RECORD STORE TALES PART 129:  Moneytalks

Are you a young person working in the world of retail?  Have you been offered a raise and a salary instead of hourly wages?

If you answered “yes” to both those questions, then sit right back and you’ll hear a tale.

I never much liked working Saturdays, for two reasons.  One, it was the longest, busiest shift.  Second, when I worked alone at least I picked the music.  Saturdays we had two people on, because it was the busiest day.  More often than not, I didn’t think much of the music the other people picked.

I mean, I hope it’s obvious by now — I’m a rocker!  Unfortunately I didn’t work with many other rockers.  On the other hand, they didn’t think much of my Journey discs.  We actually later wrote it into the training manual — try not to knowingly pick music that your co-workers disliked!  That narrowed the scope for me!

But as I said, Saturdays were our busiest days.  Makes sense — kids are off school, a lot of other people have the day off — why not pick up tunes for the weekend?

One day, the boss called a staff meeting.  He was giving us store managers a raise, and a salary.  The only catch?  We had to work one extra Saturday per month.   They decided (and logically so) that our best people needed to be working on our busiest days.  Therefore managers must work a minimum of two Saturdays a month.  Makes sense.  Previously we were only working one Saturday per month, and I knew that it was a free ride of sorts.  I wasn’t surprised when it ended, although it definitely meant less cottage time.

Later that week, T-Rev called me.

“Have you done the math on your new salary yet?”

“No,” I answered.  “Why?”

“Well,” he explained, “Even though he called it a raise, when you account for the extra Saturday we’re working, we’re actually making less money per hour now.”

“No shit,” I answered.  “That sucks.”  Once we were on salary, we couldn’t go back.

Salaries came with all sorts of interesting loopholes.  For example, as managers if we couldn’t get someone to work a shift and we were short people, it usually fell on us to work the hours.  Now, we weren’t getting paid extra to do it anymore.  Another new duty that came with the salary was stock transfers:  Driving stock around town to another store in rush-hour traffic.  The gas in your tank and miles on your car?  “That’s all a part of your salary”.

Not to mention all the extra hours I started to do in training duty  and putting out fires, and the aforementioned twice-weekly stock deliveries.  I did the math one time — you don’t wanna know how much more money I would have made on my old hourly wage!  Enough to buy several of those new Iron Maiden picture disc sets!

So, young grasshoppers:  if you too find yourselves pinned on the horns of a dilemma like this, think hard on your options!