The week after getting my book store position I turned up bright and early on Saturday morning, ready to start a job that was cultured, intelligent, and didn’t involve cleaning.
“Here you go,” said Catherine, handing me a damp cloth and a spray bottle. “You can get started on the windows.”
I think my face fell but I knew she was watching me, so I nodded, took the Windex and started wiping the shopfront down, consoling myself that window cleaning fluid doesn’t smell as bad as industrial kitchen cleaner.
I looked around to see if Tanya the shoplifting guard was watching, but thankfully she wasn’t working that shift – thieves are not likely to get up early on a Saturday morning. I like to think though that Tanya probably started chuckling when she found out.
After I finished my cleaning and stacked some fresh books in the shop window for good measure, I was shown to the counter and was re-introduced to Paul and Denise.
“Do you know how to use a cash register?” Paul asked seriously, eyeing the customers that were already starting to line up.
“No problems,” I boasted, smiling brightly at the lines of book lovers. “I used to work the cash register in a café. I know what I’m doing.”
I did not know what I was doing.
It turns out the owner of the ice cream shop by the marina had used an old mechanical cash register with the little pop-up plastic numbers for a display, and the whole device was probably closer to the toy that my daughters currently use when playing shopkeepers. The machine in front of me at A&R was hooked up to a computer (hey, his was a big deal for Western Australia in ’90s), and had all sorts of buttons with abstract three letter combinations that buzzed like a “Dr Who” alien when I pressed them in the wrong order.
Another method of payment that I was little more familiar with was the old-style credit card imprinters. Does anyone remember these? Big chunky metal plates that looked like part of a printing press, which also included those black sliding plastic handles so when you placed the credit card over the receipt paper you got a weirdly satisfying “cha-chunk” as you pushed the handle back and forth. This was back in the day when you also had to check people’s signature to see that they matched. By and large a quick glance was ok, but the pensioners who frequented the store were the ones who were the most insistent that I check the docket and signature thoroughly. It was almost as if they were worried that I suspected them of being octogenarian grifters desperately staying one shuffling step ahead of the law.
The final method of payment was gift cards, printed paper certificates which were a staple of the book industry. I’ve always found that while some people look down on gift vouchers in general as impersonal, book store vouchers get a weird sort of free pass given how individual people’s tastes can be when it comes to their favourite authors. The problem I ran into was that A&R gift cards did not come with money change – if you had a $50 card and only spent $30, you were given a $20 gift card in return. This always caused a lot of grief, particularly amongst teenage surfer dudes who had been given vouchers from exasperated parents despairing that their progeny would ever read anything other than “Playboy” articles. I soon became very rehearsed in the argument that no, spending $5 on a surfing magazine does not mean you can get $45 in cash back to go and spend on designer sunglasses, it means you got two $20 vouchers and a $5 voucher in return.
The other problem with gift cards is that people kept bringing in ones for Dymocks up the road. I still don’t understand how customers kept making this mistake, considering the corporate colours of A&R was green and white, and the Dymocks gift vouchers were dark red. Customers would get wildly agitated when you politely rejected the proffered piece of card, spluttering “well where is it written that you can’t take this?” All we could do was wave vaguely at the wall behind us where “A&R” was painted in giant green letters.
After an hour or two Catherine decided I had caused enough error messages for one day and sent me to work the shop floor. This was the part of the job I always enjoyed the most, particularly if you came across someone who liked the same books you did. There’s a lot of satisfaction in being able to nerd out with a stranger over the fact that you both loved Margaret Weis and suggesting that they start reading R A Salvatore. However, I soon found that each section of the store had their own adherents.
Professional, middle aged women loved Crime, particularly if it had the tough, serious female detective who was there to show the other detectives that it wasn’t just a man’s world. Young women loved Classical Literary Fiction and Romance, and for the record “bodice-rippers,” (as they were affectionately known) were the most consistent seller at A&R stores. Older women with glasses and in floral jumpers generally sauntered past these shelves to the other Romance section, mostly populated with Harlequin Mills and Boon. These books didn’t feature bodice-ripping on the cover art; a depiction of what actually occurred in these novels would probably have seen them sold under the counter.
Adult men also liked Crime, but favoured True Crime. Men in expensive suits would usually hang out in the Business and Finance Section, while older men loved Sport, History and in particular Military. Young adults were far more mixed in their interests, and both young men and women loved Fiction, Sci-Fi and Fantasy. Teen girls loved the Stationary section as well as the Spirituality books. Western Australian society was ramping up for the spiritual New Age of the coming year 2000, although despite the popularity of Nostradamus and his imitators the coming supernatural apocalypse never really panned out – kinda like a spiritual Y2K bug. Teen boys were, sadly, the smallest demographic group at A&R, and I remember one teen proudly telling me that he had never read an entire book in his life. Those that did come into the store would mostly hang out in the Magazines or the Children’s section.
After a while Paul, Denise and I would stand together on the main aisle of the store and could guess what each customer was after just my looking at them.
“Young woman, twenties, I’m going to say Jane Austen,” I murmured, plastering on a welcoming smile.
“Nah, it’s going to be Romance,” answered Paul under his breath, nodding at another customer passing by.
“You’re both wrong,” whispered Denise, adjusting her badge. “Look at how well she’s dressed. It’ll be Crime.”
“Hi, how can I help you today?” Denise beamed, stepping out from the aisles and clasping her hands attentively.
“Oh, thank you!” answered the young woman, adjusting her glasses. “I was looking for the latest Janet Evanovich book.”
“High Five?” answered Denise brightly. “Of course, right this way.”
Paul and I sighed in defeat as Denise made silent victorious fist-pumps at us when her customer’s back was turned.
We each had our own approach to dealing with customers. Denise was cheerful and smiling, and she always radiated a friendly warmth. She was, essentially, the sort of woman who could have walked through a forest and actually have the birds land on her shoulders and sing in harmony. This also made her great with angry customers who wanted to complain about something, as Denise would say “well, let’s see if I can get to the bottom of this mix-up,” and after a minute or two of chatting with her they entirely forgot what they were supposed to be angry about.
Paul was the consummate professional and was particularly good with the business suit set. The law student’s encyclopaedic knowledge of law, finance and travel books meant that he approached each customer almost as if examining a witness:
“What are you after today sir?”
“Well, I heard an interview with this man named Kyoki about his book Rich Dad Poor Dad and I was hoping to get a book on financial planning-“
“Aha! You mean Robert Kiyosaki. But if it’s financial planning, what you really want is his second book, Cash Flow Quadrant,”
“It is?”
“Of course it is, it’s right over here, let me show you.”
As for myself, I often found success simply by spotting someone looking at a book I already knew, then just chatting with them about why I liked it and suggesting similar authors. However, it turned out I had one set of customers whom I seemed to get along with famously: old women.
Perhaps it was something in my demeanour, perhaps it was those years at church as a little kid surrounded by old women in the choir, perhaps it was my voice. For one reason or another I don’t sound very Ocker (Australian) and people often ask me what part of England I emigrated from.
Regardless, I always seemed to end up serving elderly women who thought I was such a polite young man.
“Have I told you that you remind me of my grandson?” they would ask.
“Ah, no. Look, would you like me to bring up these books to the front counter?”
“Oh well let me tell you all about him. He’s studying medicine you know, doing all sorts of things with cancer research, nothing like my grand-niece though, she’s such a creative artist, why just last week-“
“That’s lovely to hear, but about these books though…”
The differences in our customer style really came to a head when I’d been working with A&R for about a month or two. It was a hot Saturday afternoon, and after a long day of shopping customers were milling lazily around the front of the store working up the enthusiasm to walk down the aisles to get the books they were after. This meant that the casuals spent most of our afternoons approaching different customers and fetching books for them, but tired descriptions like “you know which book I’m talking about, that famous children’s story with a sleeping monster and a sailboat on the front” didn’t make our lives any easier.
Paul and I walked up to our next customer, a portly guy in his thirties with frizzy blonde hair, and edged into his field of vision.
“Good afternoon sir, is there anything I can get for you?” I asked.
The man turned to answer, opened and closed his mouth a few times, then collapsed in a twitching heap onto the floor. The front area of the old A&R store was tiled for when it rained in winter, but thankfully the thick mop of frizzy hair seemed to cushion the poor guy’s fall.
The surrounding customers gasped, and Paul and I stared at each other in horror, but after a moment we nodded at each other in silent communication. We could handle this. We knew what to do.
After all, we were casual book store staff.
I leapt (actually, I stumbled) into action, kneeling down next to the customer and checked to see if he was breathing. He was gasping a lot so I figured that was ok, and I tried to figure out where I could hold onto his rather generous frame to roll him into the recovery position.
“Paul, could you give me a hand?” I asked, twisting around to try and find the tall blonde law student.
Paul was gone.
“Paul?” I asked somewhat plaintively. Thankfully, at this point the blonde guy had already started to recover and mumbled as he started to pull himself to his feet. He was unharmed, more embarrassed than anything else, and explained to me that he had a condition similar to epilepsy where he was collapse if he got too tired. I stuttered that I hoped he was ok and after a few awkward words I went back to work and he left A&R without buying anything.
I walked back through the store searching for Paul and found him in the small staff room partition, calmly eating a sandwich.
“What the hell, man?” I spluttered in confusion. “Where were you?”
“Waiting here for you,” he answered patiently, between mouthfuls. “Do you know how much liability you expose yourself to the moment you put your hands on a customer? Particularly one who might be injured?”
Never argue with a lawyer.
So my work at A&R continued, slowly getting used to the rhythm of each shift until I pretty much knew what to expect from the day before I even put on my badge and tie. There was one book series however that always threw a spanner in the works, especially when a new book was ready to be launched.
Harry. Goddamn. Potter.
But that’s a story for another day.
Leave a Reply