I’m cataloging my Thursday. I walk in, late, not having had breakfast (note to self: never do that again) and barely make it to my office, right behind the register, before my beleaguered staffer says,”Jos, when you have a minute.” We’ve worked together long enough that I knew something was up. I patted my hot egg sandwich goodbye and went on the floor.
\nA customer was trying to return two books without a receipt. I looked up each title to see if they had been purchased the week prior for her daughter’s birthday. They had not.\u00a0 So, now I’m just being nice by even considering the return, but it sure wasn’t seen that way.
\nNext, I check my inventory levels for each book, thinking if they were low, I could just accept the return. I had just received five of one of the books and one of them I was out of. I explained that I could only take one of the books back. The customer said, “But you can sell it.” I tried to explain that with the return I was essentially giving her $10 on the off chance that I could sell what would be my sixth copy of that title, and that’s just not going happen right now.
\nThe tension was slowly escalating as the customer kept questioning me about why I wouldn’t take the book back. It was all I could do to not shout: THE BOOKS WEREN’T PURCHASED HERE. Inside I kept thinking, why am I even having this conversation, again and again? And why am I trying to find a compromise with this customer who clearly thinks I’m trying to cheat her. Finally the point got through and JP, my stalwart staffer, rang up her returns plus several other items.
\nWell, the customer didn’t believe her total when we said it was $37. She got mad all over again. I went through it item by item with her looking at the screen. She still didn’t believe it. Poor JP resorted to using a calculator to show her how it all came to $37. I couldn’t help but add, “You know, the computer’s pretty good at math.”
\nJP and I had a good laugh about this and we both thought the day\u00a0 had nowhere to go but up. Well, not so much. Later I was speaking to a local school librarian, who was in the middle of a Scholastic book fair, about a possible author event when I asked if we could talk about the possibility of our store doing a book fair for the school. I was met with a clipped, “Absolutely not. The last book fair you did we lost $700, because we had to pay for missing books.” Wow. Was\u00a0 expecting to hear that, especially since the book fair in question was 12 years ago, and we split the cost of the missing books, so everyone lost money on that one. And it doesn’t change the fact that $700 worth of books went missing.
\nNeedless to say that kind of attitude does not endear itself to me, or the authors I have access to. We live in a small world and common courtesy goes a long way. Clearly, I’m still fuming, but I’m still laughing at the absurdity of the day. Here’s hoping Friday brings genuine laughs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m cataloging my Thursday. I walk in, late, not having had breakfast (note to self: never do that again) and barely make it to my office, right behind the register, before my beleaguered staffer says,”Jos, when you have a minute.” We’ve worked together long enough that I knew something was up. I patted my hot […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4167"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4167\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}