paste-eaters anonymous

24 Hours (not a TV show)

Sunday, Ellie and Friends went to NYC for the accessories show. Just to look, not to sell, so no van involved. It would have been a bonus if we were from one of the towns that had to boil water, but I made do by looking forward to sleeping in air conditioning on a freakishly hot night in early May. 

Of course, New York had other things to worry about. 

It was a nice hotel only blocks away from the show.

The view from our room, 11th and 48th, looking east.

New Jersey! The piers! The city sanitation facility!

It had a nice rooftop lounge, too.

My camera isn't spiffy on the nighttime shots, but it looks kinda arty. That's Times Square.

The view from the room at night. There's a glob of light up there in towards the middle where the temperature displayed read 86 degrees. At around 8:30 p.m. The air conditioning was awesome!

In the room was also a bottle of Poland Springs with a tag on it that read, "Thirsty? Drink me for $7." Why didn't it just say, "How does it feel to be poor,loser?"  

The show itself was not very exciting. It was very hot--not Paris Hilton hot, who has a line of shoes now--but I-don't-want-to-look-at-scarves-and-sweaters-in-this-heat-hot. I don't think they were planning on 90 degree weather. I felt bad for the some of the salespeople. Some of them, like the chick that chased me down the aisle screaming "HAVE YOU SEEN OUR SHAPERS? THEY'RE AWESOME! THEY'RE AWESOME!" deserved her time in garment hell.

I wanted to hit her. But fashion always makes me feel that way, which is why you won't get an in-depth report of what's happening for the season. I guess grommets and chains will be big this fall, along with tattered fabric roses and plaid shirts. And don't sell any clothes you bought during the 80's. 

So we did the shows, stopped at the deli across the street and bought bottled water and headed back home exactly 24 hours from when we arrived. 

   

Why Retail Clerks Can Be Surly: An Explanation In 56 Indictments.

Indictment 1:  She pulls up to the bookstore and parks her Cadillac Escalade right up front, except that she makes no effort to straighten it out and it takes up half of another space. 

Indictment 2: She might have been able to park better if she wasn’t talking on her cell phone when she pulled up...

Indictment 3: ...or if she had driven in using the entrance instead of the exit...

Indictment 4: ...or if she had approached it at a reasonable, slower speed.

Indictment 5:  She is still on her cell phone as she takes a child out of the back seat.

Indictment 6: She lets the child run out into the parking lot.

Indictment 7: She drags the wailing child into the store.

Indictment 8: She is still talking on her cell phone.

Indictment 9: She makes no attempt to quiet wailing child...

Indictment 10: ...instead talks louder on her cell phone to be heard.

Indictment 11: She pushes wailing child towards the Children’s section...

Indictment 12: ...while she heads for another section on the other side of the store.

Indictment 13: In spite of being far removed from the wailing child, she still talks loudly into the cell phone...

Indictment 14: ...discussing the inconvenient scheduling of her mother-in-law’s upcoming gall bladder surgery.

Indictment 15: Wailing child has stopped wailing, but is now calling for “Mommy! Mommy!”

Indictment 16: “Mommy” is oblivious to child’s calls.

Indictment 17: She fails to respond to the crashing sound in the Children’s section.

 Indictment 18: Clutching several magazines in one hand and cell phone in the other, she sits down in a chair flipping through them, depositing them on the floor when she gets to the end. 

Indictment 19: She gets up from the chair, leaving the magazines on the floor.

Indictment 20: Her child has cleared out the entire bottom row of picture and story books, also leaving them on the floor.

Indictment 21: While perusing the Parenting section, she pulls out a pile of books, holding some, but putting others back in the wrong shelf.

Indictment 22: She is still on her cell phone...

Indictment 23: graphically discussing childbirth...

Indictment 24: ...in the Children’s section.

Indictment 25: She steps over a pile of books the child has left on the floor.

Indictment 26: She grabs her child by the arm, causing the child to wail.

Indictment 27: Again.

Indictment 28:  She makes no attempt to quiet the child.

Indictment 29: Again.

Indictment 30: Struggling to hold books in one arm while holding the hand of the wailing child and holding her cell phone in the other, she drops the books onto the check-out counter. 

Indictment 31: She never acknowledges the presence of the cashier.

Indictment 32: She leaves the books, Your ADD Child, Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems, and It’s Easy To Organize! at the counter...

Indictment 33: ...while she heads to another section for more books...

Indictment 34: ...leaving the wailing child at the check-out counter...

Indictment 35: ... and continuing to discuss female reproductive problems on her cell phone.

Indictment 36: After holding up the check-out line, she returns with a daily calendar.

Indictment 37: She has not yet acknowledged the presence of the cashier.

Indictment 38: The child intermittently breaks up the wailing with more cries of “Mommy! Mommy!”

Indictment 39: “Mommy” talks louder into her cell phone...

Indictment 40: ...moving on to the subject of a neighbor’s impending divorce.

Indictment 41: Declaring on the cell phone what she would need for monthly alimony, she pulls her wallet out of her handbag and hands the cashier a card to pay for the books.

Indictment 42: It’s a library card.

Indictment 43: She frowns at the cashier, taking back the library card and dropping her American Express card...

Indictment 44: ...on the “Mastercard/Visa Charges Only” sign taped to the counter. 

Indictment 45: Another frown after her error is pointed out.

Indictment 46: The child continues to wail.

Indictment 47: Besides the frown, she has yet to acknowledge the cashier. 

Indictment 48: She signs the charge slip while discussing on her cell phone the difficulty of finding a good nanny.

Indictment 49: She decides this is an excellent time to clean out the jumble of papers in her wallet...

Indictment 50: ...unconcerned with the line forming behind her.

Indictment 51: She leaves her trash on the counter...    

Indictment 52: ...as she drags the still wailing child along with her to the door...

Indictment 53: ...complaining on her cell phone about the lack of responsibility in household help...

Indictment 54: ...while ignoring a man on crutches struggling to open the door.

Indictment 55: She is still on the cell phone as she pulls the Escalade out of the parking lot...

Indictment 56: ...driving out the entrance.

Your Day in Bookselling--Conclusion

The co-worker who asked you to cover hasn’t returned, but the next shift is up and another is there to relieve you. You head to the break room for lunch, giving in to the leftover pasta. It’s not the best choice, but it’s rent week so it’s the cheapest. You pull up a chair and a read a wrinkled copy of yesterday’s news while the splattered and crusty microwave heats up your meal.

A co-worker may pop in the break room to see if there is any food up for grabs. Occasionally there will be leftover cheese and crackers from a author event or someone will bring cookies to share. It’s not uncommon to see a mouse scurry from under the break room sofa to the backroom overstock shelves. So while food may be put out for open consumption, you tend to think it’s not such a great idea. Especially since no one in the store has the heart to deal effectively with a rodent problem.

You finish the crossword puzzle with a quick glance at the answers on the next page to fill in the last three clues. You don’t want anyone recognizing your handwriting and thinking you can’t do the puzzle. It has nothing to do with vanity. Really.

When lunch is over, it’s your turn again on the register. This time a small woman comes up with a stroller that is almost as big as she is. With baby in tow, there are also two toddlers tearing up the displays in front of the register. Mom is oblivious, talking on a cell-phone in one hand and handing over books with the other. She’s buying Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems, Your ADD Child, and How to Get Organized. You look up to tell her the total, but she’s stepped away--phone still at her ear—and has begun collecting more books to buy. 1000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die, Porn for New Moms. You add those to the total and again, she’s off somewhere. Another customer comes up and looks peeved that you’re still waiting for ADD Mom to finish up.

Finally, she returns to the register with a day planner and whips out her wallet, still on the phone. She fiddles with a stack of credit cards, handing over a library card. You hand it back to her and she stares at you, looking annoyed, until she realizes that card won’t work. She goes back to her fistful of plastic and hands you a Visa. Bless her heart, it’s a decent sale, but sometimes you wonder if the kid really has ADD or if has he just picked up the annoying habits she’s developed while trying to multi-task.

It’s the needy hour. Three people have asked you to order a book that’s no longer in print—
    “Yes it is, my mother’s had a copy for years”

Or have the title completely wrong—
    “Oh, maybe it’s not The Big Bang. It could be The Sound and the Fury.”

Or have no clue what they are looking for—
    “My sister wants me to get her a book that was in The Times a couple of weeks ago, but she didn’t tell me what it is.”

Another co-worker shows up to relieve you from the register. Frank walks in from outside and you can smell him from across the room. There is a loud, drawn-out wail from the back near the children’s section.

Definitely time for another coffee.

You could probably save a lot of money if you didn’t buy overpriced coffee two or three times a day. You might actually be able to afford a protein source for lunch on a regular basis. You could dress better, instead of living in free t-shirts from publishers shilling books. You might even be able to afford to buy more books. But sometimes you just need a reason to leave the store. You can, so you do.

Hot coffee in hand, you sit at the table in the back room and look through the printouts of canceled titles. These are books in the store that haven’t lived up to the selling cycles determined by the buyers and the bookkeeper and get returned to the publisher for credit on new—or wanted—titles.

You make a list of the books in your section and wonder why the cancel sheets never appear before you’ve shelved your books and put away your overstock. Some of the other booksellers get all hot and bothered when some titles get canceled, mainly because they have sections with books they care about. But when you have the reference section, it’s hard to get all worked up about U.S. News 10 Top Medical Schools or yet another edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary.

You’ve got an hour to kill before you go home. You go to the buyer’s office with a question you can answer yourself but want the opportunity to snoop around. There are piles of books everywhere in there; reader’s copies that the publisher sends out in advance to get buzz going about a book. A lot of the reader’s copies are put out for the booksellers to go through, but you suspect the buyers tend to grab the really juicy stuff for themselves.

What’s left can be pretty awful. Diet books. Business books from people you’ve never heard of telling you what to do with your life savings. Dead dog stories. Coming-of-age memoirs. Touchy-feely tomes. Video game guides. Society sucks and the country is going to hell books. Anti-aging cures. And novels all containing mass-produced heart-felt letters from editors telling you that this is the next big title. Only if Oprah likes it.

The buyer has her nose in a catalog, scribbling orders in it while crosschecking previous sales on the computer. She’s in no mood to chat. It’s reassuring that she’s ordering for next season, a sign that the store will remain open for at least six more months.

Finally, your shift is over and it’s time for you to go home, but suddenly you are in no hurry to get there. Instead, you find yourself looking at new titles at the front of the store, making the transition from bookseller to customer.

Your Day in Bookselling--Part Two

While there have been several attempts to keep coffee available in the break room, the store’s location between two coffee shops makes it easy to just jaunt out the door—no need for a coat—and grab a cup and a few minutes of downtime. You pass Frank, smoking another cigarette, standing right outside by the door.

You avoid eye contact.

There are several places for coffee in the area and there’s always a line in every one of them. You wait for the person in front of you to make up his mind.

“Oh. Is the Sumatra very harsh? What’s milder? Do you have non-fat soy? What’s the difference between an Americano and a latte?”

You realize that your job isn’t so bad. At least you don’t come home at night hating books.

When you return, the tenant in your section has left, leaving behind a bigger pile of books and an empty coffee cup. The pile is actually an advantage; since the books are off the shelves, it gives you some room to move stuff around in the section. Once you’ve finished that chore, it’s time to put the overstock away.

Because every inch of accessible space is valuable real estate, overstock is not kept in a convenient location. Usually it’s all packed above the sections on the walls. It takes a ladder—the kind with wheels that rests on a rail so it moves down the aisle—to reach the books. You learn very quickly how many books you can load up in one arm and climb with the other. You learn to overcome any fear of heights or balance problems. You also learn that no matter how many booksellers are on the floor, behind the counter or at the information desk, a customer will seek you out to help them find a book when you are on the top rung of the ladder.

You make sure your stack of books is secure on the shelf before you rattle down the ladder. You’ve learned your lesson once or twice the hard way.

As usual, the book he’s looking for is right there in the most obvious place. You put it in his hands. He looks at it, turns it over, looks at it again and places it back on the shelf.

“Thanks,” he smiles weakly. “Just wanted to see if you had it.”

Instead of screaming, you figure you might as well take a look at a few books while you’re on the floor.

It’s always tempting to head to the health section and dive into the Merck Manual, find a symptom and adopt it as the devastating illness du jour. One common bond of the booksellers in this store is their obsession with their health. It may have something to do with the liberal sick day policy that compensates for the lousy pay.

If obsessing over how much you swallow or that brown spot on your arm won’t fit the bill, there’s always the Psychology section and the DSM-4 to determine your latest neurosis. But venturing into that section is always risky as there’s usually someone slightly off-center or disturbingly desperate lurking there. These are the people who will try anything to engage you in their twisted pathology, continuing with the never-ending meaningless conversation that you struggle awkwardly to squirm away from. But if the coast is clear, you dive in to the books with a hearty morbid curiosity.

It would be easy to attempt to diagnose those around you, customer and co-worker alike. Ultimately, it all boils down to this: unless you are truly crazy—like the schizophrenics who come and go talking to themselves or the bipolars in a high manic state who decide to purchase one of everything in an entire section, or even the pain-in-the-ass types who never got what they wanted for Christmas and have decided to take it out on you—most are simply a little unconscious of what they are doing or asking. Years of experience have taught you to just give in and get it over with. They go away faster.

You get your overstock put away and do your best to appear busy for the next half-hour until your lunch break. There is always that heartbreaking possibility that the manager will snag you for something that should “only take a minute.”

It never does.

Putting your attention towards the stray book pile or straightening magazines will painlessly kill the time, but a co-worker asks you to take her place at the register for a few minutes.  It’s possible you could get trapped there, but you give in.

Most of the customers you see in a day are a pleasant lot: people who are enthusiastic about the books you love, suggesting titles you might enjoy, or even engage you in a good debate on something you read and hated. But a story needs tension, or the plot won’t thicken.

The store offers plenty of plot.

A thirty-something guy sporting an M.I.T. sweatshirt, a Moe Howard bowl-cut and a wristwatch that’s so large it looks like it belongs on a wall more than an arm comes up to the register. He’s indignant that a particular book is not in stock. He implies that it’s a “very important” book, and maybe it is. Perhaps if he weren’t buying a Star Wars pop-up book his credibility would stand a little stronger. You look it up and see that it was once in stock, never sold, and canceled. You smile and say nothing until his purchase is complete and he leaves.

There are several shelves below the register counter that are currently displaying childrens books. A man walks up with a toddler in his arms and puts her down. As you are ringing up his sale a little voice comes from below:

“Daddy? Can I have this book?” she asks.
“Not today.”
“Why not?”
“Because we don’t have the money to pay for it right now.”
“Why can’t we just take it?” she presses on.
“Because you have to pay for things,” he explains, “you just can’t take it.”
“Why not? I’ve done it before.”

You watch his face grow red as he smiles sheepishly and leads the child out the door.

Your Day in Bookselling--Part One

    The driver drops the papers off early, leaving them in a pile in front of the door. You have to move the bundles in order to get the door open, the weight of the papers tugging at the pain in your back, the plastic strap digging into your hands as you try to unlock the door at the same time.

    Once inside, you make the mad rush to drop the papers, lock the door behind you and run to the back of the store to turn off the alarm before sixty seconds goes by and it alerts the security company. The lights go on with a boom and a hum and the harsh glare hides the LED lights of the computers and the phones and illuminates clues of the night shift’s last actions of the evening.

    Depending on who you are and what you do in the store the routines begin. Inventory search engines are booted up and start running. The answering machine turned off and the stereo turned on. The vacuum, little better than a hairbrush, is brought out and the chunky stuff is sucked up off of the rugs in the childrens section and at the front entrance. The papers get put in their proper slots on the shelf, the front sidewalk swept, the glass double doors cleaned of fingerprints and smutz and the cash drawers put into the registers. Manila envelopes are filled out for each till. Little souvenirs to the day’s events will be tucked neatly inside: voids, credit slips, the odd note. The white board—a dry erase board on the wall behind the counter—is updated with famous birthdays, assorted odd holidays and pertinent information.

    With any luck, the night crew avoided easy distraction and got the store straightened. Stray books were put back on the shelves and piles abandoned beside chairs in the aisles are gone. No half-filled coffee cups left precariously sitting on a shelf. The old wooden floor is swept and no threatening dust bunnies are stalking in the corner.

    Register schedules are made up, consulted, copied and posted both upstairs and downstairs. The daybook, a place with important current information regarding store business and bookseller parties is read and mailboxes checked.

    At precisely 8:30--maybe a minute or two earlier if you’re feeling generous--the door is unlocked and unlatched and unless it is horrendously bad weather, one stays propped open. A cart of half-price books no one ever wants gets pushed out to the alcove. The heavy, two-sided wooden events sign goes out as far from the front window as it can without blocking the sidewalk. It’s a good day if you avoid bruising your shin this time as you lug it outside. The store is open for business.

    If you’ve been given the register shift, you are kept at the front counter. The chores of working on your sections, putting away stock, facing out new releases and pulling cancels will have to wait for an hour. Your job for the moment is meeter and greeter, information specialist, lost and found hunter, psychologist, and totally at the mercy of a wanting public.

    There will be a few customers, most of them in to grab the paper or a quick gift. The regulars will parade in; Frank, having had his cigarette while waiting outside for the store to open, will finish his coffee while perusing the remainders. Frank, like a slightly unpleasant dream, keeps coming back. While others come and go, Pompous Man, Dr. Leslie, Man with the sweet dog, and Mr. Butt-Cheeks, Frank has remained faithful. He’s never taken a day off. And despite his leering looks and that unforgettable ripe Frank smell, the staff just considers him part of the store.

    The phone will ring. First thing in the morning it’s usually calls for the manager or bookkeeping. Sales reps call to schedule appointments with the buyers. It might be a customer calling to see if a book is in stock: “I don’t know the title, but it was on Oprah. I think it had ‘love’ in the title. It was blue.” Most of the time, you know what they are looking for. You’ll start to swear you knew what the title was before the phone finished ringing.

    It’s usually slow enough in the morning for you to check out the papers for book reviews and help wanted. There’s never a job looking for English majors with little experience and less ambition. It’s the one moment you are allowed to get away with reading behind the counter. Sometimes it’s like being a bartender with a powerful thirst.

    It’s easy to sit there on the stool and just stare out at the wall of new releases in front of you. Your mind wanders, maybe totaling the bills due, subtracting what you have and hoping some money is left over. Maybe it’s that story you’ve been writing, never on paper, only in your head. Maybe it’s just thinking about what you brought for lunch.

    Around ten o’clock the nannies roll in, pushing strollers and carriages straight to the childrens section at the back of the store. They let their charges run rampant, rummaging through picture and pop-up books while they catch up on the latest gossip, bandy about day-off plans and complain about employers. About an hour later, they round up the brood and parade back out the door, leaving behind a section in tatters and the ubiquitous sippy cup half filled with apple juice.

    Lunch is starting to make a presence in the back of your mind and that leftover pasta from the night before—an effort to save some money, for once—is not meeting the demands of your appetite. But there are other things to attend to for the moment, namely loading a cart with books left on your receiving shelf and putting them out for sale.

    If you’re lucky, you’ve got the new cart that moves with a gentle push and turns on a dime. But by the time you get to the back room, it’s already loaded and held hostage by a coworker. You pull out the old one. It leans to one side as you fill it with books and you are sure that some day, during the worst opportune moment, it will collapse completely on you. Once it’s fully loaded you stand on your toes and push with all of your weight to get it out of the back room, over the hump at the door, and on to your section.

    Inevitably, there will be a huge pile of books on the floor as you try to maneuver down the aisle. Inevitably, that pile will have been created by the customer who has decided to sit right in front of the section you are working on, planting several shopping bags and a cup of coffee in the way as well. If this is a customer you know, even slightly, inevitably it will be someone you can’t stand.

    The old cart comes to a stop and starts to shake back and forth with the weight of the books. Your mission is to put out and showcase six new releases in a section already tightly packed with books. Older titles facing out--often holding more than the maximum three copies allowed to be set on the shelf with only the spine visible—will have to be pulled and put into overstock. The alphabet will require you to move virtually every book in the section. This is an excellent time to get coffee.

Retail Therapy

Look, I know it can be really frustrating to stand at a counter somewhere and deal with less than stellar service. But look at it from the other side of the counter, where that person has likely been standing for 8 hours.

Think the customer is always right? Then check out this site. Anyone who has worked with the public can relate.

And no, I can't use the eight rolls of pennies you are trying to pawn off on me.

a blue ewe for you, too

In an effort to cut down on waste products such as dyes from being dumped into our water ways, Monsanto has been working on a way to develop sheep that grow colored wool. We all know about the color variations in sheep: whites, greys, browns and of course, black, but this is much more dramatic.
By using specially-treated  food pellets, much like the ones zoos and aviaries use to keep flamingos pink, Monsanto hopes to produce sheep that will grow wool in all shades of the color spectrum. In the long run, this should actually save money for mills because it eliminates the cost of dying yarn. No longer needing to check for dye lots would  be an added bonus.
This research is still in its infancy, but a company spokesman says it's likely that these animals should be available as soon as 2010. Plans for printed sock sheep are also in the works, but due to the complexity of matching pattern and gauge, successful production could take longer.
The research has also been extended to alpaca and goat farmers. Pellets for rabbits are currently in production.

Purge Urge

    This is the closet in my office. After I've straightened it. Twice. Needless to say, I have a lot of crap. I won't even show you the storage room.
    In an effort to clear out the clutter (yes, I took the test, and thankfully I'm not as bad as I thought) I am going to post stuff to either give away or sell. I figure this will be my Sunday morning ritual through the winter; pulling out stuff, taking pictures and posting to the blog.
    I don't have the patience for ebay and for what I want to get rid of it doesn't seem worth the effort after all the fees. But surely there is someone out there who can use a shoebox (or two) filled with spools of thread or zippers. I may even post some stash yarn and fabric.
    Hey, I have a collection of weird stuff--you never know.

Things the girl behind the counter wishes she could tell you

The help always gets a bad rap.
Please, I know with the snow and the parking and shrinking paycheck that all of this can be a lot to deal with. But please, look at it from my side of the counter. First of all, I've been standing here f o r e v e r. The guy that's supposed to relieve me for my break is late. My feet hurt and I have to pee. I've had to recite our exchange policy a million times, even though it's right there in front of you. Don't put something on the counter and say you'll be right back, there's folks behind you. Please put your cell phone down and acknowledge me. Please stop your kid from taking apart everything at the register. Please, don't hand me your dirty kleenex, kid's half-eaten food or the lint and gawd knows what that's in that grimy change purse of yours. I can't change store policy, I'm not a manager. I'm sorry, I don't know why your credit card was declined. I'm going as fast as I can, please be patient. Please don't cut into the line  to "ask a quick question." They never are. And please, puhleeze, don't tell me to smile.

Try to remember that for the most part, the folks behind the counter are good people who get worn down and tired just like everybody else. A bit of patience and kindness can go a long way this season.

My Fabulous Wealth

Since my humble beginnings in retail, I have been collecting the foreign currency that magically appears in the extra well in the change drawer. Sorry my camera is so crappy, there's some really cool stuff here.

As you can see, I've been at this a while. While I'll been given some, such as the plastic zece bill from Romania (yup, it's plastic, you can even see through part of it) and collected some while traveling (mostly the Scandinavian coins with holes in the center), it always amazes me how stuff gets passed off as American money.

My Canadian coins get wiped out on occasion; whenever I hear that a friend is crossing the border I load them up with change so they will bring me back Mr. Big bars. You just can't get that kind of candy in the states.

Now that the Canadian dollar is equal to or greater than the U.S. dollar, it seems silly to have that change just sitting there. But what to do with all the others? The Belgium Franc, the Barbados Quarter, The Australian 10, all exchanged as quarters? Or the British 5 Pence and the Luxemburg Franc? Half of this stuff is no longer used since the rise (and do I mean rise, lately) of the Euro. Is it worth anything? If so, I'm sure I could get some pretty decent chocolate in Belgium, right?