Sears put a sales quota on brake jobs — the shop floor did what it was told

Any pay plan that ties a front-line worker's income to a sales number, not an outcome, will eventually get the number met the cheapest way available.

In 1990 Sears restructured pay for its Auto Center service advisers: instead of a flat wage, they worked toward hourly sales quotas — a set dollar figure or unit count of brake jobs, alignments and parts to move in each shift, with commissions and job security riding on hitting the number. Trade-press retrospectives that later talked to people who worked the counter described a floor where a slow hour wasn't a scheduling problem, it was a number you were short on, and being short repeatedly got you a talking-to or worse.

On June 11, 1992, California's Department of Consumer Affairs went public with an undercover sting: investigators sent cars needing no repair into 33 Sears Auto Centers across the state and were sold unnecessary work 34 out of 38 times — springs, brake jobs, front-end work the cars didn't need. State investigators said the pattern wasn't a few bad hires; it tracked the quota exactly, shift by shift, store by store.

Advisers interviewed afterward in the trade press didn't describe a scheme handed down from above so much as a floor where the number was the job: hit it selling what the car needed, or hit it selling what it didn't.

Sears Chairman Edward A. Brennan held a press conference on June 22, 1992, eleven days after the state's findings became public, and announced the commission and quota system was gone — service advisers went back to flat pay. Sears never admitted wrongdoing, but by September it had paid roughly $15 million to settle consumer claims and 19 class actions, and eventually 41 states opened their own inquiries into the same stores.

Sears killed the commission and returned advisers to flat pay, ending the quota pressure that drove the unnecessary work.

A pay structure that rewards hitting a sales number, not diagnosing a car correctly, will get the number — the honest way if the car needs work, the dishonest way if it doesn't

Quota pressure moved down a chain of store managers to service advisers to mechanics; nobody at the top wrote 'sell unnecessary brake jobs,' but the incentive did the writing for them

The fix that actually worked was structural, not disciplinary: Sears didn't retrain advisers to resist the pressure, it removed the pressure by killing the commission

A quota measures what people sell, not what a customer needs — put one on a repair counter and the incentive will eventually outvote the diagnosis.

Sears dropped commissions and quotas within days of the story breaking and settled the consumer claims that September without admitting liability. The Auto Centers survived under flat pay, but the brand carried the story for years, cited afterward — including in a Harvard Business School case still taught today — as the standard example of an incentive design that manufactured fraud without anyone intending to commit it.