Using the net and box-ticking as criteria to choose staff is crazy. You can tell more about a person face-to-face than from any application form. I recommended an excellent person to the manager of our branch last year. He lived 5 minutes away, was a brilliant A-level student, great with people and a fast learner and hard worker. Instead of being seen by the manager he had to apply online. The job went to a totally useless person of the same age who didn't even live locally - turned out to be a total brown-noser and had no idea about books or spelling, grammar, geography or anything else for that matter.

So please, can we employ people on the basis of their personality, knowledge, education instead of asking them what colour their parachute would be?

One more thing - anyone reading all these comments - don't they see that the current booksellers really, really care instead of saying that they whinge???

Serf - you've highlighted exactly why I left Waterstone's. Bullying of the managers from the regional managers only lead to bullying of the rest of the staff by the managers. I have a lot of affection for Waterstone's, and I hope for all my former colleagues that things get better with Daunt at the helm.

Good God... had things really got that bad? I left the chain in July last year... probably would've ignored them and ordered stuff in anyway!

Isn't it amazing that people (Myers team presumably) say how wonderful he was? He hasn't 'turned W'stone around'. He destocked the shops to make the balance sheets look better, had the shelves covered with so much POS rubbish that it was hard to see the books, transformed the front of store into cardshops, wasted tons of money with rebranding one of the best established and respected chains in the country, wasted money on bits of cardboard,training programmes which implied that shopfloor staff were totally dumb (none of them worked) a new ridiculous T-shirt every five minutes - need I go on. Waterstones so far has been something of a freak - all managers at the head who think they don't need the body i.e. the booksellers. All the above were thought up by managers creating jobs for themselves, justifying their office space and their salaries which are much higher than those of the people they used until now to support the company. Not Dominic's fault? Of course it was, he gave it the green light.
I have worked for W'stones for 7 years and I have never been spoken to by a single person from head office. The suits that came to huddle in a tight group on the shopfloor totally ignored the booksellers actually doing the ...er...selling of books. As for uniforms, I agree that staff should be easy to spot by customers. What is wrong with giving everyone a proper shirt of the same colour??? Those poor-quality lumpy, frumpy T-shirts (not everyone has a great figure) made the shops look as though the staff all lived in a trailer park with no washing or ironing facilities. I hope the next style of management will introduce the notion that it's worth making yourself look clean, tidy and well dressed - out of respect for our customers - so no more unwashed looking staff with spikes through their faces, no more builder's bums hanging out of low-slung frayed jeans like the guys in HMV. Waterstones should not be that desperate for street cred. I'm perfectly able to sell manga and goth books without having to look like the kids who read them.But it's the older generations who buy the expensive books and they deserve at least as much consideration when faced with staff. I don't think that booksellers are now going to start clamouring for higher rates; all they want is to be treated with respect, not as sandwich boards. If under Myers and Gerry Johnson store managers had employed capable booksellers, neither all that training paranoia nor paraphanalia would have been necessary. And let managers employ local staff whom they see face to face instead of taken the best box-tickers.
SUGGGESTION FOR JAMES DAUNT - PLEASE DO An anonymous SURVEY AMONG BOOKSELLERS to find out what is actually going on on the shop floor at the moment. This would save a lot of money and time and lead to much improvement. And please, please, get rid of all those managers, sub-managers, sub-sub assistant managers pleeeease.

We talk about a bullying culture, as a manager of a Waterstone's store, I say that bullying culture came from the top, it came from Dominic. Having been on the end of one of his intimidating store visits, I have to say personally I'm glad of the decision he has made.
I've seen enough of my colleagues leave or step-down in the past 5 years, hopefully things will change and move away from an impossible job. At the moment I'm in a store that is struggling to survive, yet still we are being reminded every day about the need to force linksaves, with no appeal to our core customers, down their throats. Every day we are being reminded of the need to sell overpriced related products that, again, don't match our market. Every day we are sending customers away because we have returned the range that they want, or we can't supply the technology. We have stripped our range to create feature space that we couldn't fill, now even that has been taken back and we have been told what we need to do with that space.
Let me save my store, let me get rid of a chart that doesn't work, let me choose the related products that I know I can sell, let me reduce the amount of campaign and increase the range of books I know I can sell, let me give my bookshop back to the booksellers that know our customers and their sections. Put us in whatever colour t-shirts you want, but let us run our store that provides us a wage in a way that we know will make money.
15 years ago stores reflected the manager and the team that ran them, obviously we can't go back to those days (and I wouldn't want to), but let's have a bit more local control.. please Mr Daunt!

As an avid reader of this page (but not often a contributor!) I am really heartened to see much more positive comments being posted at this news. lets hope the gloom monkeys don't have anything to report too quickly.
Good luck to all of the Staff and Suppliers.

As a former Waterstones employee, I have my fingers crossed for changes to all the things that drove me out of the shop feeling far more cynical about the bookseller trade than I had been when I started.

After the beautiful North Street shop in Guildford was shut down earlier this year, all we had left was the highly commercial shop on the High Street. Though saddened, this was understandable. You don't need two branches in a medium sized town, and of course the High Street location made more money for the company. Some of the stock was getting transferred from the shut down shop to the High Street, so remained hopeful that they would at least be a better stocked shop.

Yeah right. Let's take the Science Fiction and Fantasy shelves as an example (though I've recently noticed the same thing happening to Children's fiction). The gigantic high street shop has close to a carbon copy of the stock in genre fiction as its much smaller shop one town over. They just have more copies of each book on the shelves. What happens to the buyers who have read everything they want to from that selection? Browsing becomes impossible - even between different shops. The result is that purchases go down, and when HQ notices this on the spreadsheet that tells them how certain sections are doing, they start reducing the size of that section, replacing it with stationery or other bits and bobs.

In the case of the Guildford store, genre fiction was massively reduced and replaced with ... magazine racks.

WH Smiths is directly across the street.

Oh dear.

Let's all calm down and manage our expectations here...this is the pre-honeymoon period and already we've got rid of staff uniforms, every RM, banished linksaves, ditched RP and kept all of our shops open.

I personally think there are reasons to be cheerful. Our performance in the context of the current climate and stock restrictions is actually ok and I would say that with some investment in stock and shop staff there is cause to be optimistic. The caveat is the weird atavistic yearning for the good old days from certain quarters - we're so far beyond that in terms of where the market has gone and for that reason Tim Waterstones lack of involvement is, in my opinion, a good thing.

An attempt to return, wholesale, to the good old days would be a huge mistake in the current trading environment. Shopfloor staff need to be easily identifiable, linksaves make up a significant portion of the stores weekly profit and in a world where the consumer is less interested in full price backlist non-book items that are of interest to Waterstone's customers are a good thing.

mr Daunt,

please please please put an end to the purple people eaters and give us back our dignity, we work in a book shop, not a candy store.
kind of tired of customers making (not) funny comments about the terrible T's we have been put in. "i will if i need to" (yawns)
ps, welcome to Waterstones