Working at Nebraska Book Company — Reviews by Employees

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.

This company has a thing for checklists. We waste more time on locating the right forms or finding the correct policy than we do at finishing the task. The company sends their managers into battle with half baked plans that are changed hourly. We are currently working the new FY without a budget. We will not learn about this FYs direction 3 months into the new FY. In other words, we are already three months behind. They pick the wrong time to ask to cut payroll. This company has two home offices that just have people getting a paycheck because of their name. The training programs are worthless. It is sad to say that we have lost alot of talent over the past few years because of the lack of compassion that senior management has for their hard working people. The turnover is huge. The attitude is "where else are they going to go". Such effective management. However, with that all said. NBC could be a great company to work for. They just need to listen to the remaining talent that they still have.

Nebraska Book Company does not pay it's workers enough money, and they expect more from less every year. They do not try to reach out to the campus community at all, and try to use a "one-size-fits-all" model for their businesses throughout the country, when there is a lot of geographical, economic, and cultural diversity that needs to be taken into consideration. Before Nebraska Book Company bought our store, the store used to work with the campus and community much more than it does now, and the changes in employees, customers, and profits shows how devastating this has been to our store and the people we are supposed to be serving. It's really bad because we have a great location but we don't have the means to use this to our advantage and seriously help our customers. The worst part of it is that a lot of the employees are very competent and knowledgeable, they have great ideas, but it's the people and policies at corporate that largely hinder any progress we could make if our ideas were actually considered. Managers at our location work their butts off, but their is a high turnover rate because they don't receive the compensation they deserve.

A person can work here for decades and still live below poverty level. Do not work here if you don't have a partner with secure employment!

I have never worked for such a horrible place! Talk about toxic! I had competent, intelligent coworkers, but all of us were treated like worse than dirt by management. No respect, none at all, shown to anyone.

Poor senior management team makes it very difficult to work here. The industry is getting more competitive and our senior management team is too old or too oblivious to what is going on to keep NBC cometitive. We continue to give up market share without any sort of plan to turn the trend around. We are behind on every project and costantly in a reactive mode. I would be suprised if this company was still solvent in the next 5 years.

I worked for this company for about a year and a half. Hands down the worst job I have ever had, probably the worst one I'll ever have. First of all, pay is minimum wage, which is fine, because I expected to get a raise, but I never did. They considered the minimum wage going up .25 cents our raise. And my manager was just as bad. He didn't give a flying fuck about anything. He was a nice guy, but he was too unorganized and incredibly mean to customers. And I absolutely hated the people I worked with. There were two people who I got along with, but everyone else was really bad to work with. My assistant manager was so goddamn quiet, and left us to deal with everything. Only when it got extremely busy would she get up from her computer, doing nothing at all, and help us out. This place just seems to hire the worst employees. And also, growth in this company is virtually nonexistent. Working there for a year and a half, not one offer to move up. Not to sound cocky, butI was a pretty good employee(I definitely could have replaced the assistant manager.
This is the worst example of any company that exists. They should be shut down immediately. Fuck you, nebrask book company.

Pay: salaries are ok with NBC depending on what you do. I was a store manager and do not feel as if I was fairly compensated for the 50-90hr weeks I worked. On top of that there is not comp time given for overtime nor is there overtime pay. Just about any company you work for will give you overtime and/or comp time.

Respect: if you're in the good 'ol boys club at NBC you're set. However, as most people are NOT a part of this club expect to get treated like a piece of trash. NBC has made so many budget cuts that everyone has TOO MUCH on their plate. And the frustration filters down to the managers. I once worked 90hrs in a week and my boss told me "everyone does"...so not true. Considering it's been rumored that people at the corporate office leave early on Fridays.

Benefits: no comp time or over time pay = crappy benefits. There is a full health insurance pkg, but that's common.

Job Security: The only way to get fired here is to steal or embezzle which shows you how desperate they are to keep people because the company is just that awful.

Work/Life Balance: From my personal experience, I worked at least 6 days a week if not 7 and usually worked late or came in early everyday.

Career Potential/Growth: If you're starting from the bottom (sales associate) there's room for growth, to become a manager. But the trainee program suckers people in with it's great benefits then spits them out unprepared. There's a severe lack of manager development and it shows throughout the company.

Location: If you go into the trainee program and expect to manage a store where you want to live...you're in for a rude awakening.

Co-worker competence: If it's your own employees, well they're only as smart as the person that trains them. But if it's people at corporate you'll realize that NBC tends to jump the gun on new technology. They never fully test it, it takes days for IT to figure out problems, and your regional knows next to nothing half the time. This isn't all of the regionals...but mine was dumb as a door knob.

Work Enviroment: it is what you make of it.

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.

I worked in several positions with this company. The pay was disgusting the entire time. Frequent promises of better pay occurred, but usually it was coupled with a ton of work hours. By the time I quit I was working 70 hours a week, getting minimal support from the good old boy network in Lincoln...but don't worry the bonus will make it worth while. I walked away from this lousy company and have never felt better. Also as a minor side note somebody should really look into how many minorities and employees over the age of say 45 they have...I'm not saying anything in particular, but all the doors were open to me as a white 20 something manager, but I don't recall seeing one African American at our managers meetings. They do have a decent benefit package, unless you have family, then the health insurance is cheaper going through a local BC/BS rep.