The hours are the killer. 48-50 hours minimum, six days a week in a lot of stores. You can put the best pay plan in the world on paper but if someone can make $65k somewhere else and actually have weekends, you're not winning that fight. We moved to a 5-day schedule three years ago and our retention is dramatically better than our competitors.

Honest take... the reason I wouldn't recommend it is because your income is 100% at the mercy of factors you can't control. Market shifts, inventory, OEM programs, manager moods. I've had $14k months and $3k months and the difference had almost nothing to do with my effort. That's not sustainable.

We actually changed our pay plan two years ago specifically to address the volatility problem the previous reply described. Moved sales consultants to a base plus bonus structure with a guaranteed floor, which meant giving up some upside on the high months in exchange for predictability. Turnover dropped by about 40 percent in the first year. The pushback from the old guard was that we would attract weaker salespeople who did not have the hunger. What actually happened is we started attracting people who had been in other industries, had real professional experience, and were willing to learn automotive because the risk profile finally made sense. The team we have now closes at a higher rate than the purely commission-driven team we had before. The floor did not kill motivation. The unpredictability was what was killing people.