God bless ’em, the customers who want to be helpful. The ones who think it’s okay to follow you to the back room to look for their book. The ones who walk so closely so behind you that if you stop they slam right into you. Don’t get me wrong, I think being helpful is a lovely trait in most areas of life, but for some reason at the bookstore, it can just be trying and can ultimately create more work for the bookseller. <\/p>\n
Let’s start with the little kids. They just want to put things back. This is an excellent impulse, but unless they can understand what alphabetical order actually is, I think the books are better left in a tidy stack. I can always tell there’s been a helpful toddler in the store. All the books on the bottom shelves have been shoved back willy nilly. I’ll often hear a parent say, "You have to put that one back before you can look at another one." Well, the problem with this is the kid has no idea that his truck book goes back in the truck section, not on the bottom shelf of parenting, where he happens to be sitting at the moment. So what happens is, later in the day when I’m looking for the truck book and it’s nowhere to be seen in the section it belongs in, I expand my search, often calling for help from staff. Of course, we don’t find the book until it’s too late and we’ve already ordered another one or lost the sale entirely.<\/p>\n
And sometimes kids, especially the little ones, the adorable ones, can shove a book back on the shelf, ripping or tearing the jacket, like nobody’s business. This all brings me back to the tidy stack. Yes, it seems like a lot of books, and I think this is what customers react to: it’s a lot of books someone has to put back. They stack up twenty books and realize this is a lot of work for someone to put back. But trust me when I say, I’d much rather have an enormous stack than books put back incorrectly and brutally.<\/p>\n
The older kids and adults, the ones who do know alphabetical order, honestly have no excuse for not putting a book back right where they found. I love it when a customer who found a book perfectly well on her own, hands it to me and says, "I wouldn’t want to be put it back in the wrong place." I appreciate that, but seriously, you found the book, is it too hard remember that Risk Pool<\/em> by Richard Russo would be under R in the fiction section? Now, if I’ve handed you a stack of books to look at I hardly expect you to run around and reshelve them, that’s crazy, because when I’m on a roll recommending, I pull from lots of sections.<\/p>\n I guess with the plethora of tourists we get during the summer, I feel like I’m fighting a losing battle every day: I just can’t find anything. Adult hardcovers are being placed on top of middle novels, travel books wind up in Science Fiction, cartoon collections are left in the bathroom (seriously). Please, unless you’re a librarian, just make me my tidy stack and I’ll be thrilled.<\/p>\n I will say of my regular customers who like to help, they do it in serious and meaningful ways. One winter day last year we were a little late to get to the store because of snow. We arrived and found one of our very hearty senior citizen customers shoveling the walkway for us. Now, that’s the kind of help I need.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" God bless ’em, the customers who want to be helpful. The ones who think it’s okay to follow you to the back room to look for their book. The ones who walk so closely so behind you that if you stop they slam right into you. Don’t get me wrong, I think being helpful is […]<\/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-20","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}