Just became a store manager at a retail chain after years in hourly roles. But it's still paying me way lesser than I'd imagined. Maybe I'm not educated enough, maybe my hunch that I should be making more is right? How can you fairly benchmark your own salary, and your team’s?

I definitely noticed this as well. I thought I would have a significant salary bump but it's modest at best, especially considering the fact that I am salary and not hourly so working 50+ hours a week doesn't mean much

This is why alot of companies prefer internal promotions. Not because they care so much about their employees but because its cheaper for them to force low end salaries on them than having to pay an external hire a more median to high end salary.

There are lots of online tools to help with this. Glassdoor is great and pretty accurate in my experience. Chat GPT and Google can provide insight too, but it's a lot more general by comparison.

Forgive me for playing the devil's advocate but if YOU can't step back, take a breath, and access your self worth & value to a company how can or why ask others here that don't know either you nor what you should in the first place-..it seriously helps in life to know WHAT you want so you can be better able to strive to achieve those "goals". Especially during holiday season salaried retail managers I have repeatedly heard whine that they are earning the equivalent or less than an entry level employee with all the hours they are putting in, not including the added responsibilities. Have you a work life balance? Are you able to pay your expenses ? Do you enjoy your job? Is your well being compromised? Does your retail chain go through store managers as one changes their shirts? Do you have doubts of your qualifications or they knew they can get you at a price one hired from not within would cost them more. Everything is cut and dry, a business and I think just my opinion, workers at any company should see the bottom line is all I'm saying because there comes a time we are all faced with seeing what that is

I guess apart from taking help from online platforms, you can ask people around who hold same position as you to compare. I guess all retail stores are like this. You just a tag of a manager but salary stays same.

I was just telling someone about my first salaried job, so many many years ago. I was told that the benefits of salary is, some weeks I would work 60 hours, and some weeks I would work 30 hours. Well, they were half right. Some weeks, I worked 60 hours, and other weeks I worked 80 hours.

At some point, business (especially retail and restaurants) stopped pretending. They told salaried managers that they would work 45-50 hours, MINIMUM.

And we were OK with that, we allowed that to happen.

Twice in the last 10 years, there was an attempt to put a minimum wage on managers. In both cases, the COURTS ruled against it. And yes, if you work enough hours, you make less than minimum wage, and there's nothing we can do about that at this point.

(There's an entire history of both minimum wage and the salaried minimum. Maybe, someday, I will post about it)