Best Buy Reviews in Chicago, IL Area

Pros

Communicating with customers, learning about new products and features, using your knowledge from training, being able to complete a large sale.

Cons

Required to walk a lot, cannot stand around even if it's not a busy day, you are required to get items from the warehouse yourself.

Advice to Senior Management

Even though it is a non commissioned environment, more incentives for sales associates who do exceptionally well would be nice.

Pros

Good full time employee benefits

Cons

Pressured sales in a non commission environment, lack of knowledgeable upper management, terrible company to work for.

Advice to Senior Management

Show your employees they care, and that will reflect in numbers.

Pros

Customers and the fast paced environment. Being around technology all day is fun and exciting, you get to see the latest stuff all the time!

Cons

All the garbage that you have to put up with, I have been here four plus years and every year it gets worse. There are virtually no opportunites to advance, they are beginning to down size stores and cut management. There are only a quarter of supervisor spots left from what there used to be. Basically Best Buy cannot keep up with the competition, leveraging all their profits through Best Buy Moblie. I promise you this in the next five years look for Best Buy to close larger stores and open smaller community stores and stand alone Best Buy Mobile.

Advice to Senior Management

Don't listen to coroporate, they may do the research but it is up to you to meet the needs for the demographics in your area. Ya'll are a bunch of yuppies.

Pros

Fair compensation in leadership positions along with great benefits. Great for anyone interested in working with technology on a day to day operation.

Cons

Hours and worklife balance are on the con side. Particularly in management roles when some weeks you can log 80+ hours.

Advice to Senior Management

Develop a stronger worklife balance in higher management positions and invest more in line level compensation and competitve sales structure.

Pros

If FT, you will have teh hours, but nothing more

Cons

Words are hard to describe how negatively I feel having worked 7 years at the same Best Buy store.

My background: Worked 5 years PT while going to school. My goal was to complete my MGMT degree and grow from within and get to be a GM.

I tried to move up for 2 years to no avail. Not only are the cutting back and having me do the "Senior" work for CS money, but I was passed up for every promotion possible.

Bottom line, this a good get-by gig but you will be over-worked and under paid. Do not expect anything more.

Advice to Senior Management

Address the turnover and give employees a reason to stay. There is no recognition or motivating factors in place. Store management does not care about you and the "longer you stay, the worse you get". This is a quote from my former GM.

There is no place for advancement and Operations needs to be restructured as a department. Why create unofficial titles like "Power Rep 2"? If Senior and Ops Sup are the only supposed openers and closers for the dept, who is supposed to do the other uncovered shift?

Pros

Being able to assist people who look for it, being up to date on the latest technology, providing solutions for the customers best experience possible.

Cons

Forced to push credit cards, discount has pretty much been abandoned, being scolded when nobody wants to spend money during this recession.

Advice to Senior Management

Blaming sales associates for the company's revenue problems is not the answer, it just makes management look like most retail management teams, which is not a good thing for the morale of the store.

Pros

Great discounts along with working in an environment in which your team members become your friends. Easy to work around school, especially in certain departments where there are many people that can switch shifts with you.

Cons

After leadership changed in the Niles store, it has made it difficult for many associates to stay engaged in continuing to strive at Best Buy, making it a more commission like environment without the pay incentive.

Advice to Senior Management

Keep up the good work in progressing into a much better store than recent years, but many great performing sales associates are slowly lacking in their performances due to the lacking capabilities of moving up, as well as the environment some supervisors create with their staff

Pros

make great friends, feels like a family, pay is okay. learn a lot about business and technology.

Cons

hard to move up need to kiss mgmt's ass. can be like high school lots of drama. customers can be annoying. gets really busy during the holiday season.

Advice to Senior Management

hold each other accountable. treat everyone equally.

Pros

Big employee discount on all items but Apple products

Cons

Management does not care about the employees

Pros

The people that the company can and are fun to work with, they are friendly and most of them are really receptive to be properly coached and trained to provide people with great experiences.
Having worked for this company for years and making great friends and how fun this place can be at times makes it enticing to work here.

Cons

The single fact that 90% of current leadership is lacking maturity and knowledge as to how to respectfully lead a group. Focused more on the title than the actions. and the fact that communications between employees and management is more focused on who management favors, instead of who should receive coaching or praise.

Advice to Senior Management

Step up. Do not be a chairman, in regards to how to show your team how to properly take care of problems.