Man, I am glad I'm finally out of retail, even though there were some fun aspects of it too. I talked to some former coworkers at Borders the other day, and that company is going to hell. They used to be very supportive of staff, lots of cool perks like a free $30 gift card each month, and just really let you develop your own style as long as you did your job and were friendly and helpful to customers.
Now they've joined the legions of retail stores where they try to control exactly how you interact with customers. You MUST use their first name if you see it on a credit card or work badge, you MUST recommend a specific book that somebody in corporate has decided is this month's hot thing (re: the publisher is paying lots of money for this service), all while trying to maintain the shelves and stock new merchandise with as few as 3 people covering a 50,000 square foot retail space. With everybody worried about getting in trouble if they don't follow all these ticky tack rules, they're afraid of approaching customers, because the only possible outcomes are they forget the script when it's a secret shopper grading their performance, or they get in trouble for not doing the other 8 parts of the job that's backed up because nobody else is there to help.
Well, no wonder their sales dropped 18% compared to last year, while B&N has only dropped 7%. They keep telling employees they can't afford more staff, but then they hire 5 new vice presidents in the last 2 months after they laid off 6 in January to cut costs.
Man, I keep trying to get past the bitterness, but when I have friends who break down crying because of the stress caused by these assholes, I just want that fucking company to crash and burn.
tl;dr: Buy your books at Barnes & Noble, Amazon, or even better at any local stores that are left, just fucking stay away from Borders.
