PANDEMIC RESPONSE
Employees who were at-risk or living with at-risk family/roommates were left to use whatever sick/vacation time they had instead of being allowed to take a leave before non-essential businesses were shut down by local government.
Endangering employees and customers by not requiring masks to be worn. People who don’t wish to wear a mask can still shop online or by phone, but management will not risk losing money over the health of their employees and community. Safety precautions have no teeth.
Layoffs were huge on April 2nd. Many long-term employees were left to fend for themselves without health insurance while the company claimed they were in this fight with us. Refer to @HPB_layoffs for further information.
No hazard pay increases for staff forced to come in rather than lose their job.
Employees with questions about how laid off employees were referred to HR because it was out of the hands of local management.
Corporate sent out a letter prohibiting employees on furlough from asking currently working employees questions about operations, blinding them from assessing the risk present if they were to come off furlough.
Furlough was extended multiple times, but did not rule out being laid off or being called in early during these periods, thereby making “furlough” meaningless.
Has continued to open up hours and services despite the increasing COVID-19 hospitalizations in Austin, TX.
COMPANY PHILOSOPHY/ETHICS
Company Statement of Purpose is to “Be fair to customers and our employees, promote literacy, be kind to the environment and remain financially viable so we may continue.”
They are not fair to customers
Lack of diverse staff leaves community underserved. BIPOC customers will not see representation of themselves on staff and therefore will not find material catering towards them.
They are not transparent about buying practices and train staff to provide as little specific information on offer amounts as can be conveyed while keeping the buy. Other Austin companies that offer buying services, such as Buffalo Exchange and Precision Camera, tell you exactly what you got for each item you sell to them. Company may make no offer on a book and later take that book and sell it in store.
If you are a kind customer you will not get the same benefits as a belligerent customer who intimidates staff into “honoring” their demands for discounts.
They are not fair to employees
Paid a starvation wage.
Approximate take home pay for Bookseller is $1334/month. The average 2020 rent for an apartment in Dallas, TX, where HPB is based, is $1,250/month. In a healthy budget, rent should only take up to ⅓ of expenditures.
Expected to perform more work than time allows in a shift.
Highly-skilled labor that is written-off as “retail” and not given the support needed to excel.
Raise and promotion practices are opaque. Employees that look for promotion opportunities and try at other locations are not likely to obtain that position because the hiring manager will just go with their in-house option to avoid “issues” instead of choosing the most qualified candidate.
They do not meaningfully promote literacy
HPB will fulfill donation requests with material that is thought to be physically or financially unsuitable for the shelves. There are no continuous programs implemented across the company that would increase literacy for an individual of any age.
They are not particularly kind to the environment
HPB is “green-washing” their impact. They do not have a responsible standard implemented for recycling electronic equipment or batteries. While much of the soiled material coming into the store from people clearing out stuff is recycled if it can be, they do not properly train employees on what material is or is not suitable for the single-stream recycling dumpsters.
They will not continue
They will squeeze their staff to the breaking point to stumble towards a sputtering death if they do not make major changes.
Management trains Booksellers that we don’t censor what we sell, excusing this by pretending they are not equipping people with harmful content, thereby leaving us to sell texts that are ethically abhorrent such as “To Train up a Child” or fuel hate through Islamiphobic, Antisemetic, and homophobic texts. HPB also sells A LOT of books branded in swastikas. Their World History table is going to always be full of scarlet red books about Nazi uniforms and officers. Not great to look at every day. HPB is a company selling books for profit, not a library or educational institute preserving texts for research. HPB makes money by selling hateful material and is complicit in fueling bigotry.
Company is still privately-owned, but pretends to be “local” even though it is nationwide with over 120 locations and uses this pretence to refuse pay increases.
Poor response to problematic behaviors by employees. Anecdotally, there have been several instances of sexual harassment that have resulted in inaction or punishment of the victim.
Company is nepotistic and proud of it.
DIVERSITY
It’s a really white company, especially amongst management. Employees do not accurately reflect the community in which they operate. Management needs to actively recruit and foster BIPOC and be transparent about the scope and scale of their efforts.
Spanish language section is small and the company does not make efforts to increase this space or hire spanish-speaking staff to make options better and more available to interested customers. As a Texas-based company, this is willfully narrow-sighted. It keeps spanish-speaking families from acquiring an equitable range of product for themselves. One of HPB’s great benefits is offering more affordable children’s books, which kids blow through quickly and grow out of. The Latinx community is just as deserving, but treated as an afterthought. HPB intakes what it gets in “Foreign Language” and is woefully unprepared to curate what arrives.
Company is performative in its displays of support for minority communities/movements.
JOB EXPECTATIONS
Expect booksellers to act as bouncers in certain locations that attract transient people with no safety training or resources to help them
Barely staffed. Turnover from unsatisfied employees was so frequent, we were never truly staffed let alone staffed with enough people to allow for schedule adjustments.
Starting position requires 90 DAYS of training and pays $11/hr full-time. After a company-wide survey a couple years ago they begrudgingly increased pay from $9 to that $11 whilst also limiting the amount of full-timers brought on board. They now would rather have benefit-less part-timers who face even more difficulty getting trained properly because of scheduling. Every competent coworker that has left has left because the wages are pitiful and cannot support a modest independent life. During much of my employment I did not work with a single person who could live on their own on HPB’s wages. In this area, "low-skill" labor at places such as DQ or Rudy’s start at $13 and even that is insufficient, plus I don’t see them needing to train staff for 90 days to be up to snuff.
The best employees act as salespeople, buyers, merchandisers, teachers, historians and librarians all in one. This is highly-skilled labor and treated as disposable.
EMPLOYEE BENEFITS
Managers justify low wage by saying they offer good benefits, but those do not exist.
Health insurance has gone up in price and down in coverage.
One, single affiliate discount or promotion with other companies or services. No travel, hotel, attractions or neighboring businesses.
Profit-Sharing is supposed to occur every quarter. One year recently there was only one quarter in which we received a bonus and it was $300. Unpredictable and often late if it comes at all with no warning or explanation.
Christmas bonus is meager.
SupportLinc services are awkward to access and look exceptionally out of date.
Schedule inflexible. There are so many blackout dates that throttle opportunity to take time off. These dates include Spring Break, Memorial and Labor Day weekends, Mother’s and Father’s Day, Practically the whole of June-August, week of Thanksgiving, Black Friday weekend and the whole of December. I submitted a vacation request 6 months in advance and was told I couldn’t be spared.
Break room is small and full of equipment, presenting a fire hazard.
I’ve never read less than working at this bookstore.
LEADERSHIP
Overworked and under-equipped. Less and less autonomy for stores. Store management passes the buck on to corporate for very basic questions because they are afraid to make statements on their own.
Store manager at my location is always working beyond scheduled hours and always stayed “behind” in work.
In my experience they have often been very poor at communicating with staff to work proactively on projects and instead only share what they are unhappy with after the fact.
Management teams in stores are poor at presenting a united message or goal and often contradict one another or reprioritize without sharing that information.
OPERATIONAL
The card reader displays a misleading message that one should both leave their card in and also take it out which confuses every-other customer and slows down checkout. We were told it would be fixed after they rolled it out to all stores and it has not been.
Website is nearly unusable even as an employee. You cannot shop by store location. Customers come in expecting a title to be available only to be told that they misunderstood what "HBP- In Stock” means and that we don't in fact have it. When you look for a specific title with an ISBN or UPC code, the website regurgitates all related items rendering your search options unweildy. Example: I tried to shop for large print books available at any nearby store. I had to search through every title that exists in large print and then scroll through the results to see if any were HPB locations and then any locations that are near me. Not “Easy To Shop From.” I gave up.
Card terminals and/or network would regularly go down partially, completely or slow to a crippling speed during big sale days.
Scanners for merchandise were being taken from stores when left unsupervised, and the company threatened to fire employees who were last responsible for their machines WITHOUT providing any more holsters to carry them.
Earlier this spring, many customers at various stores were double-charged or not refunded for their purchase and the clean-up for this mess took weeks and was very sloppy.
Mail is not checked every day even though we now receive deliveries of customer orders that they expect to be able to pick up.
Notifying customers of the arrival of their items for transfer is call only. There is no email or text option and it monopolizes the time of people who are supposed to work the register and maintain eyeline with high-priced product. People don’t pick up the phone for unknown numbers so this system is out-dated, ineffective and leaves product to sit stale, forgotten.
AESTHETICALLY
Signs for sections are yellowed-beige and hang above the alcoves out of sight of a casual browser. Signage should also be at eye-level.
Shelves are labelled with peeling label tape and not secured in a frame which looks unfinished and clunky.
Music is tasteless and out-of-date. There are plenty of options to broadcast inoffensive tunes without falling back onto the current playlist options which are often unrecognizable to the general public and alienating to the younger customers and a majority of the staff.
Checkout counters are busy and cluttered with merchandise. It is not clear which are “open” for checkout leading customers to become angered if a non-register employee is in the vicinity of a second register but not taking them from their line.
Yellow Pine shelves are dusty and stay that way. They have pegs supporting the warped shelves which damages the tops of books.
Shelves are too tall for many customers and because step stools are not available for customers, it leads to conflict between irate customers and powerless employees.
Floors are dirty and regular deep cleaning hasn’t occurred for years at my location because management doesn’t have time or money to schedule it.
