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landingtreeI'm covering Evelyn's* shift today at a local bookshop, Bookhound: my first real experience of retail! Writing this now because there aren't a lot of customers. So far the shop has earned slightly more than it will be paying me, but that may change: no one has bought anything since noon.
The first sale I made, I did wrong. Leaving a note to say 'The Crowded House book was paid for with cash actually.'
A customer reported a complaint: we had sold him a book that was incomprehensible gibberish. I told him I'd get in touch with the author to prevent this from happening again.
Someone wants to leave flyers here for their new skincare parlor up the road, do we do that? Stashed in kitchen pending approval.
I'm used to thinking of shopkeepers as panoptical; in reality, customers could have stolen a dozen books from the genre alcove and I wouldn't have noticed, unless they made the mistake of beginning to act sneaky.
I was advised to bring an activity to do which wasn't a book to read, so came with a jigsaw, but the owner (who we know, and is lovely) had left something else to do: art books to cut out paintings from and put up on the walls. Next to Fantasy I have stuck a washy green city with a fort, a windowpane of a flooded forest, and a brown cellist vanishing into his background. I have also made a new 'Please ring for assistance' sign out of Henry William Kirkwood's 'Mitre Peak.'
(I'll leave it to the owner's judgement whether this calm image of an empty boat in a mountain wonderland is going to be more annoying to waiting customers than plain text. I have discovered that from the kitchen I can't actually *hear* the bell that rings for assistance, so am ducking out and in rapidly when necessary).
A homeless man came here to get change for a tenner; I assume we do that?
I'm so used to being a book-buyer that whenever I sell a book my first impulse is to hold onto it. One customer did actually have to 'Frodo Baggins the ring is still in your pocket' me.
(Do we sell the new books which are in the kitchen? Someone wants the first Harry Potter; the system claims we only have book four, and the only book I can see is three. Luckily the customer wants the first, so I have time to check. Since they seemed open to substitutions (Lemony Snickett) I'd have recommended Flora Segunda as an alternative if I'd noticed it on the shelf).
A customer reports that we have every book in two different series except the ones they're up to. We agree stoically that such is life.
Edit: Oh good, we just sold Sacred Signs and Sigils, that covers my next hour's pay. That's two books sold out of the window, I have never bought a book out of a window and didn't know windows were this effective. What shall I replace it with?
Edit: 3 pm. Now I am trying to collage a mysterious spaceship into Charles Decimus Barraud's 'Hutt River'. It isn't working very well.
* When I named Evelyn in a past post I forgot I'd decided not to use whole names of flatmates; however, Evelyn okays this!
The first sale I made, I did wrong. Leaving a note to say 'The Crowded House book was paid for with cash actually.'
A customer reported a complaint: we had sold him a book that was incomprehensible gibberish. I told him I'd get in touch with the author to prevent this from happening again.
Someone wants to leave flyers here for their new skincare parlor up the road, do we do that? Stashed in kitchen pending approval.
I'm used to thinking of shopkeepers as panoptical; in reality, customers could have stolen a dozen books from the genre alcove and I wouldn't have noticed, unless they made the mistake of beginning to act sneaky.
I was advised to bring an activity to do which wasn't a book to read, so came with a jigsaw, but the owner (who we know, and is lovely) had left something else to do: art books to cut out paintings from and put up on the walls. Next to Fantasy I have stuck a washy green city with a fort, a windowpane of a flooded forest, and a brown cellist vanishing into his background. I have also made a new 'Please ring for assistance' sign out of Henry William Kirkwood's 'Mitre Peak.'
(I'll leave it to the owner's judgement whether this calm image of an empty boat in a mountain wonderland is going to be more annoying to waiting customers than plain text. I have discovered that from the kitchen I can't actually *hear* the bell that rings for assistance, so am ducking out and in rapidly when necessary).
A homeless man came here to get change for a tenner; I assume we do that?
I'm so used to being a book-buyer that whenever I sell a book my first impulse is to hold onto it. One customer did actually have to 'Frodo Baggins the ring is still in your pocket' me.
(Do we sell the new books which are in the kitchen? Someone wants the first Harry Potter; the system claims we only have book four, and the only book I can see is three. Luckily the customer wants the first, so I have time to check. Since they seemed open to substitutions (Lemony Snickett) I'd have recommended Flora Segunda as an alternative if I'd noticed it on the shelf).
A customer reports that we have every book in two different series except the ones they're up to. We agree stoically that such is life.
Edit: Oh good, we just sold Sacred Signs and Sigils, that covers my next hour's pay. That's two books sold out of the window, I have never bought a book out of a window and didn't know windows were this effective. What shall I replace it with?
Edit: 3 pm. Now I am trying to collage a mysterious spaceship into Charles Decimus Barraud's 'Hutt River'. It isn't working very well.
* When I named Evelyn in a past post I forgot I'd decided not to use whole names of flatmates; however, Evelyn okays this!
