Pros
The atmosphere at T-mobile is the best part about working there. The people you meet and the friends you make would be what I would describe as phenomenal. I worked at many different stores during my time at T-Mobile and I still have contact with a majority of those people more so than any other job I ever had. It's really the team that you are surrounded with that keeps you going when the going gets tough. I've really liked most of the managers that I worked for with the company as well. Like with any job they all have their own styles that work for some and not others but again, that can probably be said with any job. The company has pretty good benefits as well. I have had better (i.e. cheaper) benefits at other companies in the same industry. The employee phone benefit plan was one of those perks. They allow you to purchase a phone at a pretty good discounted price (which you can usually pay on your bill) and the discounts get better the longer you are with the company. The Health/dental are pretty standard I guess. The 401k is pretty standard as well with company matching. PTO is accrued based on how much you work and is awarded every pay period. You start to accrue more the longer you are with the company
Cons
The starting hourly pay for a retail sales rep is completely unacceptable in my opinion. They are not competitive and at least in my experience, they don't care how much experience you have. You do have potential to earn more based on your sales performance, but I know from personal experience that other companies offer more per hour and very similar commission standards. Depending on what market/city you work in, favoritism can play a big role in whether or not you can get a promotion. A promotion from part-time to full-time can take like an act of congress. This company cares nothing about seniority. The only thing seniority gets you is a better price on a phone and you start to accrue more vacation time, which by the way, is solely based on who requested the time off first. In other jobs I've had, requests for time off (for instance around summer holidays) usually were granted or not, based on seniority. They have lots of issues at the top. DT does not want them anymore which is why they were trying to sell to Att. They make huge mistakes in marketing and promotion. T-Mobile was the first company to carry andriod devices and before Verizon came in and started advertising, most people probably didn't even know what android was. In fact most people confuse android (the OS) and the droid ( an actual phone that also ran android OS) because of the success of Verizon's ad campaigns. Big miss by T-Mobile. There were various other misses by T-Mobile similar to this which probably led to the ousting of the CEO maybe a year or so back. They are in a very strange place as a company right now. Before I left there was not a lot of defined company goals and order largely based on the impending merger. I would have to imagine it to be a lot worse, seeing as how the merger fell through and DT is stuck with dead weight that they don't want. The way promotions are handled is almost a joke. You get promoted from part to fulltime based on your sales performance which is understandable. From there however, it's anybodies guess. The next step up is Sales lead. I have seen people who may not be necessarily qualified to lead but have had sales success get promoted to this position. I have seen people with the company only six months get promoted to this position because maybe they had a good couple months of sales. The thing that factors into sales besides talent is location. If you get hired into a store that does tremendous volume, of course you're going to put up big numbers. That does not make one qualified for leadership.
