Subscribeyou haven’t read the followup, or my comment to B. Peregrine, so I’ll pitch this right at you:Hi, I'm on Metafilter and I could overthink a book guy.I have to be calm, polite, understanding, accomodating, creative with solutions and quick to resolve conflict. I have to smile, and occasionally apologise, because that’s my job. I have to be ‘on’ all the time, not just once a month for a sales presentation or once a quarter when a senior VP visits: 100% 40 hours a week, every week. This is book retail — at least, it’s the way I do it and it’s the way my company trained me to do it.When I am at work, I am doing my level best to provide all my customers, including the types listed above, with the best bookstore experience.
When I am at home, writing on a blog — my personal blog, the one I built and run myself, I am free to also share my frustrations with work, including those feelings that I have to suppress while I’m in the store helping everyone, even the idiots, find the book they have in mind.
So that is what hell is. I would never have believed it. You remember: the fire and brimstone, the torture. Ah! the farce. There is no need for torture: hell is other people.
IndependentsIt's quite simple. We want to physically look at the product, to see if it is something we would spend our money on, and compare it side-by-side to similar products, without hassle or input from someone who doesn't really know what we want. Exactly as mmoncur wrote, plus throw in not wanting to interact with someone who will pass judgment (with a mental sneer) on What Type of Bookstore Customer we are in the process.
They don’t want help. ...
In other words, they want a bookseller, but they don’t want any of that messy human contact. And they want an online sales site, but they prefer to drive out to a retail location, as opposed to the convenience of using a website at home.
Yeah, I don’t understand it either.
As far as the people running the businesses from the coffee shop, I think most employees are fine with it as long as you don't start making demands based on the fact that you're trying to run a business out of our store.I think that's only true if you're not taking a table that someone else would want or bothering the other customers. And depending on the culture of the cafe, talking on your cell phone all day might definitely bother the other customers.
Sheesh, I dunno, maybe I could say the same if I worked in a hardware store or a chemist?People who work in knitting stores complain about it constantly.
I'm always floored when I see someone sitting in my bookstore for 8 hours, in their house-dress, putting their bare feet up on coffee tables, and reading books, but NEVER buying anything.We had a couple of these folks when I worked at a bookstore, and I mostly felt really sad for them. One of them, I strongly suspect, was one of those late-middle-age guys who loses his job and can't figure out how to tell his wife. He showed up at nine every morning dressed in a business suit, read some heavy military history tome all day, and then left promptly at five. It was annoying that these people treated the bookstore like a library, especially because there was a library not very far away, but I had a hard time resenting them. Most of our obnoxious customers were just obnoxious. The people who sat around reading all day felt like they were using the bookstore as a refuge, which was harder for me to resent.
That floors me. And it's much more common than I think you know.
I've got news for those of you who won't be darkening the doors of bookstores in retaliation. Your supermarket checker hates you. Your postal worker hates you. The guy who processes your order at Amazon hates you. I could go on, but you get the idea.I've worked a lot of retail, and I've never hated most of my customers. Maybe I'm just Pollyanna, but I didn't feel that way. I truly hated the random local author who went and got the store owner and demanded that she fire my co-worker on the spot because my co-worker had not recognized the name of his stupid, worthless, piece of shit "sports humor" book. But the people who wanted to know where we kept the vegetarian cookbooks or if I remembered the name of the book that was reviewed on Fresh Air the day before? I didn't have strong feelings about them at all. Helping them was my job. I generally didn't expend a lot of emotional energy on them.
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posted by shothotbot at 5:13 PM on June 10 [1 favorite]