Thanks for all your help guys.

Hey WMR! What's up?? You asked how I am, I ain't gonna lie, my life has sunk kinda low!

 

Things are well here, sorry to hear you're at a low spot. I hope things improve for you very soon.

 

Thanks. I'm getting ready to go job scoping today. The plan is to hit up a Volvo dealer (yick) and a food plant... I would love working in a factory!!

Hopefully this week will be better though. I'm looking forward to bowling league tomorrow night!!

What's goin' on in your neck o' the woods?

 

Hope you get one of the jobs you're after, good luck!

I got a job about a month ago. With the kids all moved out I was starting to get bored I'm working at a convenience store. Last week was a bad week, my beater rig that I was using to drive to work conked out and I'm now having to take the F150 to work every day. Then my 14 year old cat died. I was heartbroken. I had gotten a kitten about 2 months ago and she is helping to fill the void. Here she is, her name is Cricket and she's quite a little troublemaker!!



That's about all that's really new, everything else is just same sheet different day, ya know?!

 

I've got a 20 and 23 year old you can keep. All they need is plenty of food and a place to snowboard in the winter and wakeboard in the summer. If they stay over a year I'll split their food bill with ya. If they stay 5 years I'll reimburse 75% of the food bill. If they stay 10 years they're all yours.

 

I have a 20 and 25 year old, so no thanks!! Are yours still living at home?

 

aww! She is cute! What kinda beater rig are you driving?

 

Suzuki Samurai I reckon..

 

Yes they are. No signs of them ever leaving.

 

Actually I haven't even gotten to drive the Samurai yet. It's with my husband at his current duty station. He'll be bringing it home sometime in November. I've been driving our '85 Ranger pickup but the starter went out on it, something I could replace myself but the thing has had an oil leak for. . .well forever. . .and the starter is well coated with oil, dirt, more oil and probably a few other yucky things as well. Call me a wimp, it's just not that important to me to crawl under there and get coated myself!

You could always do what we did with our youngest. When we transferred from Cordova, AK to Juneau, AK he was starting his senior year in high school. He didn't want to change schools for his final year so we left him in Cordova with friends. See, if they won't move away from you then you just move away from them!!

 

[QUOTE=Quintin]Parts is a tough gig. Most parts guys are paid a base salary (which usually isn't much more than minimum wage), plus a commission off whatever they sell. Sometimes this commission is 100% on what you and only you sell, sometimes this commission is pooled together and divided amongst all the parts personel regardless of who sells what and when. "The ability to lift 50 lbs" and "valid driver's license required" means that'll you'll also be stocking shelves and/or delivering/receiving parts from other shops and dealerships in town.

Where you work the counter and how depends on the dealer's setup; some larger dealers have dedicated staff that work the retail side, working with walk in customers and DIY'ers and such, and a dedicated staff that works the back counter, the counter that serves the service and parts departments. Smaller stores will have you doing both.

You'll be responsible for accurately ordering and selling parts - again, depending on the dealer, there's different policies in place for this. At the place I work at, if the wrong part is ordered, Ford charges a percentage of the part's list price as a restocking fee. Our parts department is only allocated a set amount of money each month to return parts, and when that money is gone before the month is up, with parts that still need to be returned, money to pay the restocking fee is taken out of the parts department's profit, which will affect their commission negatively. And Ford actively checks the inventories of parts departments, and it looks bad (both to Ford and the dealer principal) having wrong parts lying around that they can't sell - I think Ford calls this "dormant stock."

In addition, you'll also be catching flak from:

• Pissed off technicians who want to know what's taking so long, why haven't you pulled their parts yet, they've only turned 1 hour this morning and you're holding them up, wait, no, you gave them the wrong part, you don't know what you're doing, they give you the part back and they destroyed the label and barcode when opening the package, meaning that you can't send the part in question back to Ford for credit or you can't resell the part as new because it's already been opened...
• Service advisors, who want you to order some goofy *** part priority overnight for a customer who doesn't want to pay priority overnight charges (which further takes away from your profit), oh, and BTW, they want you to sell the part at cost +10%, because the customer is a good friend of theirs (taking even more away from your profit), and then when this part shows up, they didn't mention that their customer was in the military, and military families move around a lot, so this part that you practically ate the shipping on is now "dormant stock." Let's make it something expensive, like a catalytic converter (about $800-1000 list), which means that you ate the shipping, now you're gonna have to eat the restocking fee with Ford, or keep it in your inventory which you may or may not sell further on down the road...
• Goofy walk-in customers who want dumb things like roof racks for their '72 Pinto wagons, and who'll cuss you out and call you a crook for charging them some outrageous price for a part that they could have bought from Autozone for a third of the price (and you're muttering, "If that's the case, why the f'k didn't you go to Autozone?!)...
• Service managers, who want to know why Mr. Smith's part hasn't shown up yet, despite you telling them that it's D99'ed for national backorder, and that there's nothing you can do - and as such, the managers read you the riot act, talking about how this customer has cussed the dealership up and down, written dirty letters to Ford about how much we suck, and has done everything short of threatening to burn the building down and poop on the ashes...

Amongst a bunch of other annoyances. Parts guys have the second toughest job in the store, the toughest being service advisor. Now, this ain't the blueprint for every parts department in the country, but I'll bet dollars to donuts that it matches up closely to a lot of 'em. I almost transferred to parts about a year and a half ago - there is the potential to make a good living, you form a lot of friendships with people in high places all over your area, and sometimes, it's fun.[/QUOTE

The service cashier is a tough job...customers get their bills...and you can hear them yelling at the poor cashier.

Pooling commissions: A bad idea...because only one or two guys sell...the rest relax. I worked with a guy once at Crenshaw Motors in LA. This dealer was the largest stocking dealer in SoCal. It was a sweat shop...but the pay was pretty good.

This dummy would wait on one customer...then take a tour throughout the entire store...and it was spread out everywhere. This took 10 minutes or so...then he's come back and wait on another.

The mgr finally caught on and he was history.