Has your store been taken over by B&N? Do they automatically keep the current staff? If you stayed and worked for them, what is it like? Do they treat you decent? Bonus plan? Benefits?
I have a feeling many of us are going to be faced with this situation soon.
5 replies (most recent on top)
I worked for both BN and Follett for more than 10 years each and while not popular on this site I personally saw more support from Follett. BN cut payroll, had systems issues, wouldn’t spend money and let people go who didn’t follow blindly. Everyone’s circumstances might be different.
Medical benefits are through United Health Care, which honestly I think is a whole lot better than Blue Cross Blue Shield. Bonuses, that's always a ymmv situation depending on your store but if you do manage to bonus, you bonus well.
The so called "treatment of Follett people" as being cold (as one poster put it), I've seen that happen during store transitions, mainly from home office people towards outgoing Follett staff but I've also seen that from Follett home office people towards outgoing B&N staff. As far as in store B&N staff we don't give a st. If you're cool, easy to get along with and willing to work then you'll be treated fine and most importantly with respect. However, I strongly disagree with the statement one poster put "they're not much different than we are to our own people". On that, I call bullst, because B&N didn't cut manager salaries during covid, B&N didn't leave SMs high and dry during rush, we still had home office support during covid. If you want a very small idea of how different B&N is from Follett, go look up the B&N College page on this layoff site and compare the number of existing threads to that of Follett.
Our systems are a little antiquated, I do agree with that statement. I didn't get to spend a whole lot of time on Coursetracks but one of the benefits of that system over TA2 (textaid 2) is that it showed you a lot of information on one page. With TA2 there are a lot of submenus, so there's a lot of clicking on buttons to get what you want or where you need to be. Coursetracks allowed you to extract reports as a PDF or Excel (if I remember correctly). TA2 doesn't have that function directly. There is a way to extract Excel reports from TA2 but you have to format it yourself, unless you can get someone from the textbook division in home office to help you, and they usually will. And yes, home office uses Excel for many of our reports. The way inventory is controlled in TA2 is different from Coursetracks. On the subject of inventory, inventory doesn't update in real time. In-store sales take a day to post and online sales that 2 days to post (same with refunds) - THAT, is frustrating at times.
We use Accelerator for online orders and I personally think it is much better than SODA. It's not perfect but I'll take it any day over SODA. Oh, and our online order system does not fulfill online orders from another store. You fulfill the orders of the students at your campus and only that.
A couple of years ago GM was moved over to centralized buying. My store is too small to tell you if there have been any negatives since the change over. And this year all buying decision for textbooks are controlled by home office, however, if we need to make changes to those decisions then we are allowed to without having to give a reason; so it makes you wonder why go through this process anyway - hopefully this is just a phase and they'll revert back to letting the TMs make those choices.
On the smaller scale of things there are some vernacular differences. You guys say QTC, we say estimated sales. You say rental surplus, we......don't. You say Course Materials Manager and then designate a number category to it, we say textbook manager (overall, regardless of department volume). You guys alternate your new books when you stack them, we don't and I never understood why Follett pushed that. I was told it keeps better track of your new books, which I never bought that. I always saw it as unnecessary extra work.
Good news they are on the American stock exchange. They hire people and they use people to get things done. They are realistic And respectful. They appreciate knowledge that you bring to the table and get along with most of the universities. They were hand-in-hand with on campus stores. We have 25,000+ people and we treat them all with respect.
Depends on the contract, if the school wants you to stay, that'll influence it. Personally, I love it. I'm finally treated with respect and the number of people who are willing to help is amazing. Of course YMMV. But thank God I was with them and not Follett for covid... And yes, decent benefits and bonus plans.
They interview the staff but almost always want to put one of their other managers in there so they “change the perception” of who runs it. They will offer good managers jobs at other stores though. Face to face, they’re cold to Follett people through the entire organization. They’re not much different than we are to our own people to be honest. Their systems are antiquated though, you better know excel because that’s the way they report things. We use a lot of excel too but B&N does pretty much everything through it and reports are often wrong because their formulas are jacked up. They have A LOT of accounting issues as a result and it creates high ghost shrink. You’d be better off looking elsewhere.