We have a saying at the bookstore when summing up the retail day, “We worked hard for no money.” We sing this out like the Donna Summer tune we’ve borrowed it from. Oftentimes there are days where we feel like we offer help to everyone and show them books and they just don’t buy anything. Book talking, whether to folks intent of buying or just curious to learn more about books, takes just as much energy and focus. Sundays are usually the “I’m just browsing” crowd, so we’re used to that. But every bookseller has a fantasy of folks not needing a ton of help, and still buying heaps of books.  Well, this day was yesterday.
We check in with all our customers by asking, not if they need help, which implies that they don’t know what they’re looking for, but rather by asking if we can help them find something. This slight shift in language allows the customer to ask for help without feeling bad. Often this results in people feeling comfortable to ask where a certain section is or if we have a specific book in stock.
Yesterday this question was met with a polite no. This usually means folks are browsing and might buy things at a later date. But yesterday, the polite no turned into stacks of books at the register. Folks found what they were looking for, or more to the point, discovered books they had to have without any help from bookstore staffers.
Almost all our customers were adults who were buying their own stacks of summer reading. It was a great day because we had almost everything folks were looking for. And the few things we didn’t have weren’t the reason people came in. People just wanted books. The longer days of summer turns almost everyone into a reader. Stacks of books are comforting. At the end of the day we were surprised at how big a day we had had because it didn’t feel like work. It was easy fun. People were leaving the store with their own discoveries and everyone was thrilled.