Pros
-You get to see some truly bizarre & cool things come through the buy counter. -At the location I worked at, being rude to impolite or angry customers was never punished or treated as a big deal -for retail, good insurance & PTO/sick plans
Cons
-The company doesn’t offer you a living wage, period. As the dominoes fall & other locations around the country unionize, corporate scrambles to raise the honestly insulting hourly wage, but it’s never much of an improvement. As I said, unless you’re a store manager, you’re not paid enough to support yourself. -Incompetence in management & uneven training was the name of the game at my location. Another SL was a really unpleasant, angry person & was always griping about booksellers doing things incorrectly, but never trained anyone properly. -the work that managers & booksellers are expected to do doesn’t match the training they’re given. One reason why customers are consistently lowballed & screwed over is bc the average employee has very limited knowledge of how to buy/price/pay for what comes in. Unskilled employees are expected to carry out skilled buying tasks that require a lot more knowledge & expertise. -The company culture is honestly kind of toxic. I really liked most of the people I worked with, but like with most retail jobs middle/upper management was often incompetent at best & malicious at worst. -As the company tries to fully automate its buying processes (thus reducing the need for skilled workers & the need to pay them), it will screw people coming in to sell stuff over more and more. This makes more & more justifiably upset customers who basically spread bad vibes & antagonize the workers (especially since many sellers are older boomer types spoiling for a fight anyways), creating many negative & draining interactions in a given day. The company is on its way out. Locations keep closing. My advice is to find a better job that treats its workers with the respect they deserve. -Pet peeve: I found it more than slightly disgusting how the store flaunts/markets a rainbow capitalism/hippie ethos while being explicitly anti-union. (We had multiple manager meetings about the importance of shutting any talk/campaigning related to unionizing down immediately. What shocked me was how anti-union the other SLs were & how committed they were to keeping pay low for everyone, themselves included.)