There were a lot of unrealistic sales metrics that were made that weren't reflective of what the store's traffic was capable of pushing out. The pressure went from the top down. From the Regional Manager, to the District Manager, to the Retail Store Manager and to us as the Mobile Experts. I could tell that everyone was walking on eggshells when it came to metrics. It didn't start out like this, but it's become a bigger issue over time where expectations only became more difficult on us as a store to function. Upper management would sometimes hire people that were not qualified for this kind of work and some HR related issues have come up leading to people either getting fired, or just leaving (me included).
ME's that were bi-lingual were allotted a lot more customers by design, but hourly compensation wasn't any different, and even though more sales opportunities came, more often than not, there were more problems/BS troubleshooting followed.
Work-life balance is a lot more difficult than anticipated. 5-6 days a week, but the retail hours can be long and daunting when they're frequently open or closing shifts. (Especially as a key-holder. More power = A LOT more responsibilities)
A lot of in-house products/services were not fully tested and had a lot of issues at launch. T-Vision, the REVVL line of phones, FamilyMode, SyncUP Drive (bad at launch. but now actually very well done) all seem to be half-baked and rushed to the market to corner a market that's already overly saturated or doesn't exhibit any need for it. Along with that, a lot of core and crucial retail systems were changed; again, without proper testing and caused a lot of issues with sales to customers due to lost time and just plain frustration due to systems not working correctly. I won't name them, but our POS systems, customer waiting list, postpaid and prepaid activation and management system (separate systems) , and company information portal were all redesigned over the years and have had a lot of issues at launch. Countless lost sales resulted due to systems being down, or being so buggy that the customer was even concerned with reliability of T-Mobile if internal systems were so poorly done.