Rocket Bomber - article - retail - commentary - Wanderlust - The End of Wanderlust - and Wanderlust

Like many young adults of my generation, I changed jobs often. Only working a couple of years at this or that, and moving on. Even before moving out into the workforce, I changed my major quite a lot — I stayed at Georgia Tech for more than seven years, and one joke that circulated among my friends is I had to be the only person to attempt to get a Liberal Arts degree from a tech school.

[A joke, of course, because at the time GT had nothing like that: Times have changed.]

So I’ve worked in facilities management, I’ve done independent consulting, I’ve been a bartender, and a security guard, and an unpaid intern. [and a half dozen more I don’t, or don’t want to, remember.] Then, a little over 10 years ago, I took a part-time job at a bookstore to help make ends meet while the independent-consulting-thing went down the tubes, and within months I was working at the bookstore full time. After a couple of years they gave me the first job with ‘manager’ in the title. I learned the whole store bit by bit, working shipping and receiving in the back room, shelving and merchandising, the music department (I managed the music department during our first big shift, adding DVDs to the mix), hiring & training other booksellers, the JOYS of dealing with difficult customers on a daily basis…

A job in a bookstore is an education.

When I first applied, and was hired, the book business was booming — both major chains were already in the hundreds, and opening dozens of stores each month. There was a definite career escalator apparent, so long as you worked at it. An investment on an employee’s part, committing to retail full time and being willing to work any and all of the ridiculous hours the store is open (7am to Midnight, daily) would be repaid with recognition and promotion.

I didn’t have to change jobs every couple of years; I was continually handed new roles, asked to do more, asked to take on more responsibility.

I can see now that major-chain, big box bookselling was in a bubble — but the bubble at the time was firmly supported by customer demand. Each new store was greeted by waves of local neighborhood customers — customers who stayed with us.

[insert Amazon, ebooks, and a recession here — oh, the customers are still with us. Some come in every day. They just stopped buying anything. Enjoy the free ride for as long as it lasts, folks.]

Now, as a bookstore manager, I’m still being asked to do more and more, but with less. Fewer employees, fewer payroll hours… even fewer books. I have to draw from my years of experience daily, as I have to go back and do the tasks I was trained to do years ago, things I used to be able to delegate.

When our music manager quit, corporate decided not to replace him. When one of our merchandise managers moved out to Arizona a couple of years ago, corporate decided not to replace her. We used to have three head cashiers — experienced booksellers trusted to handle customer returns and the cash office (bank deposits, end-of-day reporting and the like) — but now I have one, and she’s going to be taking a vacation in two weeks.

Since 2006, bookstores have moved away from hiring full time employees — you’re either a manager, really, or you’re not. The store used to have ‘lead’ booksellers, in charge of a whole category. Not every fit was perfect — the History lead, for example, might also have philosophy and religion under his purview, and the Fiction lead might not be as strong in sci-fi as she was in mysteries — but full-time booksellers were employed by the store, and part of their day-to-day job was to make their expertise available to our customers.

A decision was made to move away from this model — fewer full-time booksellers, fewer “leads”. Some specialty departments have to have a lead: the Kids department, primarily. Ideally you’d have two full time kids books specialists on staff. The newsstand also can’t be handled as a by-the-way assignment to a regular bookseller; even if corporate decides to do away with this position too, I’ll have to train & schedule a bookseller (or three part-timers) to fulfil the role, even without the job title or commensurate salary.

Part of scaling back full-time employees meant moving booksellers to new roles. Not everyone has proved to be as adaptable as I am, or as nimble in taking up new tasks.

Say you hired an older gentlemen 8 years ago because he liked books and was an avid gardener. After a couple of months, his affable nature and ease with customers — and open availability, including nights and weekends — makes it easy to promote him into a lead bookseller position. You hire him on full time & give him the Gardening section… plus cookbooks, and crafts, and art and interior design; not that he’s an expert in those subjects as well, but he learns. He starts making recommendations on what customers should buy, and also on what the store should order.

And then some bozo in corporate decides, well, this isn’t the best way to run a bookstore.

We can’t fire our Gardener just because of a ‘strategic’ move in human resources, though, so we start moving him around: Helping out in our back room over the holidays when more boxes are coming in, working on merchandise maintenance in the mornings (re-alphabetizing, pulling returns, and the like), putting him on the customer service desk—which is the best fit—but also being reminded by corporate [paraphrasing] “Customer service is not really a full time position. You’ll need to reclass and demote your Gardener, down to part time, or move him into one of the remaining full time positions”

aside: WHY THE HELL ISN'T CUSTOMER SERVICE CONSIDERED THE PROPER ROLE FOR FULL TIME BOOKSELLERS WITH YEARS OF EXPERIENCE?

Remaining full time positions? Can I move him to the music department then?

“No, there are no full time positions in Music either, as your store does not currently merit a department manager there, and we’re even moving away from having a ‘lead’ in that area”

aside: [!]

My bargain lead just quit. It’s not the best fit for our Gardener, as it requires a lot of stock rotation (he’s not as young as he used to be and some of those coffee table books are heavy) but maybe…

“No, we’re not replacing the Bargain Lead either. Your merchandise manager can assume those roles; you need to demote and reclass your Gardener.”

aside: The merchandise manager, a full-time 45-hour a week job, can of course assume all the responsibilities of what used to be another, full-time 40-hour a week job. Love you, corporate overlords: way to plan!

But — you know, one reason he was so willing to work full time is he needs the income to suppliment…

“No. Move him to one of our corporate-designated full-time roles, or cut his hours, or fire him”

##

About the only full-time positions left are head cashiers. This is a different skill-set, and someone who is a fabulous bookseller and very good with customers can’t automatically transition to a role where the primary needs are speed, absolute accuracy, politely saying “no” to customers [nearly every merchandise return has at least one “no” lurking in it, even when we do say yes], and above all: speed.

If a customer has to wait in line too long, often they just drop their books and go home.

So the head cashier job wasn’t the best fit for our Gardener. We had to laterally move him into that role, however, because it was the “only” [only in quotes because the corporate rules are arbitrary] full-time job we had available. After a few weeks, we knew, absolutely knew it wasn’t going to work out for the best.

Above my head, higher levels of management were building up a paper trail, practically licking their lips at the prospect of firing this man — a bookseller with nearly as much experience as I have and who in fact may be better than me at customer service — all because we are letting stupid rules of business get in the way of actually doing our jobs.

Fortunately this little anecdote has a happy though slightly bittersweet ending. This particular employee (not being stupid and so seeing the writing on the wall, and after some small changes in his personal finances) was finally able to accept a demotion, and went from “full-time” to “part-time”

The change is semantic (with a slightly lower hourly wage) as my store is still short-staffed and he ends up working close to full-time anyway, 30-35hrs a week. But it checks off a box, makes corporate HR happy, and moves the company closer to being a retailer that only hires minimum wage, part time staff for all positions.

##

My Gardener isn’t actually a gardener; his expertise was in other subjects. [some details changed and of course, name withheld]

But the story is true, and is being repeated with hundreds of people as my employer, a major retail chain, desperately tries to cut costs. Payroll is the easiest cost to cut.

But “Productivity Gains” are a paper illusion, and cuts in staffing save payroll dollars but also incur other costs. In retail, when you cut staff you negatively impact the customer experience. People leave because they don’t like waiting in line at the register. In a bookstore, customers wander and flop about and wait for a bookseller to engage them, and if no one walks up and asks, they’re more likely to leave than to go to the information desk and ask for help
[RocketBomber, 21 Jan 2011: “Hell of a way to run a railroad”]

…to say nothing of some other by-the-way-mentions: Our Music Dept. manager did in fact quit. (We’re being pressured right now to move the last remaining full-time music staffer down to part time.) The Bargain Dept. lead was first moved into a new Digital role (selling e-readers) but then also quit — the decision to not replace the Bargain Lead position came first, though, and she really was too good for us. I was hoping we’d be able to promote her to a manager role…

Well, that goes back two years, though, when we cut our Management Team from 9 to 8… and then to 7, when the Music Manager quit… and then to six, when an Assistant Store manager who happened to be a National Guardsman was called up right before the holidays and we [I say “we” but you know what I mean] made the decision not to replace him for payroll reasons and work November & December [in retail!] with only 6 managers — only 4 of whom have keys and codes to the building.

…all while we went from 3 head cashiers down to 2 — and while our parent corp. was moving into digital and introducing a whole new specialty department — and while shifts in product mix and space-allocation necessitated whole-scale moves of the actual books.

I’m at the point now, where for at least 4 hours every shift, I’m the only person in the building who can authorize a customer return, open the back door for shipping/receiving, troubleshoot tech problems on the e-readers (because of course customers call the store, not the 1-800 number), backup the registers OR customer service [gods forbid I have to do both at the same time], while also handling any escalated customer ‘concerns’, fielding phone calls from aspiring authors who just want to know “how to get my book stocked in your stores”, and…

…oh, I don’t know… maybe recommending a book or two.

Some of my complaints are store specific. For example, two weeks ago — after a manager was fired — another manager was taking time off to visit his cancer specialist out of state, our National Guardsman was still off on “training”, and suddenly for 4 days we had to run a multi-million dollar storefront with just 2 managers — just 2 people with keys and codes to open and close the building, a retail business open for 14 hours each day.

Corporate had no way of knowing that we were down to just two managers at that point. Unless, you know, they were actually paying attention. This was the result of years of, “oh, it’s just a small change – they’ll cope”

Until we can’t.

##

If I owned my own business I wouldn’t be nearly as frazzled. I’d be working more hours, sure — likely 60-70 hours a week, if not more — but I wouldn’t have to put up with the added help of our corporate office. I could assign staff according to their strengths, not arbitrary HR codes, and I could empower booksellers to handle the sorts of things that currently require a ‘manager’.

If I worked just about anywhere else that wasn’t retail, I’d have weekends off. I wouldn’t have to go into work at 7am unless I chose to [working flextime] and I could go home at 5pm. [or 3, if I came in at 7] — sure, a salary job means taking on special projects and working extra hours and maybe even weekends; a tech job wouldn’t be any better as far as hours. I might be asked to work nights and weekends. But I’d be asked, and not [necessarily] required. And if I were working Friday nights, I wouldn’t have to pick up the phone at 9pm to answer book availability questions, “Oh, and how late is your store open tonight?”

Booksellers get absolutely no respect. On the rare occasions that we point out that maybe, just maybe the shopping public is being a bit unreasonable — there is an immediate smack-down calling us entitled, condescending, elitist, “hipster”, and also personally responsible for the degradation of the stores that forced, forced our customers to shop online.

Please.

This past year is the hardest I’ve ever worked, and while I don’t want to get into an argument with folks who roll steel or repair roofs in August, I also don’t want to be scolded by folks who have a desk chair at work to suck it up, after all, it’s just retail.

##

For the first time in more than ten years, I’m faced with a career choice.

Sadly, for the first time I’m also faced with the prospect of giving up a job I love.

Yes, despite all my complaints — I love my job. In fact, I might say that my complaints are only the most obvious evidence that *I love my job*. If I did not care, I would not grumble, I would not strive to make it work, I would not have written hundreds of thousands of words on the topic, I would merely collect my paycheck until the time comes to move on, and then I’d move on.

I hope to be a bookseller for a long time to come; I’d love to retire from my corporate employer after decades of service, after which I’d only work part-time — say 20 hours a week — as a bookseller.

Bookselling has, for the last decade, been a constant challenge for me. I have embraced it. I’m going to miss it.

It is not my customers — no matter how frustrating they’ve become — that drives me to the point where I have to decide: it’s my employer. Corporate is flopping about, throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks, cutting all the costs they can [though to date it seems the only costs they’ve found are the payroll expenses] and generally, making my life impossible. Only through concentrated effort on the part of myself and my fellow booksellers have we managed to make the impossible merely difficult.

For ten years — before finding the bookstore — I wandered, Lost. For the past ten years, I’ve found a home. And now, with academic credentials 15 years old and a resume poisoned by the same corporate decisions that will force me into unemployment, I look at the worst job market in 50 years and shudder.

If I choose to stick with bookstores to the very bitter end, I hope you understand.

I don’t know what’s next. I no longer look forward to taking on a new job. And yet, I know I need a change.

##

Even in my hobbies [if you can call the blog a hobby] I’ve been static for way too long. Some changes have already taken place, other changes are in the works.

Unfortunately I have a suspicion that in 5 years, I will be homeless; laptop in tow, mooching electricity and wifi wherever one can, updating constantly, an idiot telling his tales full of sound and fury, etc etc.

Sadly, I’m prepared. I’ve been buying less and paring back on my personal possessions [over the past 3 moves into new apartments] and buying new laptops as required to optimize battery life, overall weight, and usability. My next [last?] laptop will likely be a chromebook, as I move the last physical bits online.

Between now and then…

Well.

Before the end of the year I’m going to launch one last website, where I start writing the long delayed fantasy novel in the only way I know how: as a blog.

And: I will go down with the ship. Assuming the pilot steering this craft can’t avoid the iceberg we’ve all seen coming and chart a new course, I’ll be there to lend a hand, to help you step over the rail and into your lifeboat, to bring a round of drinks to the band as they play the final set before the whole enterprise upends and sinks beneath the waves. I’ll be there to cry, since no one else will mourn.

And: I have one more really good idea about how to run a bookstore – a national chain, a competitor for both online and e-. No one listens, but I’ll make the best case I can.

And of course I buy a lottery ticket every week. So there is some hope.

(personally, I’m not sure which is the less-likely millions-to-one shot: bookstores, or the lottery)