It’s got a purple cover
Working in a bookshop seems rather a pleasant occupation.
The customers are presumably nice, for the most part, compared to those you might find in a store selling weapons, or R5000 handbags, or those ghastly pizzas which seem to exist for the sole purpose of seeing how many calories they can fit onto one disc of dough by including eight kinds of processed meat and heaps of yellow cheese. It’s a generalisation, but one assumes that book shoppers are likely to be decent and educated, and probably marginally more polite to the staff.
In my bookshop-worker fantasy, I imagine quiet moments in which you could pick up a book and read for a bit. You might even order a short skinny cap from the coffee shop, and sit on one of the comfy chairs book shops provide these days, and page through Vanity Fair until business picked up. Then you’d go off on a mission to help someone find what they’re looking for, or even find what they don’t know they’re looking for, but will actually love. That would make you feel pretty good. Next, you might tidy the New Fiction shelf, moving strays, lining up the spines perfectly.
It is less pleasant, apparently, according to a list of bookshop employee gripes that has recently come to light. Entitled “Things We Never Told You: Ode To A Bookstore Death”, the list appeared at a Borders store in the days before the US chain closed. Here are some of the things bookshop staff hate about us:
We hate when a book becomes popular simply because it was turned into a movie.
Oprah was not the “final say” on what’s awesome. We really didn’t care what was on her show or what her book club book was. Really.
We greatly dislike the phrase “quick question”. It’s never true and everyone seems to have one.
If you don’t know the author, title or genre, but do know the colour of the cover, we don’t either.
Letting your kids run free and destroy our kids’ section destroyed a piece of our souls.
Some of the complaints sound legit, others are just snobbery and whining. The thing about working in a shop is that you have to serve customers. Who may not be perfect. Who may not know the name of the book they’re looking for. But who pay your salary.
Online, bookshop employees added their personal experiences, some of which were horrifying – fights, drunks, used needles – but mostly just the low-level rudeness and stupidity that you really should take in your stride if you are going to work with the public.
Customers weighed in, defending their right to choose books they like without the permission of some snotty shop assistant, and pointing out that Amazon doesn’t sneer at your book choices. Many were of the opinion that physical book sellers should be rather nicer to the customers they still have.
A librarian took issue with the employees’ seeming reluctance to help customers track down books, saying “I love, F&*&ING LOVE, when people ask for my help to find stuff, no matter their phrasing. A ‘quick question’ that has me tracking sh*t down on three shelves and 20 websites for half an hour? My lifeblood, man!” Good chap. Experience in my local stores – independents and chain – is that staff help politely and (seemingly) willingly. Perhaps because I don’t return used books or shop with jam-fingered toddlers. Or perhaps they are making up lists about my quirks behind my back.
Kate Sidley is the Sunday Times Books Columnist
