What do you think of my pay structure?

I work in retail, and I’m paid on commission. The way I’m paid depends on two variables, Sales/Hr and Margin Attached to each computer sales (with the exception of refurbished computers). I work at a Micro Center, and they seem to be price driven like so many other places now a days. It seems a lot of items are getting to the point of being disposable when and if they break giving people less reason to buy warranty. Or, we sell so many “netbooks” (small little laptops), that are really designed to be a second or third computer that no one wants to buy anything with.

Here I am in the middle of the holidays dealing with the most customers I’ve seen all year long, selling more volume, still managing to sell warranty. But if you compared my sales to a friend in another department, he has made more money than I have selling less volume, and less warranty. I feel as though I’m being shafted, I am a top performer nearly all the time, but the system is bringing me down.

Oh, and another factor in my pay structure. There is an 8 weeks running table that moves with me. For each two week pay period, they look back 8 weeks to see how well my sales/hr and margin was to determine my pay (8 weeks ago we were dead, and sales were few and far between). So it seems convenient to get paid very little during the busiest time of the year. Working harder to make less.

Do you think they may change this structure to give us some actual growth in my department? Or let it work itself out to get people back in my department willing to settle for less pay?

Some factors I’ve even thought would fix this slow uphill battle against a pay structure would be a couple different scenarios. 1) they simply take computers under 400 dollars out of our pay structure (they don’t factor in for margin attached, only come out as sales/hr), or 2) Change it all together, lock us in at 1.5% for primary items such as computers, or TVs, and everything else that we can attach we get 2% to still give incentive to make attachments.

The problem they always tell us is that we will stop trying if we get locked in. I would argue that if we get paid more to sell attachments we would still try for those items, and other departments are locked in, so why not ours?

Either of my scenarios will still give us incentive to sell attachments and give top performers more pay over time. I honestly don’t see anything improving though.