personally i would go to a “good” small independant shop for a couple reasons. i think you could be given more liberty to do whats right and not what makes money… and i have been to several best buys and circuit cities and i know more than most the people selling the stuff, and frankly they have tried to sell me stuff that was a horrible match.. Then you as a installer are forced to try and make it work… and it would iritate me to see such mismatched systems being installed. But the biggest reason is this… at bb and circuit city, it makes no difference how good you are or how good you become… they only charge so much and as a result you will only make so much… go to a independant place and you can grow. If you do well, and people recomend you and then as a result the shop books full, they very well may start to raise the rates, (simple supply and demand) and that my friend would put more money into your pocket. Plus if you want to expand into fiberglass, carbon fiber or custom enclosures of anykind a small shop is more likely to support that growth than a best buy… i have never seen a fiberglass job come out of best buy… have you?

Rick hit it dead on! The biggest thing to me is no matter how much BB or CC is going to pay you they are making a helluva lot of money! Go to a smaller shop that will also do custom installs so if you don’t know these things you can learn. Instead of a commercialized environment that is more like an assembly line you will learn an assorted amount of information and this can only benefit. Some smaller shops though won’t hire you in until you’ve worked at a CC or BB as they’d like you to know the basics and be very good and consistent and know you were good at the other stores. Although you go to BB or CC you can also give some off the wall price that you want to install things and be lazy when you want so that is one upside to working there! But generally speaking they are worthless at these stores. What I mean by off the wall prices is when you don’t want to do something you just inflate the price to where it is so excessive the customers leave extremely irritated! This happened to me and to my friend who works in the home theater department at CC. His own coworkers wouldn’t install a single din power acoustik head unit into his 03 bonneville even though it wasn’t that hard…