My essay on bookstore employment

Note: I wrote an essay in 2004 about a past employment experience working at a bookstore, and submitted it to the Boston Globe’s “View from the Cube” business section editor. The editor was unimpressed but I felt it was a worthwhile subject so revised it in 2007 and re-pitched the essay. No response this time. It’s reproduced below for the benefit of the blogosphere.

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As presidential candidates ready campaign platforms and argue the pros and cons of keeping U.S. soldiers in Iraq, I remember the words of President George W. Bush shortly after 9/11 when he charged the public to stimulate the weakened economy and go shopping.

I reasoned that if Americans were going shopping, and bookstores were on their list, then the stores would need extra employees. Considering I was denied bookstore employment as a teenager, I decided to heed the president’s words during a bout of unemployment in early 2002 and apply to work at a so-called super bookstore (such as Barnes & Noble, Border’s, and the like).

I got the job, although in retrospect I should have realized I was in for an amusing work experience when my first interview with the general manager was postponed because she was out sick. Despite my phone number and application on file, nobody called me to reschedule.

My primary role was to read books, and to share my wealth of literary knowledge with prospective customers searching for the right book to cuddle with beside their fireplaces, to take to the beach, or to read-aloud to their children.

I was a man of many hats at the bookstore, usually running around with a cell phone at my hip that could answer any incoming telephone line to assist customers. Most days, I juggled the tasks of assisting the front-end cashiers, working at the customer service desk, shelving books, and organizing and re-stocking magazine titles. I thrive on people interaction, and I enjoyed helping people find books.

Customer satisfaction is something I learned during college when I held a part-time job as a restaurant server. The customer is always right, I was told, and the waiter should bend over backwards to forget profit but properly serve the customer. Shouldn’t bookstore employees also serve the customer? You see it all the time in independent bookstores, but many super bookstore employees are downright rude or busy.

Employee retention at super bookstores is low. During my nine months of employment, I was among the longer-lasting employees and I’m not including the perpetual former teacher who had worked there for three years, the seasonal college students, or the grandparent workers. (Some of these perpetual workers continue to work there, some five years later. It must be the health insurance benefits or the casual work atmosphere, for it surely isn’t the minimum wage pay.)

Workers are only as productive as the management, and the general manager could not manage. She was rude, lacked people skills, and didn’t act as a positive role model to employees. I know this because the workplace camaraderie of customer service reps and front-end cashiers trusted and befriended the assistant managers but despised the general manager.

For instance, the GM decided to hold a contest to see which employee could sell the most bookstore memberships in a given period, with the highest-selling employee to receive a paper certificate of achievement hung in the employee room, hidden behind a keypad-locked door. We joked to each other after reading the memo. If the award was a gift certificate or free book, we would have cared and sold memberships competitively. But for a piece of paper, and not for public consumption? When Dave won the achievement award, he laughed. I’m sure he shared it with his wife that night over more laughs.

Another day, while staffing the customer service desk, a woman approached me and asked for the title and author of a book to buy for her son’s summer reading list. Normally, during busy periods, we were instructed to direct patrons to the solitary payphone near the restrooms. That day, however, there was a lull in store activity, so I dialed her home number, and gave her the phone so she could speak to her son. After purchasing the book, she returned to find me and thank me for my kindness, as the GM refused her phone request.

An important prop for every bookstore, especially those with high shelves for standing on and low shelves for sitting on, is the stool. Because I didn’t wear dirty pants to work, I didn’t want to get my pants dirty by sitting on the floor. Unfortunately, I had no choice as the GM prohibited employee stool usage without a doctor’s note. (I once saw the GM yell at a senior citizen worker, so I know I wasn’t singled out.)

I’d be remiss without mentioning the time I was in the men’s restroom when a middle-aged man asked me (while I stood before the urinal) whether it was store policy to leave a copy of Playboy magazine in the bathroom stall. His pubescent son had seen the magazine there. I shook my head, but said we couldn’t control what patrons bring into the restrooms. While the man was correct that pornographic titles don’t belong in bookstore bathrooms, I told him it wasn’t my responsibility to take it out. Thankfully, my manager agreed with me.

One of my roles included holding a laser gun, wirelessly connected to the in-store computer database, to scan UPC barcodes of all books in a given section, such as sports or history or romance novels. The dual purpose maintained an inventory count of a title, and ensured accurate shelving placement if haphazardly left by a customer. The gun’s LED readout indicated how many copies of the title were supposed to be in the store and where the books were located.

This wasn’t as easy as it sounds, because store shelving guidelines didn’t always agree with corporate guidelines. For instance, a book on the Boston Red Sox would not be shelved with sports books, as the computer database indicated, but with other New England books on Cape Cod, hiking in the White Mountains, and Boston cheap eats. However, a book on the New England Patriots, which the scanner indicated was shelved in New England, was really shelved in the sports section. I was frequently confused when helping customers!

I also grew frustrated. Because I used to work in the computer industry, I felt Web design books, for instance, should be shelved near Web development books, and not multiple shelves away. Clearly, the corporate shelving guidelines were not double-checked by industry experts.

Unlike independent bookstores that survive with sales and a customer base, the super bookstore earns a profit even if nobody is in the store. Think about that for a moment. Books are bought from publishers by corporate buyers at a deep discount and distributed to the nationwide stores. So, even if nobody buys a book, the store still makes more money on the book than the independent store that typically buys the book at retail cost and wants to break even.

Thanks in part to my employment and book recommendations, U.S. retail sales in June 2002 reached $302 billion. The U.S. Census Bureau indicates that by the following year, the figure jumped 4.3 percent to $315 billion, of which $1.1 million indicated bookstore sales. Obviously, other people listened to President Bush and went shopping.

Several months after I stopped working at the bookstore, I learned the rude general manager also quit. Good riddance.

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