Working at The Chess Emporium in Phoenix, AZ: 2 Employee Job Reviews by Real Employee working in Phoenix, AZ Area

"I worked for the Chess Emporium for 10 years. Overall I had a great experience with management, receiving great training and assistance. I started as a data entry clerk and worked my way up to a manager. The company notices and rewards hard work. I was given tasks to accomplish and tried my best to succeed at them. The management encouraged this and noticed my efforts. If you try hard at this company you will be rewarded and excel. In addition to working on the back end, I briefly taught children chess. I had the same experience in that job as well, and observed the same in others as well. If you follow the program and commit yourself, you will be rewarded."

"I started working for the Chess Emporium a while back. The idea of the company is to sell "chess". As independent instructors you teach at various schools in the valley. You are only paid for 1 hour of your time. You are told that you can make from $40-$100/hour. The true fact is that the majority of instructors make the $40 minimum as you require a lot of students to make anything more than $50. What is never really explained/experienced until a few weeks into the job is the actual time/adjusted cost. You have to show up 15 minutes early which means you have to leave 30-45 minutes before class starts. You then spend time packing up at the end and generally driving through traffic home. Overall for 1 hour of work you end up spending 2-3 h of work. Making that $40/h much smaller in general. The classes are generally loss leaders and we are "encouraged" to use persistent sales tactics to call parents, email to sell them on tournaments and classes at the shops. This is because schools take a 20-50% on school classes. While classes at the store are pure profit. Coaches are paid significantly less for those classes. The idea of commission for sales does not exist. Coaches get $2 per referral on a student to a tournament while no referrals fees for other classes. This job is a good job as a secondary or tertiary job and should never be considered as a primary source of income. This job is essentially a commitment to teach 13-15 classes on a specific day for a semester. It makes it very hard to leave without dealing with issues. The opportunities to be had can be good but require more work than is really worth the pay. For every class this is your breakdown: 1h class, 1.5-2h driving, .5 lesson prep, .5-2h calling parents, .5 emails. As you can see you can be spending anywhere from 3h-> 6h for per class. This adjusted means you're making $13/hour -> $6/hour. Sure you get more efficient but it's a lot of work."