The Second of what is apparently now at least three rants on Bookselling
edit, 26 June: some portions of this essay, as originally posted, have been removed to comply generally with my employer’s media policy, and more specifically with our code of business conduct & ethics
Also, please note: all opinions expressed are my own and both should not and can not be interpreted as an official statement or position of my employer.
##
So, you sell widgets.
You even sell them retail. You advertise. Folks know your brand, and where your local stores are located. In fact, you’ve been in business — in this exact, niche business — for years.
You just keep the doors open, right? Through good times and lean times; some years you make more, some years less, and of course you’re working hard behind the scenes — but from the outside it looks like the business runs itself.
No retail business runs quite the way it seems from the outside, though; even with two nearly identical physical store fronts, no two retail businesses have the same model. It’s not just the physical space, or the web site [if you have one] — it’s the phone.
If you sold pizza, say, you’d expect the phone to ring continously — if the phone wasn’t ringing, you’d worry, because home delivery is your business. If you’re a plumber or electrician, every time the phone rings it means a new client, and a new job worth hundreds. You’d likely even pay someone to make sure every phone call gets answered. If you’re selling theatre tickets in any city but New York or London, you do the happy dance when the phone rings; if you’re any other type of retailer, even if folks are only asking your store hours, you rejoice with every call, as it means a new customer is looking for your store.
If your main business is mail order, heck, you live and die by the phone — in fact, you run a call center. You have multiple phone lines. You hire multiple operators. You stash your staff in a cubicle farm, and pay them to answer calls, be polite, and generate sales. Your overhead is the phone bill, payroll, and rent on an out-of-the-way office in some suburb (or Bangalore). Phone orders are a different business, whether we’re talking about LL Bean, Lands’ End, or other catalog-but-now-internet retailers: you do the majority of your business via direct sales whether the order originates from a catalog or web site.
Unless you run a bookstore.
[editorial comment: this frustrates me no end. I’m not currently on medication for high blood pressure, but when eventually I have to go on meds, I know exactly what caused it and it’s not my diet or lifestyle: it’s the customer base]
There is no other industry where customers routinely and as a matter of course find an item online and then immediately call a store looking for this exact item because of course they’ll stock it —
except for bookstores
There is no other industry where one is expected to stock not only every item in a category, but to stock them in quantity at a local distribution center, available for pick-up today, on less than 4 hours notice, no matter how obscure or marginal —
except for bookstores
There is no other industry where an entry level employee at a local, backwater sales outlet is expected to have expert knowledge of millions of individual items, to the point where they can make recommendations on which item is better than another in a particular category, or to identify items out of a catalog of millions based on incomplete and occasionally incorrect information —
except for bookstores
There is no other industry where you can pick up the phone, ask for the most obscure and out-of-date model of a particular product, and expect the poor associate who takes your call to not only be able to pull up the item in a database, but to describe it, point out what is the most recent model, and tell you which competitors’ products might not only have succeeded it but improved on the item you asked for —
except for bookstores
There is no other industry that has to stock hundreds of thousands of items out of available millions and be required to staff every outlet with associates able to describe and recommend each and every one, and to do so in hundreds of outlets across the country, and make every item available for you to try out, for free, for as long as you’d care to — while also providing a place to sit, free internet via wifi, and no fees or obligation to buy, ever —
except for bookstores.
Even if everyone knows books are online — even if everyone knows Amazon, and assumes Amazon is the market leader [they’re not] — even if everyone accepts Amazon as the largest internet retailer of books, and buys from them on a regular—even weekly—basis.
No one calls Amazon — what, are you kidding? They’re online. No, even if I’m going to buy it from Amazon *anyway* the first thing to do, obviously, is call the bookstore.
##
Since I work in a bookstore I have to run a retail store AND a call center, with the headaches of both.
Book customers are needy, needy, fickle bastards whose expectations are both unreasonable and non-negotiable. And they’re plugged into the internet, with the internet’s billions of options and sources, so nothing I can do or provide on a store level — given the limits of having to live and operate in the actual physical world — is quite good enough.
This doesn’t stop anyone from picking up the phone, however.
I have five phone lines in the store, and for at least a couple hours every afternoon for the past month, all five have been ringing, at once and who knows how many callers are getting a busy signal.
I get it: your kid just told you (the night before you leave for a 3-week vacation) that they need these 4 books for their summer reading assignments. Instead of treating this as a ‘teachable moment’ about personal responsibility, it’s much easier to yell at a bookseller. The fact that we had no advance warning from the school is our fault, and the fact that 480 other parents are all calling and asking for the same book is irrelevant; we’re the bookstore and we’re supposed to have this one particular book [one out of millions] to pick up tonight because your flight for Europe (or the Caribbean, or Australia) leaves in 6 hours. The fact that your kid waited until today to mention the summer reading is also, somehow, my fault.
THANK YOU, thank you so much for your business. I especially appreciate how you use Amazon all year long for the books we have in stock, in the store today and on sale, but whenever you have a “book emergency” that I can’t adequately fulfill, no matter how much you beg, suddenly you remember our phone number and forget that Amazon has a customer service line (1.800.201.7575) where you could also rail and rant and scream, and be informed that there is no physical way the book will show up in less than 36 hours even if you do pay for overnight express shipping. And Thank You So Much for calling our bookstore first, even though you’ve been rather determinedly attempting to put us out of business for the past three years. Our business is built on customers [that are completely un-]like you, after all — and we strive to be polite [even when treated otherwise ourselves] and we heartily appreciate your business [IF and WHEN you ever actually buy something from us].
##
I ♥love♥ bookstores. Heck, I even love working at a bookstore [despite the headaches] and have grown into the role handed to me — managing a bookstore — though in fact running a bookstore actually threatens my health: it’s not so much that I’ll collapse or have a heart attack (though that is possible), I think what’s going to happen is a customer is going to ask me a really stupid question on the wrong day and I’ll just, *pop*.
Goodness me.
I don’t mean to rant.
[*chuckle*] Oh, of course I meant to rant – this blog is my only outlet. It’s not like corporate or customers ever bother to consider the industry or the market or the second law of thermodynamics — nope, it’s all my fault and it’s all my fault all the damn time whether I’m capable of doing anything about it or not.
…
It feels like Christmas every day. I’m working so hard I hardly have time to spit, let alone blog. I have no idea what we’ll actually do when the holiday season itself rolls around.
I’m not saying that retail is “hard” in the way actual physical labor is hard — but I’m still physically walking 30-40 miles a week in the bookstore, and get to play ‘name that book’ more times a day than I can count — it’s like the world’s worst reality/game show, and there are no prizes for being right. It’s mentally and physically exhausting, even before a customer complains, or a bookseller misses a shift because of a schedule conflict, or all five phone lines ring at once with customers looking for books.
##
I run a bookstore.
That means we
- run a call center to answer questions, whether they are about books or not.
- run a concierge service, telling ‘patrons’ about other amenities in the neighborhood and providing directions over the phone
- provide the ‘internet access of last resort’ and device charging for all visitors, especially the sort who are just stopping in for this service and have absolutely no intention of spending money in the store
- provide the only public restroom in [apparently] an 85 mile radius.
- …don’t know if this is related, but we’re also the default Homeless Center [whether we want to be or not] and default Day Care, after school hours.
- we’re also the learning annex: not that anyone provides us with the actual reading lists or provides any advance warning, but we have to stock all the summer reading books, and we needed them yesterday. [honestly, a little advance warning would be rather handy]
We also manage to sell a few books on the side, but that’s hardly worth mentioning even though it’s the economic activity that supports the rest — our primary function but hardly the ‘mission’ that the general shopping public expects us to perform. Completely aside from selling books, we’re also
- the research library
- the study hall
- the only meeting nexus, despite the number of lounges in classroom buildings and dorms at every nearby school, to say nothing of the student center/student union or college libraries on campus — I guess they don’t sell frappaccinos. And:
- the only source for college text books, despite the fact that we’ve never stocked college textbooks and never will and flying in the face of the actual college bookstores that do practically nothing but stock text books — please stop calling already; we don’t have your textbooks
the bookstore is apparently also the “local library”. Let me correct this misconception right now: *NO*. Fuck no. — the bookstore & library are two separate things.
Among other salient details
- we don’t have a copy machine, and never will
- we Sell Books, and will always do so
- we resent folks who bring books back after two weeks. After we sell them to you, you’re supposed to keep them. FOR LIFE.
- we are not here to promote learning & literacy. In fact, if you are an illiterate bastard, we’ll happily support you in your ignorance so long as it makes us money.
- We sell coffee, and crap ‘lifestyle’ magazines, and trashy novels, and porn, and all kinds of dross that has little place in a library — and we’re quite pleased to do.
…so as long as you keep buying.
Running a bookstore, and keeping up with the customers who walk in the door is bad enough; answering the phone on top of that is stressing our booksellers to the limit;
… add on the “old people” and “invalids” who call, and it’s the icing on the cake — wait, you’re homebound and unable to drive anywhere, but you still found our phone number? And you can’t order off of the internet why exactly?
If I were stealing credit card numbers, I’d use exactly these rationales and a fake “old” voice to badger retailers into setting aside their established protocols and sell me [and ship!] $100 gift cards over the phone, using an alzheimer’s account info.
I’ll be honest: I make these exceptions, but every time I do it leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.
And I mail issues of “Majesty” magazine to the same damn customer every month, paid for over the phone, because she ‘can’t come into the store’ — but I also hate her for it.
I don’t sell pizzas, I sell books — And pizza delivery guys get a tip; we get nothing extra when you abuse the bookstore business model to order over the phone — in fact, it costs us money — and just because you can badger a bookseller into doing what you want doesn’t make you ‘right’ – it just means you’re annoying, and we’ll do just about anything to get you off the line.
Say I manage to get an author in store, to sign copies of her latest hardcover release. It’s an event – book signings are a big deal, and great business besides — It’s a nice bonus we like to provide to our regular customers, and the community, and fine advertising for the store. Ideally, it will also pull other potential future patrons into the store, but more often than not it’s just an invitation to e-bay resellers to call the store and ask for signed first editions. Pro-tip: resellers don’t ask for a personalization, “to our sister Sarah” or whateves, but instead insist on just the author’s signature – “but please ask her to include today’s date”
[*VERY RUDE EXPLETIVE DELETED*] I don’t add extra booksellers to the schedule and and turn everything upside down to run an author event just for the out-of-state ebay associates who can plan far enough ahead to call a bookstore prior to an event. And we’re onto you. Sure, you give us a CC number over the phone and all that, but you get the books the author signed last, without the date or any inscription, and odds are good we’ll ship it to you in an unpadded mailer. Let’s just see what UPS can do to that sucker on the 1000 mile trip, shall we?
If I ever do open up my own bookstore, I’ll be tempted to just rip the phone out of the wall. We don’t need it.
