Well, it’s easy knowing people are doing their Christmas shopping, tempers are frayed, stress-levels are high and the weirdos are crawling out of the woodwork.
Some gems from the past few days:
Customer complains about the price of a trade paperback, allegedly it’s on sale elsewhere for a lower price. We did have it on special price…when it came out a few months back. The assistant manager calmly (and at length) explains to her how discounting works, and pointed out that we are currently running a sale where all books in the store are 3 for the price of 2. (Yes, all books. I don’t think we have any competition for value for money on that front. ) and that this offer applies even on top of price reductions (you can take home three trade paperbacks for €26.40 if you choose wisely). Was she impressed? Nope, didn’t care. Wanted that one book at a reduced price. No dice.
Next up was the customer from hell, looking for a very very obscure book, published in the US by a small vanity press. Vanity press books are near-impossible for us to source at the best of times, even when they’re published in Ireland. She was haranguing a junior bookseller (who had spent all day in the kids section and was therefore feeling understandably frayed) so I took over the query. Checked all the wholesalers we deal with and nobody had it listed. The only place I did see it was…. on Amazon (little known fact, Amazon basically list every book in the known universe, whether they can actually source it or not – your local bookseller orders from the same places they do, and will be more honest about the true availability of the book). I suggested she try to purchase it through them. Her response: “But I have a gift-card for here. Are you going to refund my money??” My response was a boggle. I then suggested I bring a manager out to talk to her about it, since I knew I’d only get wound up by the sheer illogic she had just come out with.
(See, we stock a lot of books, and we have access to millions more, how the hell can you have a gift card and only want one (obscure, vanity published) book in the world???) Having a book token/gift card is not a guarantee that we can source whatever you want, we’ll try to, within reason, but there is no promise with the card. The manager explained all of this to her, and she refused to back down. He spent half an hour talking to her. She wouldn’t budge. Afterwards he used some extreme language to describe her – a first as far as I can recall.
Next the parade of cheapskates for the shop-wide three for two offer. They come in with their entire Christmas list, send booksellers scurrying off to get the books for them (oh, we’re personal shoppers now too?? I don’t mind elderly people or the infirm asking me to track down their books for them, but if you’re in the whole of your health and expect that treatment, I’m going to brand you lazy in my head forever) and then wind up with a stack of 21 books, thus getting 7 of them for nothing. What a deal, eh? Seven free books!
Er, not a good enough deal for some people. They start quibbling about the seven cheapest books being the free ones, and demanding that they have seven different purchases put through, so they can hand-pick their freebies and save even more money. Now it’s a sale, not a charity, and when the store is extremely busy the last thing any of us want to have to do is make people wait even longer at the tills so these grredy types can have their own way. There is an incredible contrast between these people and the happy souls we send away from the till to find themselves a free book because they’re buying two already. I’ve had several people falling over themselves to thank me, as if I were responsible for the sale. I’m just glad they’re happy, as it makes the others fade from my memory a bit.
There has also been the seasonal influx of once-a-year book buyers who want books that have been out of print for the best part of a decade and seem to think we should be able to magic them out of the ether. I usually send them off to Abe or Biblio (or both) in search of second-hand copies – keeps most people happy, but there are some who will shout at you that they “do not have any internets” – um, okay, but I was just trying to help you get the book you wanted….
The ones that really break my heart are the lovely old dears who come in looking for books (often out of print) and chat away about how they remember the book so well and it would be perfect for person x for Christmas. They will stand there and tell me that they “really really hope” we have it, and I’ll search our inventory and all sources I can find, with an ever-sinking heart, before having to break it to them that the book is no longer available. Times like that, not having instantaneous print-on-demand on all titles actually hurts.
Had a customer today who wanted to know what book tokens looked like…errrrr okaaaaaay…
Mind you, she also wanted to harp on at me about Steig Larsson because she’d used the Millenium Trilogy as a barometer of her taste when she was looking for some crime books last week (she read it in German), I made the mistake then of telling her that I loved the first book, and really didn’t like the second one – I actually think she came back in on the pretext of wanting to know what book tokens looked like to argue with me about it. She also didn’t like the Arnur Indriasson I sold her as much as it (um, that’s fine, but Steig Larsson only wrote three books before he died – I can’t offer you any more of his) but she did like the Jo Nesbo, so that’s alright then. More proof that you can’t go wrong with Jo Nesbo!
And the final one for now came from a source who shall remain anonymous. Someone working last weekend in a large city-centre bookstore, in the kids’ section was approached by a man who was looking to buy a series of children’s books. He had no idea who the author was, or what the series was called, or anything about it. In exasperation the bookseller asked him to have another think about it. Turns out he did know something, he knew what shape they were. When asked about the shape he described a small rectangle, your standard paperback in fact. A lot of help that….
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