Vantaggi
Book check-out program, employee discount, work with fellow book lovers, get paid to hang out in a bookstore all day!
Svantaggi
Non-stop pressure to meet metrics. Even if you bang out an awesome week one week, it resets on Sunday and the pressure is on all over again. Hours are all over the place - I worked as an AGM in one store and a co-manager in another and never had a 'regular' schedule. Frequently closed one night and had to turn around and open the following morning. At one of the stores I worked at, the schedule was CONSTANTLY "subject to change" without notice, forcing employees to constantly recheck the schedule and potentially rearrange their plans outside of work. Really crappy pay; even as an AGM, my salary after all the extra hours I frequently had to work was barely above minimum wage. There are no raises for anyone but the GM, and even that raise is a joke. As are the "bonuses!" Each quarter, the management team gets a bonus that is a percentage of the store's overall sales. But that percentage can be reduced for a number of different reasons, many of which you have zero control over, and you lose the entire bonus altogether if you fail to make any single one of the metrics. And when you do get a bonus, it's a joke - my most recent bonus as AGM was a whole $60 for the quarter. Talk about feeling underappreciated. One of the perks of the job is supposed to be Spiff, which is extra money you get when you sell a membership card, get that member to sign up for an auto-renewal, or sign someone up for magazines. BUT the amount you get is pretty insignificant (the most I ever received was less than $20 for the week, and that was with the Stellar Seller double bonus) and you lose out completely if the rest of the store doesn't make it. I have experienced this frustration myself and seen it in many of my employees, who work our butts off to try and make good numbers but get no compensation for it because some other team members struggle. There is a LOT of trickle-down stress in this company. At one of the stores I worked at, the DM was really fantastic and even though she rode us constantly about our metrics, we knew it was because she was getting it from above her. At my second store, the managers were treating the staff so horribly over numbers that when I told a cashier who was getting really down on herself for being one card down that she still has the rest of the week to make it up, and she normally does great so not to be too hard on herself, she was shocked - normally she would just be berated for that one single card. The managers don't even treat each other with respect - I got sick and called off for my first time in three years, and the AGM's words to me were "You have got to be kidding me!" and then when I apologized, a very sarcastic, "Yea, thanks!" and she hung up on me. This coming from an AGM who I have witnessed spend four hours sitting in the office playing on her cell phone, and who booksellers have told me many times avoids being on the floor as much as possible. I also find it frustrating that the company sets metrics goals, then makes them harder to reach. When I first started with BAM three years ago, the discount card expectation was 5% so you needed to sell a card for every $500 you had in sales. The card was $20, members got 10-40% off, weekly coupons, free express shipping, etc. Right around Christmas last year, they raised the price of the card to $25. This might not seem like much, but when we were a small mall store literally right across the street from a giant Barnes and Noble, being able to mention that our membership was $5 less than theirs was a great incentive. Shortly after, our goal was raised to 5.2%, supposedly so they could lower the goal at Christmas time and take some of the pressure off. Yea, right. Now you need to sell a card for every $425 or so in sales. Did I mention that they also took away the express part of the free shipping? And that there was no notice to customers about these changes, except for what the booksellers could tell them. I bought my own membership (Borders gave employees free members cards even when they started their own paid membership, by the way... not going to toot the Borders horn all things considered, but experiencing the benefits sure made it easier to talk about!) and had signed up for the auto-renewal. There was no notice about the fact that this year, my credit card was going to be charged $25 instead of $20, something that I really feel the company had an obligation to tell its customers, especially since to get the auto-renewal, you HAVE to provide an e-mail address, so a simple e-mail being sent out would have done the trick. Another issue: each store is an island. My original store was in northwestern Pennsylvania. Last year, we had no heat for the entire month of February. The company employs an online reporting system for various IT and maintenance and inventory issues, but they will really drag their feet the second there is anything that involves them shelling out some money to fix. Broken door that is so hard to close, my GM and I stopped letting our regular employees do it because people were literally hurting themselves on it? Three months before we got it 'fixed,' and that was only after daily phone calls to check on the progress and a strongly-worded e-mail that highlighted such things as 'lawsuit,' 'loss prevention,' and 'workers comp.' Even then, they would rather stick a band-aid on things than actually fix it, which means that a few months later, we're dealing with the same problem and beating our heads against the same wall trying to get workable conditions for our employees. We frequently felt like we were just on our own to make things work (we'd bring in our own fans/heaters to cope with thermostat issues, borrowed buckets when we had roof leaks, etc.) Need more shelves because they keep sending you more product than you have room for? Good luck. Want to carry local titles in your Pennsylvania store instead of the Alabama titles they keep sending you? Better special order them under a fake name, cause if you try to place an order for a book signing, school reading list, etc. that is not part of what the company expects you'll sell, they'll just cancel your order after taking four months to even acknowledge that you placed it. But make sure you switch up the names you use for these orders, because you will get yelled at for doing it even though you tried to go the proper venues and got zero results. tl;dr -not nearly enough compensation for the crap you have to deal with -management is forced and encouraged to treat employees like crap -company takes away benefits of the card but expects employees to sell more of them. -stores receive little to no support and assistance from corporate even for urgent needs like having heat in the middle of winter