You Could've Just Said "No Thanks," You Know

So I'm running the register today, and a guy comes up to buy Culture Warrior. So he's already a bit on my bad side, but hey, if I got pissed at everyone who thought Bill O'Reilly was anything less than a total blowhard, I wouldn't get very far, would I?

One of the silly things that I have to do when running the register is mention the magazine offer. Basically, any customer with one of our spiffy discount cards and who uses a credit or debit card on their transaction, can get eight free issues of Time, Entertainment Weekly, People, or Sports Illustrated. And since apparently my employer made a sweet deal with the distribution house of those mags, we get to ask every qualifying customer, or risk a write-up.

So the guy uses his debit card, and has a discount card with us. And I ask, "Would you be interested in eight free issues of any of these magazines?" while gesturing to the little info card on the register.



(Sorry about the thumb in the pic -- I took it quickly when no one was looking, and didn't get the chance to preview it.)

His respone, in his deep, gruff voice: "Uh-huh. All those magazines are Communist."

Communist? Really? A momentary shock from me, while I nod to myself, hit "No thanks" on the register menu, and continue the transaction. He continues, "Yeah, People, Time... those are all a bunch of Communists. This one's okay...." He gestures towards Sports Illustrated. "And what's the other one?"

Ever-helpful me, I say, "Entertainment Weekly."

A pause from him. "That one's for idiots." I decline to mention my own Entertainment Weekly subscription.

"All right, sir. No problem. Here's your receipt." He takes it. "Thanks a lot, and have a nice day."

He walks out with the book, while I consdier the ramifications of the out-and-out Marxism of Time and People. And since he didn't claim Entertainment Weekly to be one of the proletariat-lovers, maybe he's convinced their editorial staff is a bunch of Ayn Rand-reading free marketeers. (I doubt it, though.)

Maybe I should have pushed the Sports Illustrated thing. I guess the glorification of guys beating up other guys on a playing field is the very personification of the Invisible Hand at work.

A Sentimental Picture

The store has a whiteboard on which the day's tasks are split up among the associates. Occasionally, it's also used for other purposes.



A minor tribue, to be sure, but one that made me slightly happier that day.

A Particularly Fun Customer Interaction

"Can I help you?" Slightly tall, young, shaven-head gentleman.

"Yeah, I need help finding a book."

That's why I'm here. "Sure, what do you need?"

"You know that movie Requiem for a Dream? I'm looking for something really intense like that."

"Hmm." I walk to the computer, type for a bit. "Requiem for a Dream was a book first. By..." I think. "Shelby. No, Selby. Hubert Selby." Typing some more: "selby requiem" into the search bar. "We may have some more of his books." I know he also wrote Last Exit to Brooklyn and at least one or two others, but I haven't read them.

And of course, all we have in the system is Requiem for a Dream, which is order-only. Shit.

"Nothing in stock. Let me think..." I continue, trying to help the customer.

"I just read How I Paid for College, y'know, something like that or Requiem for a Dream. Have you read it?"

Nope. Looks interesting, though. "Not yet. Hmm. So what exactly is it you're looking for?"

"Just a kind of weird, intense book. I've tried Chuck Palahniuk (he mispronounces it "palaniak"), but I can't really get into him."

Now he's piqued my interest. "Which Palahniuk have you read?" (It's paul-un-ook, by the way.)

Can't remember the title, the one wth the con artist..."

"Choke."

"That's it."

"I haven't read that one, but I've heard that one isn't his best." I'm motioning him to follow me over to the P's in fiction. "Other than Fight Club, I think Lullaby is really good, and Haunted has some really good bits, although it doesn't really cohere very well."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. Lullaby's kinda like Palahniuk with a horror novel. And Survivor is really messed up, told in reverse order sort of, and involves a plane hijacking."

The customer nods, looking at the books I've been handing him.

"Let's see, what else can I recommend..." I'm getting into it now. "I read a bunch of messed-up stuff, this one over here..." Walking over there. "...Perfume, is about this eighteenth century serial killer who makes women into perfume. Only it's not really about that at all -- it's about the most misanthropic book I've ever seen." Pause. "If you're looking for something more humorous, you could go for some of the works of Elmore Leonard. He wrote the book that eventually became Jackie Brown, as well as Get Shorty and Out of Sight." I pause. "To be fair, I haven't read those particular books, but I've read a couple of his other books, and he does these kinds of low-rent criminal capers really well."

"That's cool."

I'm still wandering a bit, looking for good books to recommend, when we pass by the "Our Favorite Trade Paperbacks" table, which is really a, "This Company Has Lots of Copies of these Trade Paperbacks" table. He asks, "Are the books on this table pretty good?"

"Generally, yeah, from what I've read." I'm glancing over the titles, noting that I actually have read a fair number of them. "Running with Scissors is pretty messed up. It's the story of the childhood of this guy whose mom and dad were both messed-up alcoholics -- she takes him to live with this psychiatrist, and he's even more messed up. He tells the stories of this horrible childhood, but he does it in a really low-key, matter-of-fact kind of way. Like, he's repeatedly raped by this guy, but he's more like," and here my voice drops to practically a whisper -- thankfully no customers were around, "'...my boyfriend raped me again. I didn't like it much. His cock tastes bad.'" (Oh Holy Jesus, I just said the word "cock" to a customer! He's taking it in stride, though, so I press on.) "It's messed up, and really funny at times."

The guy's laughing. "Sounds interesting."

Then my eyes light on the book I should have recommended from the get-go. I walk the guy back over to the fiction, in the L's I pick up a copy of Darkly Dreaming Dexter with Michael C. Hall on the cover. "This is the story of this serial killer who kills other serial killers. But it's really amazingly darkly funny, and the sequel is even funnier. They made it into a series on Showtime, but the book is tighter and funnier."

"Yeah, I think I saw that advertised a while ago."

"Check it out -- it's really good." A pause. Should I go for it? Why the hell not? "But if you're looking for something really intense and weird, check out the most recent novel by Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day. It's over a thousand pages of really dense text, took me over six weeks just for an introductory read, but it's filled with bizarre stuff."

"I don't know if I have the patience for that. If I can't read a book in a week or so, I get restless."

"I know the feeling. But this one... well, let me put it like this. There's this bit where there is this intelligent dog, 'trained in the French arts', as it were. And this guy gets the dog alone in a room and decides to, hmm, take advantage of the situation. And just as he's getting ready to do the dirty deed, the dog bites him you-know-where."

His eyebrows shoot up. "Wow."

"Even better, it takes place on page 666 of the novel. Let me show you." I open it up to the page and let him glance through. "It's filled with this kind of stuff."

He holds the book under his arm, along with two or three others, including the first Dexter book. "I've got to get back to the customer service counter, but I've got one more for you. One of my all-time favorite books. Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson. It's this parallel narrative that takes place partly in World War II, and partly in a present-day (well, late nineties) software company. And it's a really cool book, if you're a geek like me, which I'm guessing you are."

"Yeah."

"So anyway, take a couple of books, sit down and see if there's anything you're interested in. That's all I can think of off the top of my head."

"Thanks a lot, man. Lots of good books here to check out."

"No problem. Let me know if you need anything else."

Yeah, sometimes the night is good to me.

(And if you think I'm only including this because it gives me a chance to talk about a bunch of cool books that I wanted to mention, you may be right. But all of this happened, more or less.)

A Mundane Interaction with a Customer

I walk up to the customer service counter, having put away a stack of books that customers had left on a table, looking for yet another stack of books to put away.

There's a customer looking at me in that way that I've come to recognize as, "I'm a customer, I need help, I haven't gotten it yet, why aren't you helping me yet?" So, obviously, I say, "I'm sorry ma'am, do you need help?" She's middle-aged, standing alongside several other persons, among them two small children.

"I need help finding a book." Yeah, you and everybody else.

"Sure. Come on over to this section of the counter, please." She does, and I continue, "So what can I help you find?"

"Do you have any books on the Canadian Railroad?"

Pause. I start typing 'canadian railroad' into the computer. "So are you looking for a kid's book, or...."

"No." Slightly displussed. I look at her more closely, and notice that the kids I saw were with another customer being helped by another employee. "I'm thinking of something more like a travel book."

"Oh." I scroll through the listings, glancing at the descriptions. "The system shows several books sort of about the Canadian Railroad. Um.... Looks like mainly history books and picture books...."

"No travel books?"

"Hmm, well this one's kind of ambiguous. Might be a sort of travel book." I point it out to her.

"Well, what section is it in?"

"It's order-only, have to get it from the warehouse. All the books I'm showing are warehouse-only titles. We don't have anything in-store on that subject."

"Why not?"

Maybe because you're the first person I've ever heard of looking for books on that topic? I shrug, "We carry lots of books, but nothing in-store about the Canadian Railroad. Your best bet might be to try our website." I give her the address. "And if you want us to check stock status of a particular book, or to order it in-store, you can just give us the ISBN and we can probably have it shipped here for you."

"So you don't have anything in store?"

"No ma'am. I'm sorry about that."

She sighs. "All right. Thanks for checking, anyway."

"No problem. Let me know if there's anything I can at least try to find for you." A smile, and we're done with one more routine interaction in my daily life.

Hand scanning and Inventory Control

Beep. Beep. Beep. Chir-rup!. I'm standing in the Needlework section, scanning-gun in hand.

"I'm sorry, am I in your way?" Nice, twentysomething brunette, looking at the Home & Garden books behind me.

"Not unless I'm in yours," I smile. You get a kind of ingratiating manner when dealing with common customer questions like these. I don't let it bother me. I didn't tell her, of course, that in a little bit I was going to have to be scanning where she was -- she'd most likely be done by the time I got there, anyway.

She chuckles back at me. "Oh, okay." A pause. Another chir-rup, followed by my putting the offending book on a cart beside me. "So what exactly are you doing, anyway?"

"We have to scan all the books in the store periodically to see if anything goes back to the vendor." Beep.

"Oh. So it's like an inventory thing."

"Pretty much." It's actually exactly like an inventory thing. I continued, "It's about as exciting as it looks." Beep, beep.

"I guess sometimes that's kinda what you're wanting, right?"

A chuckle. "Yeah, like, 'I wonder if I can have some mind numbing boredom at my job today.'"

She laughed, and went back to her hunting in Home & Garden. And I continued scanning every book in the section.

Anyone who works retail long enough eventually runs across the joys of a scanner. They go by different names, depending on the store's lexicon and the manufacturer of the scanner, but "RF Gun" or "hand scanner" are generally the most generic terms I've seen for them. And while the person scanning make look like they're not really doing anything, this scanning process is a big part of what makes the store shoppable, in any retail environment.

Back in the old days at the office supply store, scanning was generally done in two stages: 1.) scan the item for price and 2.) if the price was wrong, take it off and replace it. The way I generally did the job was to take sections of the store and use a single hand scanner, first scanning all the prices and removing the wrong ones, and then going back a few minutes later to scan new labels. After a few sections, I'd go to the back and print up the labels I needed, and put them on the shelf.

(Some places like Wal-Mart make this last bit unnecessary, in that they have portable printers that associates can use to print labels.)

Inventory control at the office supply joint, on the other hand, was handled by a receiving associate, who was given a list of pulls each week -- he or she (well, let's face it, at my store it was always a he, although I met some highly capable female receiving specialists at other stores) would find the listed items, take them off the shelf, and send them back to corporate. This individual would also be responsible for handling discrepancies in on-hand data, i.e. if I discovered that we were listed as having eight Hewlett Packard DeskJet 812C's when we only had five, I'd let him/her know and he/she'd take care of it.

At the bookstore, though, all items come pre-marked with prices, so there's no need to scan for price. (We do, however, have a merchandising specialist who is largely responsible for making sure that all the various "percent-off" or "clearance" stickers are affixed to the right items. This doesn't count salebooks, which will be in another post.) Instead, we receive a list of sections that are to be scanned each week (on average, every shelf in the store is scanned once a month) and the system tells us which books to get rid of and which to keep. This takes two forms: either we are doing "voids", in which case any item that needs to be pulled (the chir-rup above indicates this) is pulled in its entirety, i.e. every copy off the shelf, or we are doing "overstocks", in which we may keep a limited number of copies of a book that we ordered too many of to sell readily.

In either situation, scanning is generally about as exciting as watching paint dry, but it is a pretty essential part of the shopping experience for the customer. It's a glamorous job that gets me all the groupies, but someone's got to do it.

Lights Out!

Ever been in a store when the lights went out?

Even better, ever been working in a store when the lights went out? Happens not quite irregularly, just often enough that anyone who's done the retail thing for a while will generally have experienced it. Basically, I went to lunch at around 12:45 today, and when I got back thirty minutes later there was no power. Apparently it was the entire shopping center that had lost power, but since I spend all my lunch breaks in my car anyway, I simply didn't notice.

In general, there are two basic philosophies that companies take towards what to do when the power goes out: 1.) Having customers in the with low visibility is a liability, and if anyone gets hurt it's tons of lost money for the company or 2.) Telling customers to get out means losing all revenue during the power outage, and losing revenue is a Bad Thing.

The office supply store where I used to work took the former attitude towards power outages: get the customers out, nicely, politely, apologetically, but get them out. And don't let any new ones in. I once sat in an office chair for nearly two hours during a power outage, because we're still required to hang out there for our shifts, even if you can't get any work done due to a lack of lighting.

The bookstore where I work now took tack number two. Although partly it may be because there was a DM in the store (gotta do a DM visit post soon!), it's likely that this company are just greedy bastards.

Now, when the power goes out the register doesn't work. So someone has to stand at the register with a paper pad for making hand receipts and writing down all transactions, making change the old-fashioned way. Fortunately, this wasn't me -- in fact, the manager on duty ended up having to do the register for that period.

The highlight of the brief blackout period? A customer wanted to browse the home and garden magazines all the way in the back of the store, far, far away from the sunlight streaming through the front doors, and out of the way of the emergency lights. So I got to stand there with a crappy plastic flashlight while the customer glanced through a gardening magazine. Y'know, since I didn't have anything important to do to prepare for the DM's audit of the store coming up the next day...

People, just leave the damned store when the power goes out. It's not like you'll never have the chance to browse those magazines again.

Phone conversations with retail emloyees (not mine)

Beth sent me this link to a conversation Waveflux at Shakespeare's Sister had with a Hallmark employee over whether they carried a certain item in-store. There's not really a way of trimming it down, and I don't want to quote the whole thing, so go on over there and read it. I'll wait.

Now, from the perspective of someone who gets these kinds of calls regularly, the employees really didn't handle this all that badly. At the bookstore, we have what are called "Key 6" items, which are typically small tacky knickknacks that either sticks in a purse, sets on a desk, or gifts to someone who will do one of the two. And it's pretty much impossible to keep track of what's what, and where anything is, and what any individual thing might be called, unless you spend some percentage of your time stocking and/or straightening it. Ditto for the handful of stuffed animals and other similar things in the kids section.

In other words, if someone called me and asked for such-and-such item, my response might very well be, "Um, well, not sure, let me go check," or, "Let me check with the merchandising specialist in that department," or similar. And unless that person had very recently seen the item, or at least was familiar with the various names of the random stuffed toys that get stuck in that area, their response might very well be, "Beats me."

I can understand that the employees here work at a Hallmark store, not a bookstore, and can be more reasonably expected to have at least some knowledge of the various items in their store, but remember that this sort of thing can be tough to keep track of, and even smart, motivated employees can be stumped by very simple items every once in a while. And that assumes that the store wasn't really busy when Waveflux called -- in-store customers will generally get a much higher priority than phone customers.

Now I've got to go get dressed for work, even though today's supposed to be my offday, because someone else called in and I've been asked to cover the closing (four to midnight) shift. If anyone wants anything, I'll just pull a "not even supposed to be here today" defense.

Camera Phones Suck

So I was on my lunch break yesterday, sitting in my car fiddling with my phone (I'd usually be reading something or other, but all my new reading material was sitting on the coffee table, forgotten) and basically zoning out for thirty minutes, when I realized what kind of bus was in the parking lot. Chuckling, I took three pictures with my phone, of which this is the best:



But my camera phone sucked, and missed the detail that was so important: the bus belonged to Athens Bible School, and across the back, in large flowing script, was "Go Trojans!" The irony would only have been more delicious if it was a Catholic school.

And now I've had to explain all that instead of just posting a simple picture. Damned camera phones.