I'm
going to warn you right off the bat, some of you will recognize
yourselves in this post. If you do, I want to apologize – not
because I've offended you by calling you out, but because I'm one of
the ex-Borders employees who taught you to be an entitled jerk.
Most
of you other readers are innocent of any of these shenanigans, but
will recognize your own customers, regardless of what sort of store
you work in, because the economy we've suffered for the past 15 years
has bred a lot of desperate customer-service policies. But there are
some issues that are peculiar to bookstores, mainly because someone got
the bright idea that book stores should have a coffee shop attached
to them.
I
can just see the wheels turning the head of the jerk who thought that
one up. What would I want in a book shop to make the experience
relaxing and perfect? they asked
themselves. A place to sit down, read a book, sip a latte
. . .
Yeah,
that's great, all right. And in the late 90s this worked out fairly
well for Borders and Barnes & Noble. People trashed a lot of
stuff in the cafes (spilling coffee on unpaid merchandise and getting
goopy fingerprints all over it), but the economy was good enough that
they also spent a lot of money in those superstores. They became
social meeting places, and that must have seemed like a great way to
get customers into the stores
.
.
In
fact, it was a great way to get people into
the stores. People are often not customers.
And as the economy tanked, and people had a harder and harder time
paying for even the basics, some were able to continue enjoying their
books and lattes – because they didn't have to pay for the books.
Or the magazines. Or the newspapers that they spread all over the
place as if they had purchased them.
There
was an unspoken agreement between the superstores and their clientele
that if you were sitting in a chair and reading a book, it was
because you were considering buying that book. It was (mostly) true
at one time. But by the time Borders went bankrupt, it was usually
not true. And as we
employees watched families move in to the children's section to grab
armloads of books and spread themselves out on the floor as if they
were in their own living rooms, we could see which way the tide was
turning. These folks became so bold, they brought bags
of MacDonald's food in with them and put greasy fingerprints all over
the books they left in untidy stacks on the floor.
And
we did it to ourselves. We
created the environment that made it possible for people to walk all
over us. We should have been trying to adapt to the bad economy
instead of pretending it was all a matter of good customer service.
And now Borders is gone, and surviving book businesses are having to
cope with customers who were raised in a barn. Many of these folks
are now shopping for books they are considering buying online, but
they want to review them first, turning local bookstores into the
amazon.com showroom.
Yes,
people are behaving pretty badly sometimes. And very few businesses
have adapted to the situation. One of the few I can think of is
Wired? Cafe in Taos, New Mexico. They have a handful of book titles
that they sell, but most of the books on their shelves are used books
donated by staff and customers, available to read for free. Primarily,
they sell lattes and internet/computer time. Since they're located
in a popular travel destination, this model works beautifully for
them.
As
for the rest of us, we're still suffering from the austerity policies
that have wrecked economies all over the world (she said, without the
least hint of political bias). Until things get better, the
knee-jerk customer-service policies that companies think up to
compensate for the fact that customers don't have any money will
continue to create monsters among their clientele. Sooner or later,
regardless of the economy in general, this is going to have to be
sensibly addressed.
Photo
by Em, drawings by the fabulous Ernest Hogan.
