Books-A-Million Reviews

Pros

Easy to become a specialist, creative control of your department

Cons

Low pay upgrades to specialists with a substantial work load increase

Advice to Senior Management

Allow for larger pay increases to specialists

Pros

The discount I suppose is decent. And on occasion, you might get to enjoy a book signing.

Cons

There are too many cons to get into. The Senior Management is the reason the store is a horrible place to work. There is no consideration for your medical problems, family events, or just personal reasons. This specific location works off of a bare minimum staff. Barely any training is involved. There is no raises, no encouragement, and absolutely no feedback on your job. Instead, if you do something wrong, you are just given the cold shoulder from senior management and given the worst schedule.

Advice to Senior Management

My suggestion to you is if you hate the place that much, don't work there. All you are doing is making it a horrible place for everyone else.

Pros

Great people
Discount
Very easy to get time off if you need it

Cons

If you can't sell the card, hours are cut
If you can't work closing shift, hours are cut

Advice to Senior Management

Make it possible for people that believe that customers matter more than discount cards to get shifts that wouldn't require them making an hour drive back home at 2 in the morning.

Pros

20% discount on products. Working with books.

Cons

Selling discount cards takes away from customer service and people are fired if they do not sell enough of them. Upper management is clueless.

Advice to Senior Management

Let your employees actually help customers so that they buy books instead of focusing on selling a $20 discount card. Also look at lowering prices on books. Selling books at list price will result in your company going bankrupt.

Pros

People you work with.
20% discount on most things
Checking out books for free
Easy enough, assuming you're lucky enough to be trained

Cons

I don't make very much money.
It's stressful knowing that your hours depend on your ability to sell discount cards and magazines.
Frequently changing schedule ensures that you have no idea when you actually work.
No good reason for the advancement of some people over others.

Advice to Senior Management

Make sure that the people you're hiring are making decent amounts of money, being well trained, and don't have to sell $20 pieces of plastic to get hours.

Also, don't promote someone to manager if they aren't a hard worker.

Pros

- (Generally) Sociable, Friendly Staff: these are all, for the most part, good, intelligent people. A few bad apples, but they don't spoil the bunch.
- Discounts!: 20% off all the time, 30% off on the 1st of the month and the holiday season.
- Rental System: Like books? Want to read them? Don't need to own them? Check them out!
- Enjoyable Sales Floor: Customers are (usually) nice and patient, regardless of how small the floor associate pool is, and will politely wait in your queue of customers until you can help them.

Cons

- Magazine & Discount Card Programs - The Customer's Take: You will be expected to pitch both a magazine subscription scam and a discount card to each customer when you work on register. This means that customers hear about these programs multiple times if they aren't enlisted to them already, which causes many to be bitter, jaded, or even volatile towards those on registers.
- Magazine & Discount Card Programs - The Manager's Take: You will be expected to sell a certain percentage of cards and magazines to customers; fail to do so, and there's Hell to pay, threats to your hours and job security, and unfriendliness all around.
- Magazine & Discount Card Programs - The Employee's Take: Those who meet their percentages will be given the ability to slack, complain, and avoid the worst labors; those who don't will be looked down upon by management constantly, given the hardest tasks, and micromanaged excessively.
- Grueling Hours: 9, 10, even 14 hour shifts are not uncommon. The practice of making the same people who closed the store (at 1am) open the store (at 7am) is also not unheard of. For relief, you have 1 10-minute break every 4 hours available, but some in management treat taking breaks as crimes, and if you're on a register, getting your breaks are almost impossible. Your lunch is a scheduled 30-minute off-the-clock affair, which can be rescheduled at the active manager's discretion (and often is, especially if you're on a register).
- Overscheduling (for Part-Timers): expect to work every day you list yourself as available, regardless of if it was agreed upon at your hiring that you were available for a set amount (read: college students, beware.)

Advice to Senior Management

Drop the magazine scam - the magazine business is a dying one, and it's threatening to drag you down with it at the cost of your customer's good graces. Rework your card program, too; it's a solid enough package of benefits for loyal customers (though the coupons are kinda weak), but the strain it puts on employees and management in its current condition is obscene. A high turnover rate and frequently missed sales goals are signs of a failing business model: heed them.

Pros

-30% off First of the month/X-mas Time, 20% regularly
-Great lower level employees
-Good coffee

Cons

-Incompetent middle and upper level management. They hold grudges, which result in hours being slashed. I have had our St Louis DM spy on me numerous times while working the cash register.
-Magazine Scam: This is the biggest scam in the books. Anytime a customer pays with a credit or debit card, we must pitch to them how they get 3 free magazines for 2 months. When they forget to cancel, they get charged the subscription fee of the magazines. After this happens, BAM gets a portion of the fee, which is why we have to pitch it. If I wanted to work for a company that depends on scamming people, then I'd work at Vector.
-Discount Cards: We must sell discount cards to the customer, pitching it to every customer that comes through the line. If we don't meet the certain percentage, hours are slashed and firing is in the horizon.
-Upper Level Management: A bunch of sleazy managers who don't listen to anyone. It is so frustrating.
-There seems to be no employee training. They put you onto the sales floor and think you should know what to do. It is like a maze working there. They don't tell you how to do anything, but if you don't know how to do it then you are worthless.

Advice to Senior Management

You will lead this company into the next Borders. All of your stores will fail if you don't get a new business plan. It should be about customer service, but all you care about are the discount cards and magazine sales.

Pros

The store level management in my store is good
The other associates and specialists are wonderful to work with
The book check-out is ok but matters little if you have an ereader
Helping people find new authors and books

Cons

The infamous discount card percentage and the magazine program
The incompetence of the home office and senior management.
The pay is not adequate and even if you perform well there will be no raise.
Expect to be the janitor, the deep cleaning crew as well as the cashier.
Employees really are abused and unappreciated as has been stated by others here and elsewhere.

Advice to Senior Management

Get into the actual stores and listen to the people who are providing the customer service. The top management will walk through the stores but in over six years of working there I have never seen one of them talk (or listen) to anyone at the store level. Stop hiring and promoting your nanny or your golf buddy's son and hire or promote on the basis of ability. If you want to lead you will have to earn some respect first, that would be a miracle in this company! As of now, top management is a joke.

Pros

Great people to work with at store level. You get to be around books and, if the store has a cafe, plenty of coffee.

Cons

I agree with a lot of the 'cons' posted on here (ridiculous amount of focus on discount cards and magazine program, constant feeling of "what have you done for me lately" no matter how long you've been with the company or how you've contributed, etc.). However, one thing that I noticed as the market has changed, Books A Million has become increasingly focused on not losing money instead of trying to present a brand and product that people want (which will make profit in and of itself). Daily directions became increasingly convoluted and contradictory, hours for management became longer, budgets got slashed (and yes, we all realized that increasing the magazine quota, eliminating the cafe specialist position and cutting our salary budget 20%, making the salaried managers work themselves to the bone was just so they could save money to buy up the Borders stores!!). The bottom line is that employees, and to a certain extent, customers, have become less and less important. (Remember when it was actually worth it to pre-order a book? Now, it's full price and you get some lame coupon booklet and the employees have to submit a written reason why they didn't sell one to the RVP!) By the end, I didn't know one employee who really looked forward to coming to work, compared with several years ago when the exact opposite was true and everyone loved working there!

Advice to Senior Management

Stop being so reactionary - establish an identity (I heard at a recent manager meeting, most GMs thought that BAM was trying to be the Big Lots of books). Treat your employees like actual people (if you think you do now, then you're too far removed and this won't help you anyway). Look back on when you had seminars and bonuses and things that actually motivated people to work for you. Incentivize!! Your ship is taking on water and you have a gang of people at the home office all trying to justify their existence by moving feature 4 to feature 6 and feature 6 to this or that table, and then blaming stores when the moves don't work or when associates can't help customers because all they do is move stuff around and hear about what failures they are all day.

Pros

Book renting program
Employee discounts
Fellow employees are easy to work with
Mostly laid back attitudes
Very easy-going dress code

Cons

The biggest, most obvious con is the insane pressure to sell membership cards. You could be a complete slacker, but if you made the quota you were untouchable. If you didn't meet quota, it didn't matter how hard you worked - they look for reasons to fire you.
When I was given a notice that I wasn't meeting quota, the paper said that I had never met it the entire time I had been working there, which was an out-right lie. I made twice the quota one week, then just barely dipped below it the next and was immediately fired.

Advice to Senior Management

For one, if you want more people to buy membership cards, drop the price back down to $15. Also judging an employee solely on how many pieces of plastic and annoying magazine scams they can sell is ridiculous. We're supposed to be selling books, not plastic.