Leonard
New Jersey,#2UPDATE EX-employee responds
Wed, February 08, 2012
But... It's not their fault. It's the fault of store management and upper management. STS underpays their techs, plain and simple, and then they promise them the world with their 'commission program', but when the profitable jobs come into the shop, management just gives these jobs to the techs who are not on the commission program. The techs who ARE on the commission program are left with the unsavory choice of... ripping people off.
The district managers are all pitted against one another. This makes them push the store managers, who in turn push the techs. Management doesn't want to know what you are doing... If you get caught, they will try to help you out, if you are pulling in the 'numbers'; if you aren't, you get left out to 'flop in the wind'. If your numbers fall behind, you get reprimanded. This reprimand goes all the way up the food chain, from tech, to store manager, to district manager.
STS is starting to shy away from actually 'fixing' cars. They are moving towards just doing tires, alignments, and fluid maintenance. Those are the things that you can train a monkey to do. They don't want to pay their top techs top dollar, they want to hire kids out of school and pay them nothing to do tires, alignmenets, and fluid changes. With the new alignment machines, you don't even have to know anything about cars; the machine tells you exactly what to do!
I saw one guy get bounced around from shop to shop because he wasn't pulling in the numbers. Do you know what his problem was? He had integrity. He couldn't sell people oil flushes (which are useless!), or any other of the fluid services. He couldn't sell rotors and calipers on every brake job. He couldn't sell belts, tires, or cabin air filters on every oil change. He had integrity. He cared for his customers. That landed him onto the unemployment line when the big mass exodus happened in the fall of '09. Companies used the economy as an excuse to get rid of what they thought was the 'dead wood'. STS was on the crest of that trend.
Find yourself a local guy. Someone that you can trust. Stay away from the STSs of the world, the Pep Boys, the Sears, the Midases, the Goodyears, the Firestones. Sometimes the local guy can rip you off too. Hey, it's not a perfect world! But... the odds are better that you are being ripped off by the ones that I mentioned above! I worked at STS... for a long time. I got out, and I'm doing much better now!
Do your homework, ask around, check out this site, reasearch! You'll find the good guys, they're out there! Peace!