Pros
Employee discount, some great coworkers
Cons
Everything. Management treats employees like garbage. The higher up the manager, the worse of a person they have to become. The absolute worst character traits are rewarded by an increasingly corporatized company. If you will not protect or support your employees then you will go far in this terrible company. District managers are absolute bullies who constantly cause hostile work environments. They lie and threaten employees regularly. The district managers would get vendettas against certain employees over small, silly, or inconsequential things and then spend years making life difficult for them, driving them to want to quit. They very rarely ever fired anyone because they didn't want to have to pay anything more than they had to into unemployment, so they would just make life difficult and uncomfortable for employees driving them to quit so they would be ineligible for unemployment. Employees would be subjected to literal emotional torture and abuse until they just gave up and left. LGBT people have been treated poorly including dead naming trans employees on publicly posted schedules and signage. Homophobic and transphobic employees were protected by management and conducted witch hunts amongst LGBT staff. Racist employees, including management, regularly expressed racist sentiments and no matter how often employees complained, nothing was ever done and there were no consequences for the racists. Anyone with injuries or disabilities were treated disrespectfully, including fat shaming employees and making awful comments about their health or physical conditions. Employees injured on the job were encouraged to not seek medical attention and just walk it off. If employees filed for workers comp, they went on the district managers' list of "bad" employees and were treated poorly in subtle and unsubtle ways. The scheduling was terrible, too. They would expect employees to work vastly different shifts, constantly changing with no rhyme or reason, making it difficult to maintain a good and healthy work/life balance. The company also laid off over half the staff permanently during Covid and replaced them with temps for half the pay they were earning and no benefits. They also began training employees during the last few years to pay customers less and less for their books and other media, doing their best to get stock for cheap or even free. The mission statement of the original founders was to treat customers and staff fairly, but now that they are gone that went out of the window. The daughter of the original founders is CEO and does not care about the company at all anymore and has let greedy corporate stooges and awful consultants destroy the good values and happy environment that her parents had so thoughtfully developed. The benefits package also decreased more and more over the years, giving fewer and smaller bonuses, taking away holidays, decreasing the number of vacation days you could earn, etc... At one point they dropped the hour paid lunch, one of the original huge appeals to the job, and made it a 35 hour work week so that they could make everyone work an extra five hours a week without paying them time and a half for overtime by calling it "straight time" instead. Do not work or shop there and definitely do not sell them your merchandise or they will rip you off as much as you let them! Eventually there will be a class action law suit against them, it's inevitable at this point.