Exhausting, outdated ways of promoting, emotionally tough!
Pros
Since everyone is about the same age it's easy to find friends, staff is helpful whenever there is a problem. Fast track promotions (well if higher level staff like you enough). Looks good on resume. A lot of happy hours, and company gatherings, for promoting you have to go to these things since it really is based on if you are liked or not. The good thing is the tab is paid by ERAC.
Cons
They emphasize customer service as being number 1 but this is not the case its all about sales numbers. Sales and money is all that ERAC thinks about. If a customer doesn't have a reservation and is a "walk up" we pretty much charge any price usually management likes it to be above 50 dollars/day for the smallest car. People are promoted quickly because of reaching their numbers NOT because of showing good leadership. I have seen some great leaders leave because they did not reach their sales. It is a very sad culture that ERAC has, people are constantly quitting. The hours are long about 12 hours each day. Clean cars in nice clothing. They Don't abide by California work regulations as far as breaks go. They move you around which can be good if you don't get along with your branch manager, but then have to deal with a new set of customer's who think you are new and try to pull the wool over your eyes by telling you the last employee always gave them deals. That is another thing we always want to run tight so we rent to just about anyone, since we do not do credit checks just verify insurance or employment and even if a customer doesn't have either but is buying OUR insurance it's about sales so we go ahead and rent. Since Promotions are also based on Employee survey quality Index ,ESQI we pretty much rely on customer's to help our career. Unfortunately that makes us bend over backwards for the people who huff and puff over the most ridiculous of things, and no matter what you do they will always be unhappy, rather than those who are loyal customers. Since you deal with all types of people there is a sense of entitlement they have. People always want a Cadillac for the 9.99 weekend special. You have to have a back bone to deal with the riff raff that comes in. Because for sure someone will cuss you out because you charged them a detail fee, or window chip or whatever. This is where many times I wanted to walk out on the dumbest/rudest of customer's. Because our goal is to run tight, we sometimes have put cars that were due for an oil change (LOFR) or cars that needed to go to re-marketing back on the road, it's against company policy to do this and can be dangerous, but branch managers really only care about their commission and act as individual islands rather than working collectively, hence the drop fees to other branches.