Half Price Books doesn't know what it wants to be. It sells used items, remainders (far too many of those), and brand new bestsellers that are 20% off cover price. They also sell items online, and let third parties sell items through the Half Price website, like Amazon and eBay do. That last part is confusing for customers who think that items that show up on the website can be found in the stores.
The problem with all this is that the chain hasn't changed staffing levels and procedures to make it possible to cover all the new things it has put in place and still provide great customer service at the store level. No matter where you are stationed (register, phones, buying desk, etc.), you will be working on things that are entirely unrelated to that post, making it harder to give the customers the attention they deserve.
The store maintains an inventory database...sort of. It doesn't include sale items, mass market paperbacks, and other categories, so if a person asks if you have a particular item in stock, the only way to REALLY know is to check the shelves. That defeats the purpose of telling customers that we can see what we have by checking the database. Hardcovers and trade paperbacks tend to be listed in the database, but since they never seem to clean the database, it may show that you have 57 hardcover copies of something in stock when you really don't have any (and haven't for a year).
When the chain focused on used books, their procedures and staffing levels worked fine. When they added remainders, it still worked. Now that they have added a lot of other tasks and procedures at the same time that they are cutting staff hours and staffing levels, though, things are starting to fall apart, and customer service is suffering. The policies and procedures are a motley mix of those you would find in used bookstores, new bookstores, and online businesses, with no real coherent plan behind them.
All the job positions at Half Price Books are unnecessarily stressful these days. They expect you to know as much about books and music as library workers, but the pay is closer to what you would get at Wal-Mart. That would be okay if it weren't so frantic and (often) physically demanding. In short, they are demanding more and more of their employees and making customer service much more difficult, all while slashing benefits and hours. A lot of employees are leaving or reducing their hours to part-time, including many who have been with the company for decades.
