is different and has different tastes, incomes and budgets, so it's your job as store manager to identify the needs of that demographic, and order merchandise and organize it on shelves, run sales, etc. in order to move as much of it as possible to maximize sales and profits. Sort of like targeted advertising but IRL and less privacy invasive. Paying based on this seems like the only way to incentivize this performance.

LegitShady 3y ago
In university before co-op, many years ago, I worked for home depot part time. the line employee profit share was really bad. the management profit share was better. They understaffed my department for long periods of time to make their numbers look better. They were making $15k/day in profit on my department but they wouldn't schedule a second employee so that there was someone there to help people when person #1 was on the saw, on the forklift, or covering lunch for the next department over too. I quit mid june after I realized they weren't hiring/scheduling more staff for the summer even though every day was very busy, constantly running between helping customers and taking care of other things. There are a lot of ways to make profit and show good metrics that aren't good for line employees.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  >There are a lot of ways to make profit and show good metrics that aren't good for line employees. Sure, but this is in line with every major (European) tech company I ever worked at. Pay employees peanuts and pay senior mangers amazing, therefore you were incentivized not to do well as an IC, but to put up with bullshit and fight your way to climb the corporate ladder to management, and then exploit the other poor schmucks who come below you with the same perverse incentive structure. Yes this leads to a huge turnover, unhappy workers, and to a lot of arguments, back-stabbings and fights. But their stocks were always rock solid and managers were always wealthy so I guess they saw that culture as a net win. It seems to be the M.O. with ever major company everywhere, I think it's called the "GE model". Paying ICs at the bottom great wages and incentivizing them with stock, is mostly unique to US/SV and new-age software start-ups from the Google/Facebook era, but rare everywhere else.
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    Ye it is strange that such anti-intuitive management style pays off. I have no clue why. I got this feeling that what's most important for a Big Bad Company is to be able to get well of with management of other Big Bad Companies to be able to land contracts.
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      >Ye it is strange that such anti-intuitive management style pays off. I have no clue why. It works because it prays and exploits several flaws in our society and in human psychology like greed, wealth inequality, conformity of the masses to cultural norms, fear of missing out/of being left out, and the crabs in the bucket mentality, which leads to a rat race to the bottom form which it's difficult to check yourself out as an individual if the majority does it and is heavily vested in it. This isn't something big bad corporations have created, it s just something that has existed for hundreds of years, they're just exploiting. The same mechanism and behaviors were in place during the communist rule in my home country 35+ years ago, when people were fighting to climb up the party ranks, because that's what gave you the best QoL. Now it's climbing the corporate ranks.
klyrs 3y ago
> Isn't that ... good? For whom?
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  For everyone?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - Shared404 3y ago
    FWIW I've seen managers burn down stores by pushing their employees to far in chase of those numbers. Perhaps it can work situationally, but I've not seen it anywhere I or any of my friends have worked.
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      Managers burning out people chasing KPIs and promotions of their own careers, isn't anything new or exclusive to Walmart. I've seen it in every tech company I've ever worked at.
      - olddustytrail 3y ago
        Then why on earth did you suggest it was good for everyone?
        FirmwareBurner 3y ago
        Slipped my mind.
    - golergka 3y ago
      If the manager burns the store down, wouldn't his KPI plummet and he get the boot eventually?

filmgirlcw 3y ago

+1 to everything you say here. The store manager track is very much a Corporate vs Retail (hourly) thing at least at the big chains. I worked retail in high school and college in the same era as you mentioned and even 20 years ago, a store manager at a Best Buy or a Costco was clearing $250k or more, at least in the wealthier-Atlanta area where I lived (I know a lot of HD employees being from Atlanta and my knowledge of corporate and sales manager salaries at HD aligns with yours too), as you said, based in part on bonuses related to store revenue (the Best Buy stores I worked at when I was 16 - 22 were two of the top-ranked stores in the southeast region by sales, with some departments being among the top 10 in the whole company). For some of the chains, I think that has decreased as in-store sales have shifted but places like Costco notoriously pay their store managers extremely well. Best Buy desperately wanted me to quit college and be fast-tracked into store or sales management (I would spend my summers as a manager of a department and they agreed to keep me at that elevated hourly wage even when I was part-time during the school year), trying to lure me with tales of just how much money the top of the foodchain people make, but I never took it seriously. Given the ebbs and flows of the economy (I graduated from college in 2008) and the collapse of the retail market from its early 2000s high in favor of ecommerce/Amazon, that was almost certainly the right decision -- but it was an instructive lesson for me at a young age about the very disparate differences in compensation between the hourly workers and the people at the top of those stores.

eastbound 3y ago
The Freakinomics book has a great chapter on how the police discovered accounting books of a NYC drug cartel, and its pay scale from the street watcher to the top lord was the same as at… McDonnalds (just the ratio, not the amounts). 20 years later, I reckon there was a lot of storytelling here advantaging the arguments of the right-wing, but I’d still be curious what are the true figures.
- AtlasBarfed 3y ago
  I thought freakonomics also showed most foot soldiers made less than minimum wage.

subsubzero 3y ago

You are 100% spot on. Shrink was a huge factor for bonus payout(huge pay lever for mgmt in stores) as if you lived in a area that had high theft you never hit your bonus(shrink is the delta of actual vs. recorded inventory). That and the bonus also factored in sales volume, but shrink was a giant component of it. I remember when a few employees from a rural store came to help out they mentioned they had never not gotten a bonus, whereas my store - a urban store never received a bonus due to excessive shrink. But what I was getting at is there are positions that pay well if you hit your numbers, as a sales associate/dept. manager your pay was capped to really low numbers no matter what happened.

m463 3y ago

Home Depot stock has been very lucrative. Take a look at the historical values.

missedthecue 3y ago
Home Depot is the best performing stock in the S&P500 going back to 1981
- throwaway2037 3y ago
  Literally, I Googled for: best performing stock in the S&P500 going back to 1981 The best I could find: Home Depot (HD) had the highest return in 1981 by a US stock in the S&P 500 (GSPC), returning 66.9%. [1] I think you are mistaken: That was the best single year return in 1981. It is not easy to find a single stock with the highest return since 1981. The best I could find was 20 years: Monster (energy drinks) [2] Other research shows the highest single year return on a stock ever was Qualcomm: +2620% in 1999 [3] [1] https://www.statmuse.com/money/ask/best-performing-stocks-in-the-sandp-1981 https://www.statmuse.com/money/ask/best-performing-stocks-in... [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/08/sp-500-stock-has-the-highest-return-over-the-past-20-years.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/08/sp-500-stock-has-the-highest... [3] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/top-sp-500-stocks-by-annual-returns/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/top-sp-500-stocks-by-annual...
  - missedthecue 3y ago
    Home depot has returned over a million percent since 1981. Compare that to Apple who is up about 150,000% since IPO and less since their S&P inclusion.

raydev 3y ago

> while the assistant managers I think were in the 60-80k range. Don't know how it was at Home Depot, and my experience at Walmart was ~20 years ago, but asst managers were in-building 10-12 hours/day, usually there 6 days a week for various reasons, and at that time were only making $50k salary to start. Unless there were other bonuses I was unaware of, it was absolutely not worth it. I wasn't making a living wage as an hourly associate, but they were super strict about me working beyond 40 hours, and when they "requested" beyond that (it was rare but never truly optional if I wanted to keep climbing) I was well compensated because they were terrified of lawsuits by that point. Small blessings.

swozey 3y ago
Yeah, asst managers lived a brutal life walking back and forth through the stores on walkie talkies all day long. I have a feeling its a lot of peoples first salaried jobs, they move up from front line to asst mgr so willing to take more abuse to not make $15/hr anymore. I was there at many points. I did that leaving HD, 12.50 to 40k in ops. I can picture the faces of all of my managers, ASMs. I can't picture the face of either of my store managers. I'm not sure I actually ever saw them. They definitely weren't in the store often. I loved my first store and HATED my second store. If you're full-time at HD you have no control of your hours at all. They'd schedule me to close 11pm-12am then open at 5am the next day at the second store. I just quit one day. I constantly got sick from getting no sleep. If you're part-time there you have 100% control of your hours. Tons of people in college who worked 2-4 hours a day. It was miserable watching them come and go.

hunter-gatherer 3y ago

I worked at Lowe's circa 2013 and this was my experience as well. One thing to note is that if you're ambitious and not incompetent, you can get pretty far career wise in retail. That was the impression I got anyways.

swozey 3y ago
I'm the op that worked at HD, I got out at like 20, but I have an ex who's climbing the ladder at Abercrombie (or whoever owns it) for the last 5-6 years and it seem so miserable. She's moving every 1-3 years because they transfer her to a new store, and because she's running the higher profit stores they send her to trash stores to try and fix them. She has no practically no vacation, has to fill in staff shortages, works every weekend. I think she's around 30-40k. So she's doing all this to eventually (6 years in now) break into the corporate world, where she'll then have to move 1000 miles away to I think Georgia. To... probably make 60k. I'm really curious where she'll be in 5-10 years, she's managed so many stores I feel like she'd go regional manager route or something. OR training would keep her at corporate instead.
- wahnfrieden 3y ago
  Do you think she’s meeting the bar of ambitious and not incompetent? If so then why isn’t she reaping the rewards? Are the people working under her unambitious and incompetent?
  - swozey 3y ago
    I think corporate sees themselves on another planet from the peasants running the stores and to allow someone outside of the caste system of.. gasp, having a bachelors degrees/mbas in mass communication to work at HQ vs having worked in stores for the last 6 years bringing the company earnings is .. like a sympathy promotion if it ever happens. I don't think she'll ever wind up at corporate.
    - wahnfrieden 3y ago

anjel 3y ago

Radio shack store managers easily hit 60 (Strip Malls) to over 100k a year (Shopping malls) in the late 1970s, again thanks to performance bonuses so this is nothing new. Same long hours as retail, with way more reason to get out of bed each day. (60k in 1978 would be 280k in 2023 thanks to inflation)