Barnes & Noble Reviews in Miami-Fort Lauderdale, FL Area

Pros

Great Benefits and Wonderful Working environment

Cons

hours, pay, quality of life

Pros

The discounts on instore products is good. Medical and Dental benefits are good.

Cons

The position you get hired for is the position you will have when you leave the company. There is NO promotion from within. Do not believe the nonsense they peddle about how all their managers are promoted from within the company. In the years I was with the company I saw one bookseller become a merchandise manager. Never did I see a bookseller rise beyond merch manager. Managerial positions are always filled from outside. Store Managers and Assistant Store Managers tend to be condescending, inept and unwilling to do the physical work required of everyone else. They often spend hours locked up in the office doing paperwork ignoring calls for managers from the book floor. This has been true across several stores I have worked at. In short, do not attempt to make a career of this place. They will not promote you. You will see the lazy and inept employees get the same raises and more hours than you. Lastly, the sensation when I finally quit was as true for me as all the people who left before me had assured me it would be. Leaving that place was the best thing that could have happened.

Advice to Senior Management

Quit the useless condescension towards your employees. Much as you probably hate your lives and your careers, they probably hate working for you just as much.

Pros

Customers and co-workers are always offering new worlds to investigate for a book lover..

Cons

Employees are considered disposable. Professional dedication is not considered a valuable performance item. It is all about memberships.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop targeting senior employees for not being able to move as fast as younger employees. There is value in experience as well as moving slush quickly.

Pros

-Employee discount (50% off cafe and 30% off music and books)
-Vacation and sick time
-Workers are easy to get along with

Cons

The Company does not promote you (at least not me) based on how hard you work or how dedicated you are to your job. At least where i worked, management chooses who they will promote to higher positions based on favorites. Translation, if you're not one of their "chosen ones", you will never be promoted and respected, no matter how much you give to the store. After three years of working for BN, i was literally treated like dirt towards the end, getting ONLY FOUR HOURS A WEEK! how inhumane!

Advice to Senior Management

Try Promoting employees based on how hard they work, instead of other insignificant reasons.

Pros

The discount, obviously, is a major pro. There's decent communication from Corporate HQ all the way down to the newest bookseller, which is something you don't really see at a lot of places. Comraderie among co-workers made the store a second home.

Cons

Employment and customer experience varies from store to store. Inflexibility of institutional sales program led to job losses. No direction announced yet for shrinking music departments.

Advice to Senior Management

Continue to provide more transparency into the company's performance and Corporate's decisions. If you're going to lay people off, be honest about it as opposed to telling everyone that everything's fine and then axe 100 store positions without blinking.

Pros

The medical benefits are really helpful if your putting yourself through school and do not have health insurance.

Cons

The pay is not great. The starting pay for a bookseller is minimum wage and pay increases are very diffucult to obtain. Promotion is also very slow. I was a book seller for three years with really good employee evaulations and was never promoted

Advice to Senior Management

Managment should try to implement better benefits to employees. Such as tuition compensation for those putting themselves through school or a commission program