retail sales associate

sales associate

repair technician

management trainee

customer service representative

Batteries Plus Bulbs

There are a lot of things wrong with this company.
  
1. The Management.
    The management of this company is downright awful. The owner insists in being involved in every little aspect of the company down to which side of the counter a clipboard is sitting on. They demand that things be done or organized their way even though it makes absolutely no sense when put into practice during the work day. They are also incredibly bitter whenever anyone leaves the company. I put in a written two week notice and the owner didn't bother to say a single word to me even after my five year employment with the company. The store managers are nice enough but are supposed to be available to call when an issue goes down. This is not the case. I've found it difficult to contact the managers multiple times when needed on weekends or after they've left for the day.

2. The Work Day.
    The day it self was what you could expect from any retail environment. Lots of customers wanting things. The issue arises when you realize there are no scheduled lunches or breaks for the entirety of your shift. You're expected to eat your lunch on the clock and to be helping customers when needed which meant, more often than not, your lunch was either cold or ended up becoming dinner. Breaks are supposed to be available as well, but due to the owner's policy of "If you have time to lean, you have time to clean" the only way to truly get a break from the work flow is to have a nicotine addiction. The worst part though was the expectations at closing time. The store wanted to help customer's as much as possible (very understandable) and would allow any customers in the store to finish up before locking the door. This isn't the issue. The big problem comes from the expectation to let customers in and continue to help them. Even after the doors have been locked. This was the requirement until you physically set the alarm and left the building. If you're halfway through counting down the register and there's a knock at your door. Expect to start that count over in anywhere from 5-20 minutes once the customer has finished. Staying more than an hour after close was not an uncommon occurrence. This only added to the gruelingly long work days they required. Being anything more than a base level associate meant working a mandatory 42-45 hours a week or risk getting written up for refusing the overtime.

3. The Processes.
    The hardest part of actually working at the store was the constantly changing procedures. Processes and required documentation changed almost weekly. This made it nearly impossible for not only the salesmen to stay up to date on the procedure, but getting assistance from the store managers was difficult as well. With 6 different locations and a different manager at each one, their own procedures were unique and only added to the confusion of the changing company wide processes.

4. The Pay and Benefits
    The compensation at this company is nothing livable. As a high schooler getting a first job, you'd be earning better pay at a big box store or fast food chain. The most insulting part of this is that they did not give cost of living increases and any pay raise earned was likely to be in the range of 25 cents. The paid training they require is nice, but I saw my fair share of new recruits who could sense the bad vibes halfway through and bailed after only a few weeks. Holiday pay is a complete joke. They close for 4 holidays during the year. On these closed days, you only got paid if you worked that same day of the week as the day they closed. You could have up to 6 hours of pay that day if you worked that same day the last 6 weeks. If you don't work Thursdays, you're not getting paid for Thanksgiving. Period. On the holidays that they do stay open for, they run a skeleton crew with reduce hours. But hey, you do get time and a half for those few hours, so that's something. They also offer 48 hours paid vacation each year, (side note, they don't pay out unused vacation when leaving the company for any reason) but it's difficult to schedule; much like any amount of time off requested. They would schedule shifts 3-4 weeks out and once the day was on your schedule, you were not allowed to request it off. If you wanted so much as a single day off, it would need to be requested before the schedule was written. Don't let this fool you into thinking the schedule was anywhere near finalized though. If you wanted to keep a day off that you were not scheduled to work in a given week, you were expected to specifically request that day to not be scheduled. If you did not take this precaution, it could be changed without warning or notification to you. This includes after schedules are supposedly "locked" and should not be able to be adjusted further. Employee's showing up at wrong days/times/stores happened a fair bit due to schedule changes made by the owner after the schedules were posted. This wouldn't be a big deal, except that at no time were these changes communicated to the employee's they affected or their direct managers. One nice thing is that the company does offer sales incentives. Small bonuses, usually ranging from $0.25-$5.00 for selling/upselling specific items or categories. Though they had a strict rule that ANY error on the ticket would make that bonus null and void. Misspelling a word or capitalizing the wrong thing and say goodbye to your bonus. Just more money in the company's pockets.

Now on to the upsides with the company. I'll keep this short, as the list is just that.

The employee's you work with are generally pretty great. That was far and away the best part of the job and made every day bearable. The customers were always wildcards and there's a few that stood out to me over the years. 

The employee discount is another great perk. I won't say exactly what it is, but it helped me relamp 4 houses in my time there.
    
To summarize, don't work there. It has far more downsides than up and I constantly question what ever drove me to stay as long as I did.

A typical day at Batteries Plus would either start one of two ways for me, either had to clean up another individual's mess or I was being yelled at for another individual's mess and I had to fix it. Now when I say mess I would be more accurate in saying a broken device, a dirty floor, an area not cleaned, a pallet of cores not organized, the list goes on. The Manager of my main store, had an ego the size of New York. constantly berated me for others short comings and expected me to handle every issue. Granted I would do my very best to accomplish this, even to the point of staying late and covering shifts from employees calling in or not even showing up. I handled almost all of the upset customers and even settled drawn out disputes over prices. My point being is that the company hired, during my tenure, some pretty poor managers. I also want to make a point that this franchise owned multiple stores, 7 in fact. We were expected to work from store to store, normally not an issue. But the system is so disorganized that when an employee comes in for his shift to a store he/she is not normally at, they must handle the problems left behind from the previous day without any knowledge before hand. 

If I have anything positive to say about this company it's that the district manager was a very kind and understanding person. He would listen to your issues and try to accommodate everyone. Whether it involved a shift change, PTO, or even an emergency, this man was top notch. Reviews happened often enough that the pay was decent and up to date based on your skills, except near the end for me. I was training to be the assistant manager for our franchise, often enough I would run stores in place of the manager, and found myself over whelmed with constant and unexpected shift changes and stress filled days with paperwork I was not trained in to file and oversee. Customer issues I had no foreknowledge of came out of nowhere. My point is that for all the extra work I was doing, I wasn't being paid enough. Constant management work and associate pay, it's not ethical by any means.

The bonus system had you believe that opportunity for an extra bump in your pay was easily achievable. Wrong, the high volume stores set the bar for target bonus sales goals, which made the medium to low traffic stores nigh impossible to hit. Also, doing all the extra manager work and tech work left little time for sales.

Very little training and had to learn product and equipment use on the fly or by another associate when i first started. If you didn't have a knack for speaking, then you would fall on your face consistently. Daily emails would shower the top sales associates with admiration, leaving anyone who wasn't in the top 8 berated and even phone called to find out why daily numbers where not met. And believe me telling the owner that you had a pile of tech work was no excuse for not selling anything. The hardest part of this job was learning new equipment or handling product that required safety gear, because there wasn't any! I went through more pairs of clothes and uniforms, due to acid holes, than anywhere else I've worked.

The workplace environment with other employees was very comfortable and easy to manage. A few individuals made daily work life difficult, but that is anywhere you work.

I will end this review with one more thing, I do believe there is opportunity here for a decent career, just not with the franchise I worked for.

I worked for Batteries Plus Bulbs for just about a year. They trained me out of denver for like 3 months until they moved me to the actual store i applied for. During that time i had already witnessed a manager be fired for poor mangement skills as well as managing a side business during work hours. The next manager they brought in was not much better either, he never realized he was constantly making me do the same work and there would be little to no collaboration from the other staff members and he'd get upset with me because id remind him im not the only one who can organize shelves or dust(which i did despite having allergies) so i moved stores and thought things would turn around but they brought that same manager to the store closer to me and from day one since he started there i had 3 other employees come and tell me he was planning to fire me. I confronted him about it one morning and he denied it. I also brought it to the district managers attention and he dismissed me saying "well he says you give him alot of back talk" which was the one occurrence i mentioned. This was about 6 months into the job and at this point they finally decided to send me to train in repairing phones up in longmont and thankfully they paid the mileage for that but the training could barely be accomodated at the store i was sent to because we'd be very busy. Id be training on an iphone then fixing keyfobs simultaneously and they expected me to learn samsung and iphone repairs all in one day. I half expected to be sent to a somewhat official training seminar or something to that effect to learn the training in a relaxed evironment come to find they used to provide that but stopped because of one person..... and so i continued for another 6 months until i couldn't take it anymore and offered a 1 week notice after explaining to my district manager how i couldn't manage the stress anymore he responded promptly "well you're just not cut out for retail." and asked me to finish out the following week (which i did) even tho 2 weeks notice is a courtesy and 90 percent of employees i worked with quit without any notice whatsoever also before i forget while i agreed with the fairness of my decision i was basically stonewalled into doing it because he said if i did not i would not have his recommendation when i felt personally 1 week notice was more than satisfactory given everything i went through. Also another thing they tried to do to improve our sales and get employees to try and sell more was offer "spiffs" which was like an extra bit of money you'd receive for selling over a certain amount as well as it being posted for everyone to see in-store, i never once saw one even though i know for a fact i sold enough to receive one, more than once and no one i ever worked with got one either in that entire year...

The current manager at Lake Zurich BP296 is the ONLY reason I have stayed as long as I have. If I based this company purely on the pay/benefits... it would be one of the worst places I have worked at. There is no career advancement beyond maybe ASM to SM. I have watched the management culture change at the top to get worse and worse, and they hire off the street white collar instead of promoting from within. I have watched the door swing over and over. When I started in 2014, we have five people running this location. They have expanded services and cut labor budgets, so now we run this location with three people which is sadly the norm for this company. Less people getting paid the same, to do more work. The spiffs have been cut by over 50% and the only I have stayed as long was to finish my degree. I couldn't imagine being in another store with a constantly changing schedule. I wish I would've quit and moved on years ago. To their credit I received a little bit of tuition assistance (but wasn't told I was qualified for it until I was here over two years!)

They do offer insurance which is nice, but unless you're living with family the pay is not enough for someone to provide a living for themselves. Its really sad how little you make. You used to be able to cover that gap a bit with what you sold/repaired. The PTO is great, afforded it is approved, and in a retail environment with a declining labor budget to have adequate coverage at a store- good luck.

When I started we sold batteries and lights, and the only services were car installations and drill pack rebuilds. Now, they expect phone/computer repair, key cutting and automobile key programming on top of everything else. There is used to be much more freedom for the store teams to merchandise what was profitable and what worked. Now there is a insane amount of micromanagement from the District managers. They don't even let the SM's run their own stores without a daily checklist they now have to perform.

Depending on the store it be can dead for a couple hours which is nice for a mental break, but it is a good reminder you're in a dead end job. I learned a immense amount of how not to do/run things and how to not manage poor employees. 

This job is only really good for those people who like to get comfortable in a slow paced job, and no desire to go up or down the chain of command to make more money and earn more responsibilities. If you're a young collage/high school student, great place of work. If you're a young adult with a desire to work a career, find a career... this is only a job.

At first, everything seemed fairly normal and upbeat. The first week was spent helping me become familiar with the store and employees, doing computer training, traveling to other stores and meeting other managers, and being shown how to open the store. I was feeling pretty good and then the second week started and it went south very quickly from there. 

You are given the position of General Manager, but you are never actually allowed to make decisions or be the manager. Your boss(the Area Manager) works of the same store and will be there with you every single day. I was told several times that he and I needed to be on the same page, but he would always override every decision I would make and really caused a rift between us. As if that's not bad enough, HIS boss also visits the store all the time, as does the actual owner of the store(who really doesn't care much anymore.) And non of them have different ways of  doing things, so it's very confusing for myself and my employees to know what way is right. 

The workload here is so heavy that after I left they were actually hiring 2 additional people to handle all the responsibilities that I was expected to do all by myself. Not only was I expected to handle all retail oriented tasks, but also expected to handle all commercial customers too... all the while trying to find time to coach and train employees, do the monotonous checklists that they require you to do every single day that are ridiculously redundant and inefficient, and direct traffic in the store during heavy business hours(10am-2pm). Needless to say, it's overwhelming and given the fact that they offer ZERO training on all of this, it's pretty much a sink or swim environment. But don't trust that they will help you "swim" because they won't. 

I really enjoyed getting to know the other employees and I still communicate with some of them. They do the best they can with what they have even though they know they will never be promoted or have any upward mobility due to the upper management. 

This environment was extremely crude and hostile at times also and if they actually had an HR department, I would have reported upper-management several times for things that happened in my store. It's very difficult to be a manager when you have someone telling you that everything you do is wrong and offering ZERO praise and 100% negativity all the time. 

This company could be so much better, but honestly, I wouldn't waste your time. They don't care about you and you will be glad you listened to me.

I worked under Sree for nearly 7 months from 2017-2018, and in that time he lost his Assistant Manager, who he refused to fire despite him not showing up at all from the ending of November to the beginning of February (That's right, Sree kept him on the schedule for 3 months of no-call no-show before finally firing him officially), and relied on me (a Sales Associate making $8.00/hr) to be the stand-in Assistant Manager. I was promised a raise and a promotion around two to three times from December-January when I was working around the clock during the holiday and again when he was leaving on a personal trip to India, and never saw or heard of either opportunity again.

Sree then had to step out for nearly a month and a half for health related issues, which is understandable, and again I was left with much of the out-of-paygrade responsibilities. During my employment with the company, I was not once reimbursed for the extra duties, or a recipient of any commendation, promotion or anything else along the lines. The only thing I ever received that was considered "extra" was when I turned in my incentives for cell phone screen repair or battery replacement, which sometimes added up to $100 - $200ish extra dollars on my paycheck, and that was if we even had business for the two week period. 

This job would be perfect for someone in college, because it is slow-paced and once everything was done (opening, cleaning and organizing), you usually had it pretty slow for the rest of the day. I was able to bring my laptop and work on homework or watch Netflix on the ridiculously slow days without much of an issue for a majority of the time I worked there, which is one of the few positives of employment here.

However, be prepared to have to flip over frequently as Sree has a tendency to want you to enforce his policy of,"No returns on opened batteries/purchased batteries," and the moment a customer complains to him he immediately flips for the customer without much of a push. He's seldom stood his ground and it tends to make you look like an idiot when he does.

Finally, his wife is relatively shady. I've heard rumors that she actually is the owner of the franchise and her husband, Sree, is just a manager however I can't really confirm that at this time as I do not know, still. On the local Yelp page, they use different accounts to leave positive reviews about their business. A customer even had to call them out when leaving a negative review.

All in all, I'd advise against anyone looking for a healthy work environment from applying here. If you like low pay and being isolated for long periods of time (If a coworker doesn't show up to their shift), then this job could satisfy you.

If I wrote this review a couple years ago, then I probably would have given a higher rating but things are declining faster now more than ever. Back in September, they implemented a big structural repositioning and many roles changed. They also laid off a lot of people, some of who had been with the company for 20+ years. This is when things started to really go down hill. They have been introducing new programs and things to try and grow the business which is great but it seems like no one cares about the quality of work going into it. I love being able to use my knowledge to provide support to the stores but lately, with all the new programs, there are a lot of things that I don't have knowledge about but yet we are being listed as the point of contact for things that we don't have the answers to. When I try to reach out for more information, I barely ever get a response. Part of my job is to voice concerns that the stores have but when I do, it seems like no one takes it seriously or wants to take any action to do something about it. I wish the product managers in charge of this stuff would want to involve us more since we work more closely with the stores than they seem to.
The employee morale, at least in my department, is at an all time low. I think this mainly is due to lack of reward for effort and management not doing anything to keep people on task, even though there is plenty to go around. Right now, its really just me and one or two other people who are taking on the majority of the work load, while the others get to sit around and slack off.
I haven't always been the greatest employee but I've always been good at what I do and over the years , I've tried countless times to go above and beyond to prove my worth but it seems to always go unoticed. My direct supervisor got better about complimenting my work but that still does not seem to translate when it comes to promotions or pay increases. I make enough to live pretty comfortably but I don't think I'm getting what I am worth and the benefits are nice, but expensive. I'm paying alot for very average health insurance. The company is very flexible about using PTO and they have special resource groups like Women's Empowerment who host events and stuff like that, which I think is awesome but if the day-to-day job is lacking then no one is going to want to be involved in those things. 
My overall experience with the company has not been bad but small things are starting to add up more and more. I know that most of the problems I mentioned are probably pretty common with coorprate jobs, or any job really but I am starting to consider trying my luck somewhere else. 

If you enjoy a loud and boisterous environment with friendly people, Batteries + might be for you. 

However if you do not enjoy having no future promotion opportunities and a pay cut to actually take the promotion if offered as a normality, then it may not be for you. 

There is also a problem with management feeling superior to their employees. There is a consistent environment of condescending condemnation. If you don't come in to the job knowing what you need to know, you will be made to know your place. Whether it be through punitive measures, or a consistent air of superiority that leads you to feel incompetent and small, the management will have you covered and ensure you know your place.

Do you have a lot of experience elsewhere? Leave it there, it doesn't matter here. It is irrelevant to the company. They have no care nor concern whether you are the pope or a drug-addict. If you don't have a manager tag and a long sleeve shirt, your all equal here. Again, leave that experience at the door, you won't need it here. 

Are you one of those people that enjoys going to work each day because the people you work with are awesome and fun? Then you will absolutely love this place of employment. Just be wary, because it only takes one manager or assistant with a bad attitude to obliterate that environment for the remainder of your time with the company for you and your coworkers. This is more common than you might think. So choose the store you work at wisely. Don't take the atmosphere or attitude of the managers during your interview or early days at the company for face value because it is I'll evaporate and become hostility within minutes once upper management walks out. 
Don't like the way they treat you? Upper management is so mismanaged and dispersed, nobody cares lol. Call whoever you like, it's just going to be a game of telephone he said she said. 

If you like a job that seems friendly from the outside, and truly is, a place you actually look forward to getting up and clocking into, but having leadership generate a hostile work environment instead every day, you have found your forever job. This is it. It's perfect. 

Should fit like a glove. Have fun. 


This job is extremely easy to do. They don’t micro manage you. Overtime is offered alot! I work for a franchise and the owner offers Several bonuses that are very very easy to hit if you do your job correctly. They give out raises every single year as-long as you meet minimum  requirements. Basically everyone gets a raise every year. They offered several raises in your first year there as well. If you do your job halfway decent they are very fair with promotions. I feel as if they are to fair. (Which may be a downfall in promoting management.) Any negative review about this place is probably because of entitled people, I wouldn’t listen or pay attention to that. They Have always gave me my requested days off. Ownership will take care of you as long as you take care of them. However this job never has a set schedule, your days off will vary from week to week and you could work at different stores. However this was agreed-upon hiring, so I can’t hold that against them. And plan on working at least some weekends. However management will ask you what you prefer, And try to work around your schedule. Managers don’t make their own schedules, Which makes it very hard to get your shifts covered without a week or more of letting them know. However they will always work around that for you if needed. Very fair with scheduling as far as “must needed days off” Very understaffed at the moment so it might get hard to get certain days covered/coverage but again they will try to work with you. I feel like this company truly cares about me and puts my needs ahead of most things. I’ve never felt like this with another company, And they really do compensate you well as-long as you do your job correctly and take care of them. Keep in mind they won’t start you off at a very high wage but for the work it’s a very fair wage. and they will get you to a much higher wage as long as you do your job. It’s a very sales oriented job if you are good at sales you Could be making in the mid-20s per hour within a year or so. Possibly higher. I highly recommend anyone working at this place.

I've worked for several batteries plus franchises the system corporate enforces is inherently bad for business and inefficient, the stores entire m.o is to hire untrained potential techs and then underpay them. This being said the majority of the employees tend to be intelligent and pleasant people and there is a good work culture and a good amount of PTO imediatly available upon hire. There are generally few opportunities for growth in the smaller franchises and you are expected to obtain a lot of electrical/battery mechanical/ vehicle and computer/PC knowledge. 

During my time with all three stores I saw blatant lack of disregard for employee safety, the rules are aknowledge then ignored. You will get battery acid on you you will burn yourself or breath in solder you will have  lack of equipment and tools to actually do the job and unfair business practices such as not letting people take lunches and then docking them the hours for the lunch anyway, or encourage certification with the promise of a raise that never comes seam wide spread. In 2 of the 3 stores the hourly employees did just about every job in the store as a group with little to no management involvement or direction and training typically falls to people who were taught wrong or have only been there a few months as all stores seam to have trouble retaining lower level employees with their pay rate. 

In my time there I have come to a simple conclusion it's a good temporary job for a young strong person if you like helping people and solving problems the majority of customers need information more than anything. But you will be payed several dollars less than fast food and you will be expected to have a much higher degree of product knowledge and service. you'll need a strong back and you'll be unloading and loading alot of heavy batteries installing them in cars in the sun and illegally in the rain. Learning to build battery packs is an explosive learning process and there is no shortage of heavy metals broken glass and hazardous materials. 

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