Working at Nebraska Book Company — Reviews by Employees

I always had the upmost respect for everyone I worked with. My managers always gave me praise and were very trusting of me. It felt good to work for people who actually cared about you and knew your potential and how important you were to the success of the business. The pay was great and I new I always had potential to grow in my position. The benefits were way better than anywhere I have ever worked. Everyone I worked with was always willing to stop and help me if I didn't understand something. There were projects that were frustrating but I was still happy to have that job!

For retail, the pay is way better than their competitors at Follett and B&N. The company has absorbed some major payroll cuts in the recent years and support for people in the stores seems thinned to the point that it is hurting them. Some locations are well maintained but some are downright embarrassing in how horrible they look. Upper management seems to lack compassion, but they are a business. They have a hard time with planning and sticking to it. Too many inexperienced managers hired. Good benefits, the job can be fun.

Worked for them since 2000. They think that cutting payroll is the best way to make money. They do not hire enough people to get the job done in any store I have worked in. Both stores I worked at used to have a much larger customer base until Nebraska bought them. Since then, they have cut down so much on the payroll budget and advertising money that both stores have lost a great deal of customers and employees. A store that used to sell ten copies of a book, for example, now can barely even sell three copies. Their stores are extremely understaffed and the salaried managers are expected to "step up to the plate" and take on much more responsibility than they can tolerate or perform. Then they expect you to do all these trivial things like "back safety tests", filling out mountains of paperwork for each new hire, (and if you don't fill out the forms perfectly, they fax it back to you and make you do it again and again) "internet security policies" that everyone must read and sign and other "policies" every employee has to read about and sign. They make you pass out all these worthless pieces of paper to the customers and try to get them to fill out surveys when you can't even get one minute to actually do your job. They don't have a clue what is important and what is trivial. We can't hire anyone new until book rush because they won't give us the hours. that means none of our new employees will be trained or know what they are doing. We need to hire several dozen people just to man the cash registers, not to mention help in textbooks. It also means the hiring managers will have to fill out all these piles of paperwork for each person in the middle of rush when we should be helping customers get their books. They think buying a $5000 floor tv to advertise NIKE while people wait in line is a good investment when they can't even give you a minimum wage worker to put price tags on their Nike merchandise! They are driving our stores into the ground by giving us a skeleton crew with a few bones missing to do huge amounts of jobs - from the mundane (pricing, cleaning books, shelving/stocking) to the complicated (ordering merch, managing, scheduling, deciding things, etc). Nothing gets done. Everyone gets angry at each other. People don't get paid enough. The company focuses on trivial things and you get in trouble for actually trying to do the important parts of your job. The company does not know about the organization of the textbook department, either. Ever since I have worked in the textbook department, not once has a regional manager or even a regular manager known anything about the textbook department. They don't even know how to read a shelf tag or look up a book in the computer. And they don't care to. They spend about 2 minutes of their in the textbook department and ask you "what is this?" you tell them and they act like they know what you're saying, but they don't. Then they walk away and start telling you about how you need to answer the phone by the third ring with a smile on your face. And don't forget to wear your name tag! Apparently it is more important to give the impression "we want to please you" to a customer than actually pleasing them by having the items they need on the shelf and ready to buy or answering their questions about their books. By the way, they don't pay for your moving expenses if you move to work for them. And their bonuses are nice, but only after you have worked for a full year. If you come in the middle of the year, don't believe anything they tell you about how much bonus you'll get. You will be disappointed. After having worked 10 months in a salaried position, my bonus didn't even equal an entire two week paycheck. Last year, when minimum wage went up, the workers who were supposed to get raises for having been there several months, only got the minimum wage increase at their raise. A girl that worked there for two years never got a raise because of this and was making the same as anyone hired that day. Their buyback practices are shady, too. We are not supposed to tell the customer what their individual books are worth unless they ask. If their $100 book is worth $1, we can't tell them unless they ask. So say one book gets bought for $49 and the other for $1. They get $50. They are happy. We don't tell them that they just sold a book for $1. Most people would not want to sell their book for $1, so we are purposely not supposed to tell them unless they ask, because otherwise we would not get the book. Anyway, NBC is a bad company to work for if you expect to get work done alongside any employees other than yourself. They don't pay enough, they expect way too much out of their salaried managers, they cut payroll budget back substantially every year yet expect you do make more money than the year before, they focus on trivial things and they don't know anything about textbooks themselves. Bad business. Running stores into the ground. Shady dealings.