Half Price Books reviews

They began to slash benefits by A LOT, which was one of the great things about working for them. Their benefits are still better than most places, but beginning to cut them does not signal anything good going on with the company. Store managers are beholden to the corporation, not the employees. When I worked there, I had to file an OSHA claim just to get them to move books off the floor because we were buying so many. This is after the management's suggestion was just to 'work harder' when concerns were raised about safety. You might start to feel like you're ripping people off for their books when you see how little they give, how much is actually recycled (which is more than 50%). One of the biggest things that bugged me was that it explicitly states in the employee handbook that time off is earned in order for employees to use it to enjoy the things they love doing. When I tried to use that time off I was met with an attitude of disgust for actually requesting to use the time off I earned.

I don't even know where to start because there are so many. Understaffed, overworked, underpaid. Shocking nepotism on the part of management. Taking away and reducing our benefits and going out of their way to find ways to fire long-time employees or make their lives miserable until they quit. Ridiculous hiring choices that resulted in more work for everyone but management (who could have avoided these painful processes if they had only listened to their supervisors rather than completely discounting their advice.) Customers who are allowed to walk all over you (in fact, we were encouraged to let them take advantage of us and treat us like garbage, perpetuating these behaviors.) Hostile work environment thanks to management. I keep mentioning management because they made everyone's lives a living hell due to their complete incompetence and antagonistic behavior, even towards customers (yes, the rest of us had to give them the sun and the moon while they were allowed to go so far as to call customers on the phone to berate them or deny them basic services in the store.) At our location, we had major issues with the homeless, having to clean blood and large quantities of feces from every surface of the bathroom, not to mention crack pipes and ashes, large-scale flooding of the toilets resulting in severe damage and loss of profits, multiple calls to the police, and we STILL were not allowed to close the restrooms to the public. Hey, did I mention management? Employees who went above and beyond for the sake of the store were chastised like children, told they were not allowed to speak to each other while working, were micromanaged to the point of ridiculousness, were made to feel like they didn't know how to do their jobs, were picked on incessantly for anything and everything, were banned from talking about work related issues or the sharing of information outside of work (What? Yes, they even tried to police us when we went home for the day.) I saw over 30 employees come and go in my time there and was told that this type of turnover was "normal." In what universe is this normal, especially when you're running your business with a skeleton crew at any given time? I could go on for pages and pages but I hope you get the gist.