Changing Hands Book Store Reviews

The utter disconnect between upper management and the team that is ACTUALLY on the floor day-to-day running the store, doing crisis control, and connecting with the community is abhorrent. This business is 100% performative. They capitalize on being an "independent, politically active, community-oriented" bookstore, using their retail workers to drive this narrative and neglecting to do any work or research themselves. I've worked for corporations before. Changing Hands is the corporate experience without the structure and communication liaisons you are often guaranteed in a corporate environment. They will try to silence you, make you bend to their will, and will completely disrespect you as an individual, despite the amount of work you and your team put in daily. This position is perfect if you are a worker bot with no boundaries or compassion for others. If you have any self respect and actually care about the community, do not work here. Your morals will be compromised. P.S. a special perk of the job is that you'll get anonymous phone calls regularly that subject you to sexual and/or verbal harassment.

First of all, the owner is abusive. She insists on being involved in the day-to-day and creating conflict with her employees, though she was not necessary to the daily operations. She would make bigoted (racist, homophobic and transphobic) remarks about her employees, potential employees, and customers. I've watched coworkers who were bright, warm-hearted and kind, on top of being highly competent, get scapegoated, or bullied, or just straight up burnt out from being unappreciated who all ended up leaving the company, some without new jobs lined up. Some were fired. Unfortunately this bleeds into the entire structure of the workplace, causing distrust and aforementioned burnout, gossip, general pettiness. It's hard to keep a positive attitude which /will/ be used against you by the owner. The pay is not a living wage and they withheld a positional raise from me for about a year for insubstantial reasons (though I have reason to believe it was due to the owner having a grudge against me which only grew in severity and caused my eventual quitting). They want quick bookseller turnover, they do not want people to grow with the company. It's unfortunate that Changing Hands' reputation hinges on their supposed open-mindedness and compassionate values, which was why I applied, but this is not the case. The managers really do their best in the face of this but it is a sinking ship. Honestly I would avoid Changing Hands entirely, especially if you feel passionate about the work. If this seems egregious and you are wondering, "why would anyone stay there knowing all this", it's because I genuinely love the people I worked with and the customers and felt responsible for trying to keep the ship afloat. And I know that this sentiment is corroborated many times over in various places. Don't work here!! Take care of yourself!!