I was so happy to find this website. I'm posting this in the "Thinking about Enterprise" forum because I hope I can help just one person. It has been 3 years since I worked at Enterprise and back then the Internet wasn't nearly the resource for this type of thing as it is now. To this day I still frequently remind myself how great it is to come to work and sit at a desk all day without having to wash cars, answer 30 phone calls an hour, or deal with not getting a single moment of peace.

I think I started at Enterprise because I had low self-esteem. I went to a competitive and heavily recruited business school and did not have a good job right out of college because my GPA was not very high. I began to realize that I wasn't going to find anything good for a long time and when I found out about Enterprise I ignored the warning signs and spent every moment of every day for the next three months (minus my two weeks notice) kicking myself for the terrible decision I had made. The one good thing that came of it, and this is the only good thing and maybe a big thing, is that I will walk every day of my life knowing what it is like to work a job that is not well suited to your goals and personality.

Like I said, it has been nine years and as I read through the other posts on this site, it has brought back so many memories. There are so many highly negative comments on this site about what employement can be like at ERAC and I can honestly back up about 99% of them as being completely truthful.

Here are some highlights that I can remember, these are all still pretty vivid memories...

Recruitment
-The first warning bell that I ignored was when I was called by the recruiter to come in and apply for the postion of "Management Trainee". I didn't realize until about 30 minutes into the interview that almost every single person came into the company as a "Management Trainee".
-I received a job offer without even ever having salary mentioned. I had to ask what the salary was going to be and I was given a range but the recruiter was discernably evasive about the conversation--another missed warning bell.
-On my first day of training at corporate while processing I was given a huge packet of almost everything I needed to fill out. After all that was done there was one final form which was the pay breakdown. I remember there being a confusing matrix which laid out what your pay would effectively be per hour with different levels of hours and overtime. This paper was slapped down in front of all of us we were told to sign it immediately and it was collected immediately. It was obvious they didn't want us to dwell on it.
-The city manager met with us all on our first day back from corporate (there were about 25 people in my recruiting class). He told us we would never make it if we got hung up on the hourly rate and that we should keep focused on the big picture. He said his base pay was $27,000 a year but he made well over 6 figures and that we shouldn't worry too much about pay in the phase we were in.
-I was told that my CDW sales would need to be at least 80% to take my grill or even be considered for promotion. I was told that a full 60% of the customers will ask for waiver without you bringing it up. This was not my experience.
-I found out that in my city after you take your grill and pass you are promoted from "Management Trainee" to "Rental Representative". That still doesn't sound like a promotion to me to this day.
-I was told that I got no vacation time in the first year and two weeks in the second year. I could, of course, take unpaid time or borrow a week of vacation from my second year.

At the Branch
-I was placed at a relatively new branch. The manager and the assistant were both already managers at other branches before but they were recently transferred and they were both used to working at an enormous branch that had about 7 to 10 management trainees that they could assign different tasks to. I was the only MT at this new branch so far and they were so used to getting a MT to do everything for them at their previously huge branch that they ran me ragged. They made me do every single branch task but count the cash drawer. If they were in the middle of a ticket and I was getting back from washing a car or dropping off a customer they would actually back out of the ticket and make me start it over from scratch and write the contract.
-I was repeatedly yelled at for closing out tickets before 2pm because this would make us look like we were sitting heavy when the 2pm fleet statistics ran. One time the corporate auditor showed up on our lot at about 1:30pm and we had to feverishly close out about 10 tickets before she got into the branch. I have no doubt I would have been blamed for this.
-My BM and AM would not answer the phone and would put calls on hold for me if they had to answer.
-I got so sick of how we took every single deal but never had any cars. It was so bad most days that I had to use my own personal car for pick-ups and drop-offs and when I mentioned mileage reimbursement I was scoffed at and made to feel like I wasn't playing with the team's interest in mind.
-Enterprise buys everyone in the company a Holiday present in December but my branch manager complained constantly that these little perks came out of her pocket because it hit our branch's bottom line and therefore her commission.
-My branch manager would pre-write any ticket that was guaranteed CDW so that her stats were high. These were almost the only tickets I ever saw her write even though our branch only had about 3 employees and a driver. We would do about 15-20 deals a day and I would probably write 80% of them. They would complain that pick-ups/drop-offs were taking too long and they were having to write tickets in the meantime.
-One Saturday it was just the BM and I and I was getting slammed in the office and she was nowhere to be found. I left about 5 customers in our front office and went out back to try to find her. I was relieved to find her washing a car and I said, "Oh thanks, I didn't know how I was going to get to that." She looked at me funny and during next minute or so of our discussion I realized that she was washing the car off the lot she had selected to be the one she was taking home for the rest of the weekend.
-After about the 6 week mark I new I was experiencing hell. I started to fantasize about getting fired or laid off. By about 4pm Sunday afternoons I would begin to sink into a deep depression because I knew Monday mornings were such hell.
-My manager would jot down the worst directions on contracts for me to follow for pick-ups and I spent so much time lost. This was before everyone carried around cell phones and I had to pull over and use a pay phone all the time to get them to call the customer for help
-You do not want to deal with people who just wrecked their car all day long. Enterprise customers are some of the most demanding and unforgiving members of the public I have ever dealt with. They treated me like a second class citizen. I was particularly embarassed when one time I had to pick up and write a ticket for a classmate of mine from business school. She was an accountant and I was an ERAC MT. I had my whole spiel about how I was in "management training" for those situations but I don't think anyone fell for it.
-I went to my branch manager at about the 8 or 9 week mark and told her that I was unhappy at this job and I was trying to get some sort of indication from her that I should stick it out and that it would get better. To my surprise, she just kind of shrugged her shoulders and flashed me an "I don't know what to tell ya" look. Nice management skills.
-They used to not give you your raise until your manager filled out this little mini-eval form as your first mini-review and my manager would not write this up. I tried to explain to her that this was costing me money but she just didn't care.
-I got so tired of being made to feel guilty for eating lunch in the back break room. I learned that I would have to stay off-site for lunch or I would get grabbed from lunch every day to write tickets.
-With my BM and AM's work ethic I was so busy all day long it made me sick. It was like they had an alarm that went off when I sat down at my desk. The day I got my first pay check I did not even have 30 seconds to look it over because every time they noticed I had sat down and wasn't on the phone they would send me off on some other task.

The Dreaded Damage Waiver Charge
-There were people in my city who had 95% waiver stats. I asked my assistant manager one day how they sold that much waiver and she explained that they work in big branches and they "cherry pick" customers. When an old man comes in they act busy on the phone but when an easy waiver mark comes in they jump up and take the deal. I was also told that there are a lot of underhanded waiver dealers out there that sneak it onto contracts or misrepresent what it is.
-We were trained to basically harass customers who would not take waiver (e.g. - threaten to call their insurance company, remind them how painful it was to have to pay a deductible, so on and so on).

The End
-After about 3 months I gave up and turned in my two weeks notice. I didn't even have another job lined up and I didn't care. It was so liberating and such a feeling of exhiliarating freedom. I decided to just temp since I had the business degree and then go back and get a masters the following fall. When I turned in my two weeks notice, other ERAC employees came out of the woodwork telling me they wish they could have done so and that they wish they'd had the nerve I had. This surprised me because I honestly was constantly wondering why I hated the job so much and why I seemed to be the only one who didn't absolutely love ERAC as being the best opportunity this country had to offer.
-ERAC bashes employees who leave. In the culture of my city it was not the "they couldn't hack it" like I've seen in other posts. I heard a lot of comments like "Some people think they are too good to wash cars." "MBA's can and should wash cars just like anyone else." "Some people think a job should be handed to them on a platter and they shouldn't have to get their hands dirty." This was not it at all--but I'll admit, I didn't like washing cars and yes, I did go to business school to not have to wash cars and if that makes me a snob then so be it, I'm sure I'm not alone. I had too much of a conscience to sell waiver to people who did not need it, and I didn't have the personality for ERAC, whatever that personality is.

All this happened in only 3 short months (seemed like 2 years to me). One of the things I will always remember is a kind thing our driver once said to me. He was an older gentleman and he had been a businessman but drove for ERAC as a retirment gig. He and I would talk a lot on the first leg of our trip to go pick up a car at another branch. One day I told him how unhappy I was but that I was trying to stick it out and be mature. He told me to quit and follow a dream, he told me he sensed I was meant for better things. That meant a lot to me and gave me a lot of the inspiration I needed to leave. Now I make about four times as much money after three years and every day when my job gets rough I know it is petty compared to what I went through at ERAC.