Pros
Dealing with used items makes the job fun, we see new stuff everyday. Customers are usually pretty reasonable people who are enthusiastic about books. Paid vacation and sick time. Coworkers are usually cool people, although if one is being unreasonable it gets to be a problem since with this job we tend to rely on each other heavily in order to succeed as a store.
Cons
I've worked in multiple districts in Half Price and I can say that your experience as an employee can be wildly different depending on who your district manager is. The attitude in the district I was trained in was amazingly positive, our district manager and assistant DM would visit each of the stores a couple of times a week and help out doing whatever we were needing help on, whether that be pricing or doing buys or helping out customers. Things like scheduling and how the stores were run were left to the very capable store managers, and that's the way it should be. The district I'm currently in is micromanaged by the DM who sets arbitrary and unnecessary quotas while things like section work (the main way we make money- getting books out onto the shelves) and BUY TRAINING are being neglected. There is no district trainer here and new hires are being trained subjectively and improperly on how to buy used books back which affects the rest of the staff negatively. Also, just generally as a company our sick and vacation hours are being cut, probably in favor of getting more money in order to open more stores.