BookHolders LLC.
reviews and complaints

As part of their marketing tactics, BookHolders will tell sellers that their books are worth a certain amount of money if they sell through their 'Advantage' program, which is essentially a consignment which automatically drops the selling price of the books if they don't sell quickly (and sometimes dropped immediately). Emails to 'opt out' are always insufficiently marked, and often go directly to spam. BookHolders clerks are often told to lie to people to convince them to use the program.

Not only does BookHolders have deceptive business practices, but their pilot store (which coincidentally closed down recently) had multiple OSHA violations and unsafe working conditions. There was an incident once where a sewage line burst in the warehouse (the basement), and management simply left a tub underneath the leaking sewage for over a month before fixing it. Multiple employees were exposed to the waste, and a few contracted pink-eye. Large areas of the warehouse were unlit, sharp objects protruded out from numerous areas, mold grew rampantly in multiple parts of the warehouse on the ceiling and shelves, the only exit out of the basement (other than the small spiral staircase leading upstairs to the storefront) was always bolted shut with a key, providing no escape in the event of an emergency.

At their corporate headquarters, not far from where the main store used to be, they have 'analysts', whose job is to create fake accounts on Amazon, that are used to mass purchase books under fake names to avoid Amazon's mass buyer policy. Gift cards are loaded to the accounts and shifted between accounts to prevent the fake accounts from being flagged as fraud. When purchasing books through individual sellers with these fake accounts, if there was no tracking number given, or the shipment arrived a day later than it was supposed to, they would file A-to-Z Claims against the seller and get their money back. If they received the book after they were refunded for their fraudulent claim, they would keep the book, delete the fake account, and thus prevent themselves from being shut down by Amazon.

Not only this, but in the pilot store (and presumably every other store), cash income was never reported or deposited; only manually driven between stores, avoiding documentation of income through cash by any means necessary. New employees who are hired on during peak season are paid less than the legal minimum wage, because they claim they're 'contractors' (violation of contractor classification and use). After two weeks, before they would have to be hired on as full employees, most new hires are fired for no reason other than to avoid paying taxes on them.

BookHolders has a long history of illegally exploiting employees, customers and businesses, and should be avoided like the plague. All experiences listed here occurred between 2012 and 2015.