Pros

If you love books, and can overlook all the other bad things that come with working at Books-A-Million, you might can eke out a minimal level of satisfaction from the job. Any idea about working for a place so you can enjoy yourself, working with customers and solving their problems, or learning more about a business to improve yourself pretty much go out the window as soon as you start working with the company.

Cons

Complete lack of training for new hires. Everything revolves around selling the discount card, and if you don't do that satisfactorily you will be fired. Considering the first sentence and the second one, you'd think you would get actual training, guidance, support, and sales tips to help you meet your goal of selling the discount cards, but that doesn't happen at all. There are vague promises of 'safety nets' to help you get up to speed, but when you are put on a cash register all day every day starting from your third day on the job, there isn't much of a net there.

Managers pretty much coast into the job and don't do much they don't have to do, and it is common to see a co-manager who doesn't know the day to day details of their job well enough to actually do it. There is no communication between management and associates on issues like new book releases, sales goals, or important issues that are sent down from the all-powerful Home Office.

It is my personal observation that most long-term managers, those who have worked with the company for several years and have been promoted into their positions, have gotten so used to the fact that everything is controlled in a top-down fashion that they don't know how to display original thoughts or problem-solving processes. When every minuscule aspect of your job is programmed from the Home Office in Birmingham, right down to 'pull this list of books to put on this table and put them EXACTLY like this without fail', a 'manager' pretty much becomes a 'checklist completer' and it doesn't encourage actual management skills.

As has been mentioned before, the company could not pay associates any less if they wanted to, since their pay rate is rock bottom minimum wage. There is no holiday pay that I've seen so far, and you can be sure that you'll be working all weekends and holidays.

The discount card program is a sick joke that obviously was put in place by a former used car salesman who has never had to actually sell a card themselves. The first hint that it is a poorly-implemented program is the fact that every store has to sell the exact same percentage of cards, with no consideration being taken for the size of their market, how long the store has been opened, what sort of demographics exist in the local market, and what sort of competition exists. A store that has just opened will obviously be able to sell more cards than one that has been opened for five years in a slow-growing area, and a store that sits in a high-population area that remains steady will sell more than a store that is in a tourist area where a large percentage of their customers are either vacationers or snowbirds who don't live in a market Books-A-Million serves for most of the year. The existence of these unrealistic sales goals poisons the entire environment at Books-A-Million for both the workers and the customers. I have observed situations where customers lined up four or five people deep because no employee was willing to actually ring up a sale for fear it would 'mess up their percentage' for the day, so they leave the main cashier for the day swinging in the wind. Of course, managers are entirely reticent about putting in a drawer for themselves because then they'd have to worry about their percentage as well.

Advice to Senior Management

Leave Birmingham occasionally and actually go to a working store and put on an apron and do every job that you expect your employees to do, including keeping up a certain percentage of discount card sales. Consider ditching the control freak management structure and give your managers some opportunity to actually manage their stores instead of just completing 100 checklists a week. Respect your customers and try to understand why someone comes to a bookstore to shop, because it isn't to be badgered about discount cards or magazine subscriptions. Train your employees and then actually support and guide them to make them better and give them incentives to stay with the company.