What do Art Van's Salesmen make? 3-05-11

The short answer is: $10.88 an hour. But the long answer is far more complex. The real money is in commisions, and the scale is quite tricky. Let us just suppose, for instance, that a salesman at one of Art's stores worked nights and weekends. It is, afterall, a common lament among his sales staff that nights and weekends come with the job and cannot be avoided. Let us assume that this salesman works 45 hours in a given week. This means that his hourly rate works out to be $489.60. In Michigan's sorry state of affairs, this is not terrible. NOW let us assume that Art had a number of misleading sales that week splashed all over TV and the newspapers and sales in that particular store were brisk. Perhaps the salesman sold $10,000 worth of Art's foreign-made crap and got a commision check of $700!! That means the salesman grossed $1189.60, and that's really good, right?!!? Well, um, ahhh....no. What? Why not? Because then he does not get to keep the $489.60 that he earned hourly. You see, that hourly rate is treated as a draw against commision. It gets subtracted from any commision he has coming. So he actually only grossed about $700 for his 45 hours worth of work, or about $15.55 an hour. And he pays taxes on that. Ouch. But fret not. The Chinese, Mexicans, Vietnamese, and Indonesians that actually make the furniture take home far less than that.