Wokring in a bookshop.

Actually, I hate it when bookstores hire people who don't read - nothing's more annoying than asking about a book and having the person behind the desk mispronounce the title and the author's name and then suggest seeing the movie, instead. Grrrr.

I want to work in bookstore in an advisory capacity - looking for a book for a course? Sure I can help - what interests you? What was the last thing you read? Did you like it? Have you ever read anything by ____? Or about ____? Here's four or five things that might interest you.

Maybe I need to go back to my dream of being a librarian.

this was my last job. it's cool but you're going to feel extremely poor and you will eventually get tired of having to be 10x more personable than barnes & nobles clerks. there is also a plus/minus in that you may be expected to learn how to sell antiques or garden supplies or something too at a boutique shop (plus in my case because antiques and vintage pottery and bakelite are cool! minus in ms laura's because crystals are not!)

or you could work at a university press bookstore?

If you know anything about books at all, you will be a star in a chain bookstore knowledge-wise. But working in a chain bookstore is more obviously about speed and selling efficiency than about imparting a love of literature. Large chain bookstores often have night crews doing their shelving, which means that you will not have a section in which you are expert. Merchandising (what gets displayed, etc) is increasingly driven by publishers, which means you may not necessarily get to push the books you think are worthy. Inventory control is highly centralized and the window between receiving a book and returning the excess is very small (though not as small as for music). A busy chain store rarely offers an opportunity for either you or the store to express any individuality. You may spend a lot of time at a cash register. None of this is necessarily bad. It's pretty cool to be working in a big, busy chain store in December and you can find everything they all want.

An independent will have more financial constraints, but will likely allow you to be more creative. The independents need to offer services unavailable at chains, so they need to find a genre niche, or be more knowledgeable, or offer better service. In my experience, the smaller the bookstore, the nicer the customers (there are always a few, though...). You have a better chance to affect the inventory of an independent--and it's pretty damn cool to order a stack of books you like, put them where you want them, and see them sell.

I don't mean to sound so hard on chains--they're not bad, but as publicly-owned companies they tend to look to the bottom line first. If you have any wanderlust, they're an ideal way to move around and have a job when you get there. And they tend to be highly incestuous, which has its place too.

On the plus side (and our owner is not typical) we can order in whatever books we want, display them as we want, and schedule readings for such authors as we can persuade to pause on there way somewhere important. Being asked for advice comes with the territory and is a compliment only from regulars, but the ego-stroke compensates a little for the salary (we're also allowed to check the daily books, so we know vast quantities of wealth aren't being diverted from our linty pockets.) You do, however, have to be able to keep a straight face when people enthuse about what you loathe -- I seem to be the one person on the North American continent who can't stand The Secret Life of Bees. The boss, on the other hand, has been known to warn regulars off of such stinkers as Bridges of Madison County. In the end, you can't live on the income but if it's supplementary it's a wonderful job. A lot of ifs.

All anybody bought was
1) The DaVinci Code - Dan Brown
2) 5 People You Meet in Heaven - Mitch Albom
3) Thunder and Lighting - Phil Esposito

and they wanted to know my candid opinions about their chocices. When I replied that I hadn't read any of their books they got all bristly and told me that I had better keep on stock or I wouldn't earn my pay.

So if you work in a bookstore, make sure it's not a shitty one.

a few months ago,when i started work,there was one copy of tuesdays with morrie on the shelves,then the irish radio personality equivalent of oprah,who has an amazing amount of power over what people in ireland read (although i didn't know this before working in the shop) did a show about him and since then there's been well over a thousand of his books sold...

its amazing when you work in a bookshop how many people will come in and look for "something for a forty year old woman" with no other information...
its not a bad job though...
comments above about staff discounts and being surrounded by books all day are entirely true-i've spend loads on books while at work...

this may be a bit romanticized here. i mean, let's face it, while you technically CAN order whatever books you want you also want to stay in business.

so in practice, this meant that while we bookstore didn't stock ann coulter or michael savage or any of the other raving conservative fuckwads we sure as hell didn't have a choice about whether or not we stocked the da vinci code, or tuesdays with morrie, or even politically "neutral" stuff like bill o'reilly. and if people asked to order ann coulter's book there's no way anyone was going to think twice or give them attitude - no way around it, you just HAVE to stock this stuff, and sell it, or your customers are going to go to barnes + noble and you're going to go out of business.

unless, of course, your bookstore is financially independent as well as independently operated - well, then you're just fucking lucky. there's a bookstore in la jolla operated by a guy who i think has a trust fund. he just sits in it all day, drinking beer and watching football with his feet up. sometime in the afternoon he turns on books in print and orders 40 or 50 different university press titles, books of obscure poetry, beautiful monographs, etc. that he never worries about selling. lucky bastard!

the woman i worked for was single and her entire livelihood was her bookstore. you wouldn't believe how customers and other professionals (UPS, sales reps, etc) would try to gouge her for discounts and small concessions. one UPS guy said once that he didn't understand why she was so upset with him bringing the order in late - "after all, your husband can stand to lose a little more money, right?"

i think two or three years should be enough to put anyone off their dreams of operating a bookstore. i'd say the biggest problem is figuring out a profitable sideline (cafe is the easy choice, but then you're competing with starbucks, too!)

also i'd like to point out that i had the same the same privelege (responsibility) where i worked and i have to say it went pretty damn far in lending a great deal of dignity (and personal investment) to an essentially unskilled (ha!) minimum-wage job.

one cool thing: a couple years later i was running this little corner gourmet food/coffee place on rittenhouse square and i was thinking of quitting. in order to keep me around, the owner put in two huge bookshelves and let me fill them with used stuff to sell. and i got to keep all the profits. wasn't much, maybe an extra 20 bucks a week or a little more, but it was nice at night when i worked to see people come in, grab a cup of coffee and pick up a book to read. i ended up having regulars who would come all the time to talk books. my own salon of sorts! That was nice for a couple years.

Naw, I thought it was horrid, too. IN
n fact, everyone who told me that I should read it, well, I sent them Susan Straight's I Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots - seemed to go over fairly well.

http://kempa.com/articles/bn/

really hilarious bookstore stories.

after all, your husband can stand to lose a little more money, right?"

WOW.

Or to a no-wage job. Since I took over the running of this bookstore (which is a charity one, so all our books are donated and the staff are volunteers, except me), I've always told people what our target is for each month, and how much we've made each week. It doesn't just make people feel involved, it actually involves them.

Working in a charity bookshop takes at least one of the hard parts out of the job: I don't have to worry about what to order, because I get the books donated free of charge. Of course I do sometimes find myself wondering what to do with twenty Dick Francis hardbacks. Sigh.

Funnily enough, I've always liked working in retail. The four customers a day who stop to talk to you and who you get to know kind of make it for me. Of course I'm very lucky at the moment. Not only are our customers a lovely bunch of people who just want to be helpful and get some nice books into the bargain, but I don't even have to stand up all day. But even in the bad old days of working in sweet shops for 1.20 an hour, and working in a dry cleaners, there was always something about shop work that I liked.

I must be some sort of freak.

And like Lauren, the really unpleasant customers completely ruined whatever enjoyment I could have taken from that job. The biggest problem with working retail isn't so much the kind of work, the standing all day, or the low pay, all of which are rough, it's the incredibly rude attitude that total fuckers give you for ABSOLUTELY NO REASON AT ALL and you can't tell them to fuck off without losing your job. One guy absolutely ripped into me when I was working the info desk one night, made an absolute scene, got on his high horse because I worked in a bookstore and therefore was utterly stupid and worthless, and all because he was looking for a magazine we didn't carry. Turns out we did carry it -- he just didn't have the name right. So no matter how many times I tried telling him the magazine name he gave me isn't listed in our inventory so we don't normally carry it, he claimed I was calling him a liar and saying the magazine didn't exist. Then when I finally got a manager to get off their ass and handle him, he proceeded to make a formal complaint about me.
THAT is the kind of shit that pisses me off about retail. So few other professions rate your job performance on the uninformed, spiteful behaviour of others.

And some people are just dicks.

For all that working in a charity shop attracts more than its fair share of mentals, it's worth it for the nice people who tell you you're doing a great job and that they love your shop. Everyone gets a warm fuzzy feeling.

Also a lot of it is down to the management. I would never let a customer raise their voice to a member of my staff, paid or unpaid. I would step in. People in retail don't get paid enough to put up with that kind of thing, and everyone deserves courtesy, including the people who work in the shop. Besides which, if a good member of staff is getting barracked by some asshole, then they're more likely to quit, which is more likely to make my job harder.

So you should all come and work for me, when I open my fantasy bookshop. In Christchurch, my fantasy home.

The other 360 days were not.