I have friends who do the OfferUp thing. Craigslist is still pretty active for that sort of thing depending on your location.
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Thanks!
That sucks that you have to pay for that. 
I think since those are things you don’t want to ship, your best bet is craigslist.
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Thanks. It does suck, but at least this time I have saleable items. Quite often it is just random things that don’t work for anything and they end up being donated to Habitat or trashed. My coworker had a huge job last year and owes my boss a lot of money for the errors there.
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That does not seem ethical?
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…or totally legal?
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That too
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I mean, I don’t like it, but we have always known it and most similar small companies around here do the same. My coworker has worked for 3 that do it. I do not know what big box stores or companies in large cities do. I guess if we just keep making mistakes with no consequences we will never try harder to check orders and not make expensive mistakes. I mean, one cabinet often costs over a thousand dollars and our profit margin does not cover that. Also, mistakes delay projects which makes clients angry when their house is torn up. Like our mistakes can literally be anywhere from $3k to 10K per year which is a lot for him to absorb. Everything we order is custom and takes many weeks to get and is not easily saleable to a different client in order to recoup some money/get rid of the item. We may have 8 mistake cabinets that are all different colors and door styles. If someone selling furniture orders something wrong, they can just put it on the sales floor and sell it to someone else. It doesn’t really work that way for us.
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I know nothing about the law, so I am legitimately curious why you say that? If I make an error why should he have to pay for it? We work on commission, so I feel like he will only pay me less if that is the case and I would end up paying for it in the end anyway. I have worked there for a very long time, and that has always been “the rule” so I simply never questioned it.
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I don’t know the law either, but it also seems wrong to me. I’ve seen literal millions of dollars wasted because someone decided to start an implementation of a huge corporate project without buy in from the correct stakeholders, or a new VP gets hired, and they decide that’s not how they do things and scraps the project.
There are all kinds of waste on a big and small scale in all businesses. If the business owner can’t afford errors, how can they expect their employees to afford it? This makes no sense to me at all. You are an actual employee, correct? Maybe if you are a contractor running your own business I could see things differently.
Management either decides the error prone person is the problem and coaches then to improve, lets them go, literally nothing happens, or in the best case scenario somebody looks at the system of how things are being done and fixes the root cause of errors. Also, write offs exist for a reason.
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This is very different from how my family runs their similar business. If an employee kept disordering things then they would get fired at some point? But they do absorb the costs otherwise. I ended up with a new toilet because the client wanted blush and someone ordered white. Sometimes they’ll try to find another job it could be used on, sometimes they’ll offer the client the option to use the wrong item at a discount, sometimes they’ll just take the loss.
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I’m not an expert in employment law but one thing I could think of is that if requiring you to pay it back brings your pay under minimum wage for the pay period that may be illegal.
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But we are not a huge corporation with a huge budget either. We are a very small company in a small town.
If you guys have an especially good year or get a good deal (eg sink a client wants happens to be on super sale), do you get to share the profits? If not, he’d be passing on all of the risk but absorbing all of the profits.
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I get paid a percentage of profit, so yes. Of course I always try to make as much profit as I can in order to increase my pay. He does give us a “mistake allowance” every year, it just doesn’t usually cover all of it. Obviously the amount I pay varies from year to year, I try to have as few errors as possible, but mistakes do happen. He gives a nice Christmas thank you bonus as well. It really is not as bad as I have apparently made it seem.
ETA I make a percentage of the total sale amount not just the profit. But obviously the more I sell something for, the more I get paid.
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That doesn’t really matter. Not sure if you read Ask A Manager, but similar questions have come up before, and the answer is generally along the lines of ‘check your state laws, but usually not legal–and definitely not legal if it takes you below minimum wage since that’s federally protected’…which may not be an issue in your case, but if I was your coworker I’d sure as hell be looking at the legality of a company who expected me to pay back large costs. That’s the cost of doing business, and trying to shift it onto employees seems pretty shady.
ETA–a quick google says Can Employers Charge Employees For Mistakes and Deduct Pay? - Avvo about different states, obviously it’s not a .gov website, but it’s interesting as an overview.
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I think it’s unfair that you guys have to pay 100% of the losses (once the max is reached) but only get a % of the profits, AND I hear you that it’s the norm in your field and region. I know you are a smart, savvy person and would not take a job where you were worse off! I feel like this will happen in plenty of fields, that norms can be surprising to people outside of them.
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Thank you. Unfair? Maybe. Would I prefer to not pay back and have no consequences? Absolutely. The norm around here? Yes. Legal? I just don’t know and have never thought about. The fact that there is literally nowhere else to work other than a big box store for a distance of at least 45 minutes and I don’t want to drive that far or move or work in a different field? Definitely yes. So, in a nutshell… nothing would be better in my case so I accept “the way it is per my boss’s rules”.
If I end up selling an item I have paid him for, that money is mine. It is just often hard to sell one off weird items.
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I think it would be illegal if you were an employee in Ontario Canada, but legal if you were an independent contractor, which your pay structure and relationship with employer always seems closer to. In fact, it could he a way of making sure you had skin in the game.
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Yes.
How would I possibly benefit with not being responsible for mistakes, then getting fired for having too many and having no good (wanted) options for employment? There cannot possibly be unlimited allowance for employee mistakes in a very small company. A big box store would absolutely pay less than I make even after I pay my mistakes back.
Also. I never thought I would start a legal issues conversation by asking how to sell stuff. Guess I went into a bit too much detail.
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