Sep 07, 2006 21:27
I quit my job today. Well, handed in my letter of resignation. Same difference really; I have set into motion the wheels that will eventually lead to my self-termination from my current location of part-time employment. That place is Indigo Bookstore. Oh, wow, a bookstore! You might say, and I don’t blame you, for that is what I said as well. What a great place to spend the months of summer making a bit of cash. And it was, for a surprisingly large amount of time. It is not as if I even dislike the store, really; the people are great, the work is tedious and largely mind-numbing in nature, but there is constant exposure to high amounts of high quality literature, if you keep your eyes open, and I’ve picked up numerous books by numerous authors that I may likely have never ventured to try without seeing them before re-stocking them on the shelves (and a decent employee-discount). My time there is done, as it were, and that is why I’m leaving. I’ve learned everything I can from the place, and now, with nothing else to learn, it quickly grows dull.
But, that’s not what this is about. This is about the general operation of Canada’s biggest (by far) bookstore chain; the massive franchise that is Chapters/!ndigo/Coles/etc,etc,etc (by the way, I fucking hate the goddamn exclamation point as an ‘I’ in Indigo. I can just see the marketing exec being all ‘what an awesome idea! It brings excitement and energy to the whole store!’ No it doesn’t. It looks like the whole store is brutally illiterate). Two main practices that are central to the chain get on my nerves to no end. First, is the current trend in the publishing/bookselling industry to function primarily on the idea of ‘returns’. That is, you stock a book in your store for a time, and if it doesn’t sell, you ship it back to the publisher for a refund on that book (likely, minus shipping fees). I cannot even begin to recall the number of titles I’ve seen come in and out of that store on a WEEKLY basis. I’ll scour the store for a title that needs to be returned, find it, and later that very week be restocking it onto the shelves. The same edition, hell, for all I know it’s the same damn book. The idea is to have as big a selection as possible, and cycle that huge selection around as fast as possible - I guess, statistically, that gives the store the best chance of having any given title a customer is searching for in-stock when they come in. It’s brutally cost and time inefficient. There are simply so many titles carried, obviously the lists that are sent around are not hand edited by anyone, so many, many titles go through this same process of arriving, returning and re-arriving. Now, I love the idea of a bookstore to browse through a selection of titles. Not only is it calming and a delicious way of spending an hour or so, you often stumble upon titles and authors you would never have seen otherwise. This is of course where the almighty cover-art and back-cover blurb are kings of the hill, ruling over the bookstore with a seemingly hell-granted power. It’s fun discovering a new book; it’s your own personal treasure hunt. But this stupid idea of cycling so quickly is wastes thousands of dollars in shipping costs, thousands of hours in man-power for stocking/re-stocking, and, though it is only a small portion I’m sure, contributes to the massive amount of gas wastage/carbon dioxide emissions that come from the FLEETS of transport and parcel delivery trucks that run the darkened highways of Canadian nights.
My second point has to do with the calm feeling of searching through a bookstore. A bookstore, in my opinion, is a pretty relaxed place - I’m not talking library quiet here, just a mellow atmosphere. Most people enter a bookstore to browse, or to find the titles they are looking for completely unassisted. For those looking for help, they often attempt the search themselves before giving up and finding someone to assist them. But Indigo/Chapters want to turn this experience around. They want a staff of customer-service experts. They want the customer to be ultimately swept beneath a massive tsunami wave of service. Working on the floor, employees are expected to not only strike up a conversation with a given customer to lead them forward with questions to determine what they are looking for, but also what others items they could squeeze into the sale. Also, they are expected to mention each and every promotion going on in the store, and to push to get the customer signed up with the discount program of the store. This much information/energy should be forced on consumers in the right setting (though I would prefer it to be not thrust upon me at all, I can see it from a business perspective), otherwise most consumers just tune you out or get offended at being given sales pitches while they are minding there own business. Sure, not everyone knows everything, so sharing information is good, but its only sharing information in order to trick the customer into believing they need more than what they came in the store looking for. Business perspective be damned, that’s bullshit. The one place that this sort of coercion shouldn’t be happening is a bookstore. Maybe also a privatized hospital - maybe. Of course this company policy is, I believe, largely due to the disparity between Corporate Indigo and Store Indigo. Corporate Indigo is manned by the same people that would run the same jobs in other similar corporations. They use the same tactics that work for other businesses, and I have no doubt they work at Indigo as well. But just because they work doesn’t mean they are a good thing for the store. This is likely one of the main reasons for the backlash against Indigo as a Mom and Pop store killer. It uses big business practices to succeed, and it works, because it’s perverting the whole idea of a bookstore - which the Moms and Pops aren’t doing.
Anyway, I could continue on how I perceive the destructive disparity between Corporate and Local Branches of big business, but this post is already incredibly over-length. It’s like opening the door to the candy store to get a quick fix of sugary sweets, and finding that you actually must bypass a time-consuming obstacle course before you get to the counter to pay. You know, obstacle courses, they be always popping up everywhere.
In other news, I played a bunch of Ultimate Frisbee today, wherein my teammate Eric and I developed a new play of epic proportions known affectionately as the 'sonic boom'. It can be refered to in code as 'goin' supersonic' and harkens back to the wonderdays of Top Gun.