sales associate

truck driver

teacher

music manager

instructor

Long & McQuade

A typical day involves arriving, checking the lesson schedule for the day (cancellations or additions can be made last-minute) and going over lesson plans. You have an assigned room that facilitates your instrument of instruction. Parents and students come in and out and you teach, update the parents and then report to your supervisor about the general status of lessons and anything salient or upcoming.

I learned how to bring energy and enthusiasm to bear when you are not feeling those things, as your ability to elicit such from your students is a huge part of the job. I learned about my own weaknesses in trying to balance friendly behaviour with authoritative behaviour, keeping focused for hours on end and, in presenting facts to members of the public in such a way as to both be informative and supportive.

The management is excellent. They are cooperative, helpful, and competent. They root for you to succeed and do many things to coordinate your student load with your schedule. 

Co-workers are generally quite friendly. The teachers are technically sub-contracted and, as such, there is a bit a variance in the teaching staff every so often. Most of them are affable and competent. Some of them are merely affable.

The most difficult part of the job is reconciling the expectations of members of the public with the reality of instruction. For example: a parent wishes their child to achieve a certain certification or level within a set period of time but the child is either unwilling or unable to achieve this goal (for many possible reasons). Often, though you can be on good terms with the parent, their frustration with their child's perceived lack of progress towards this goal can lead to many ill things: the dismissal of the student, antagonism toward the student, refusal to acknowledge the student's effort (invalidating a child is a terrible thing) et cetera.

The most enjoyable part of the job is simply when a student has some breakthrough or joyful moment. To see a five-year-old smile and giggle because they are making music, or to see a college student get shivers from their joy of music is a remarkable thing.

I urge anyone considering to apply at Long & McQuade to read this. It is a decent company, but please don’t make the same mistake I did. I thought Long &McQuade was going to to be the place I worked until retirement. They lure you in with a good raise after the first year and lead you to think that the pay is going to be awesome. And then, surprise, you only get a very tiny cost of living raise that hardly amounts to anything. If your wanting to have kids and provide for them then forget about working here unless you have a rich spouse. If you’re single, RUN. You will not be able to build a decent life for yourself. Long & McQuade doesn’t pay enough for someone to live on their own and they know it. You can only afford to live on an L&M salary if you live with your parents or if you have someone else that can fend for you financially. Don’t ever work here and get the lofty dream of providing a home for yourself or your spirits will be squashed. To get a mortgage approval, you need to spend 32% or less of your income on housing expenses. You can’t even get a shack for 32% of Long & McQuade income.  They hire people who are young and who won’t question the pay right away. There is a major gap in pay between employees who put in the same hours and effort each week which is disheartening. Lessons positions seem to get paid less which makes me wonder if the company does not care about music lessons. I think Jack Long would be sad to know that employees that don’t marry rich aren’t even able to put a roof over their head even though they are trying their best. This is not right and I thought Long & McQuade was one of the few good companies left that cared but I guess not. There are not many housing options that are possible within this budget and they darn well know that employment is scarce so they are just going to keep on having miserable employees. Sooner or later, they’re going to hear of an employee that did away with themselves because they couldn’t provide a life for themselves. Maybe then they will understand their greed isn’t worth it. Maybe I will take one for the team.

Long & McQuade can be a fun place to work in the short term, but do not expect that feeling to last. The best part about this job is all the awesome people you will meet, both customers and co-workers (except for the few odd bad apples). 

Management tries really hard to instill that this is an ethical company that cares about its employees, but the exact opposite becomes apparent rather quickly. They will do the bare minimum to try and keep you motivated and are very strict on doing things "by the book" even though they pretend to pride themselves on a "common sense" approach. You can sometimes be reprimanded for the smallest infraction, expect to be scolded at random intervals depending if you catch management in a bad mood that day. Very unprofessional and disrespectful to say the least.

There can be an unreasonable amount of strain when trying to book time off. For a company that hires musicians, they could care less about your pursuits outside of work. If it doesn't benefit them, don't expect any leniency or empathy.

The pay is abhorrent especially considering that management is constantly bragging about how well the company does year in and year out. Don't expect any significant wage increases though, most salaries paid here are 30-40% below the Canadian average. It's a real shock considering how knowledgeable you need to be to even be hired here. You are literally an EXPERT in your field but you might as well be a cashier at Sobeys for what you're making.

This could be a fun and engaging career, however the culture is plauged by corporatism and the abysmal compensation makes it too difficult. When I was hired, they proudly boasted of their low turnover rate, yet I've run out of fingers on both hands to count the employees that have come and gone already. 

Long & McQuade is specialized sales at a retail salary. They give wildly different pay grades to employees that are doing the same amount of work, and will only increase your wage based on the average CPI of the province you are living in, even if you excel at your job. For example if you bust your butt for a year and become a "Top Performer" you will receive CPI plus 1%. If you are just an average employee you will only get CPI. So if you are driven and motivated you will get basically the same wage increase as someone who stands at the front counter all day. 

They also say that the staff is non-commision, but the first thing they talk about in the yearly wage review is your sales. If you're sales are low they will put pressure on you to increase your sales and write you up for having low sales, or decreasing sales. For example: If you take on extra responsibilities and your sales dip because of that you will not only be reprimanded for the dip in sales, you will also not get an increase in wage for working harder.    

They also DO NOT pay overtime. The expectation is that you will stay after hours to help customers, but they will not compensate you for it. In the level one training manual they say that you are not allowed to leave the store until all they customers have left, but they will not pay you for the extra time you work. 

(I have changed my years worked and location as I know if this is read by my employers I will be fired. They do not like to be criticized in public, and wish to keep their misdeeds in the dark. You can find examples of the owners of the company online looking into online complaints, as a current employee I know that they look for these people internally as I am in management and get to hear these things first hand.)

Pros:
-Working with like-minded people. You end up being really great friends with your coworkers
-Consistent schedule.
-Discount can be decent depending on brand/supplier
-Store-level management is fair and even-handed for the most part (this of course varies from store to store)

Cons:
-Pay is far too low for the amount of specialized knowledge expected from staff. Raises are based on CPI, but don’t expect much beyond that. This is coming from a top performing salesperson. Without commission, there is no incentive to excel at your job in this regard.  
-Continued trend of understaffing stores and spreading the extra workload to existing employees without commensurate pay increases. 
-Company refers to its employees as “experts”, yet frequently throws people into departments that they have zero training in to fill out gaps in schedule. While this is a fine short term solution, this has been a consistent and ongoing issue over the last 5 years I have been with the company. Expect to show up on any given day just to be told that you will be working in a department that you never work in with zero notice or training. This is especially true if you show you have a decent worker ethic. If management discovers that you are willing to say yes to these things, they will lean on you EVERY time to fill in gaps you are not technically qualified to fill. Don’t be surprised when you see the same 5 people taking on the bulk of the extra work every time there is a staffing issue. There is absolutely no pay incentive for this either. 
-Severe lack of training. You are expected to take on new functions and policies with little to no training. There is a lot of trail-by-fire at this job and it doesn’t ever seem to improve. 


Eventually this place felt like the movie Office Space.

You'd bust your hump with little reward,  and get scolded if department numbers were lower 'even though numbers don't matter.. but why were your sales down this month' mentality.   

With no commission,  I wouldn't be shmoozily swarming every customer who'd come through the door because anyone available could help them (Nor would I want to be that sleezy).

Instead,  I'd naturally build relationships for a long term customer retention (which was evident over the decade I was there).  

Even still, it was the kinda of place where you'd stay 30 minutes late every night when busy... and get in trouble if you were accidentally late by 3 minutes in the morning because of bad traffic.

There was zero incentive to progress there.  The pay was (and is still) bad.  Especially for Toronto Living.   The knowledge expectations are high.  Yet,  It was frowned upon working outside store hours to gain the very experience they wanted their sales staff to know.  And if you had that experience and spent more than 10 minutes talking with a customer,  you were scolded and expected to sell them anything and push them out the door quickly ... which I always fought management with. 

Initially it wasn't like this,  but there was a shift in their corporate culture in the early 2000's that snuffed out every spark that place had.

The only great thing about L&M were the people you were working with on the sales floor and some of the oddball customers that made it bearable. 

I was employees for a few years and informed of multiple policies in place form the hire ups to “turn and burn” staff after roughly 1.5 years to keep profits acceptable.  The pay is terrible for all positions except for head office and the communication across the country is virtually non existent. The company experienced a boom during Covid and has since failed to adapt in anyway to the changing market, and are in fact actively chasing to go back to their pre-pandemic practises. Products are often delayed and miss handled due to the companies poor shipping logistics (something produced in British Columbia, must be warehoused in Toronto, and then packaged and shipped back to a store across Canada before a customer can get their hands on it. Because of these problem practises and their environmental impact, the cost is all passed onto the consumer.  They also have policies in mind place to lessen your ability to make staff purchases, and you must pass ridiculous knowledge tests to earn your discount. If you can’t name a precision instrument from Nigeria, you are not qualified to get a discount on guitar strings (in no way is this an exaggeration).

Long story short, if you want to hangout in a music store all day go for it but have a backup plan for your income. Most employees have wealthy spouses, or are young kids living at a home. 

My time at L&M was pretty great in comparison to most other retail jobs. You don't have to listen to a lame music playlist everyday, work/life balance is great, and you're not forced to sell a required amount of product. All you need to do is provide excellent customer service (which everyone did), and carry out your job duties to the best of your abilities. The staff are terrific, and the management is good.

Salary is painfully low, I was making just a little over $33,000 as a supervisor. It takes years to move up in the company, and when you do, they don't give you raises until you've proven capable in your new role. Salaries can not be negotiated, even if you are moving in to a management position. You have to take what they give you, and it's not much. 

Retail is retail, and Long & McQuade is no different. If you expect a high paying career, you need to put in minimum 5 years before you see any return on your time investment with the company, and even then, your salary won't justify it unless you become a store Manager, which takes even longer. You're better of getting an education in that period of time in literally anything, and getting a job somewhere else.

Long & McQuade is a great place to work, not a great place to make a living.

If you want an opportunity to work with the coolest people that you actually want to have a beer with after work, this is the place. Everyone from the lowest employee to the highest management is a musician, so everyone kind of "gets it". When you get the job, they fly you out to Pickering headquarters to get trained and meet the founder. They have a great ethical approach to sales, no one is on commission, and you are told NOT to try and upsell people (only get the customer what they need). You get to try all the new equipment first, you get to help out other musicians who come to the store.

...but you won't ever get paid very much. Even if you are expected to be a labourer, salesman, sound technician, musician, and teacher all at once. Even if you are the top salesperson for the entire year, they will give you the tiniest raise. And the only way to advance the ranks is to just deal with it and hang around until people leave. So most of the management team is just whoever stuck around the longest.

Overall, great place to work as a starter job if you're a musician. Make the connections, make the friends, and move on when an opportunity arises.

A typical day of work would involve teaching a wide range of students, from beginner to advanced abilities. I would always update the parents on the student's progress and made phone calls home whenever necessary. I did not work directly with my co-workers as I worked generally on my own unless running summer programs. The management was fairly organized and booked me as much as possible but was unable to give me the hours I needed during the summer. I learned how to think on my feet, to be flexible and adapt to any situation that arose. For example, a student who showed up with no books (which happened frequently) or a student who simply did not want to be there and I had to think of creative ways for them to enjoy the experience. The most enjoyable part of this job was developing longstanding relationships with students and their families. Over 4 years I was able to see students grow so much in their abilities. The hardest part of this job was the isolation of working on my own, and the repetitiveness of this type of work; after 4 years it was no longer stimulating.

Top Job Titles	Average salary
Sales associate 9 salaries reported	$37,677 per year
Truck driver 2 salaries reported	$47,500 per year
Teacher 5 salaries reported	$27.74 per hour
Music manager 1 salary reported	$41,000 per year
Instructor 4 salaries reported	$38.13 per hour

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