Some of you may know that I work retail. I also happen to work in a fairly large store in a fairly large chain of bookstores. And I get questions all the time. Is there anything you Dopers want to know about the glamorous life of a bookseller?
Does it piss you off when a person takes 4 hours to read a book in your store without purchasing it? 
Do you have that blue book about this big by that author that was on tv last week?
Does this look like a library to you?
What’s the deal with hardback books? When they first come out they cost $24.99 give or take. Then a few months later you see them on the bargin rack for $5.99. If you go in to order a hardback, you pay full cover price.
I know a little about the deal where stores sell books on consignment and if the don’t sell them they can return the covers and get credit.
Is the store making a ton of money when the hardback is new? Is it losing money when it sell it on the bargin rack? Can’t they return it?
I guess I want to know how the stock is handled/owned and who makes money where.
Not to steal elshatan’s thunder…
The bargain books are remainders. They usually come out remaindered when the title is about to or has just come out in paperback. Basically, the publisher still has a load of hardcovers in stock, but knows that know one will want them, so they sell them to remainder distributors on the premise that a little money is better than none, who sell them at a discount. They do keep a few on hand, which is the reason the hardcovers are at full price if you order a title in. Bookstores will order from the publisher or a distributor first. If you know a book is remaindered, though, you should ask the bookseller if they can find it for you. It’s not impossible.
Regular, non-remaindered titles are marked up about 50-30%, no matter whether it’s paper or hardcover. I worked for an independent bookstore, and we ordered either from the publisher, or from a distributor. Most big publishers would give us a 46% discount, but it took a couple weeks (at least) for the shipment to arrive. With distributor orders, our discount would be 40%, but they’d arrive much quicker.
Yes, the bookstores can return books. When a title moved from hardcover to softcover, we’d usually return the hardcovers on hand. Or if a book hadn’t sold in a year (or less, depending on various factors), we’d return it. The publishers reimburse the bookstore’s account. For one period when I was a bookseller, we owed money to Simon & Schuster, and rather than actually pay the bill, we did a HUGE cull and returned a ton of S&S books that hadn’t sold for a while. It was a pain in the ass, because S&S wouldn’t sell us anything until we paid back everything.
No, the bookstore doesn’t lose money on remainders. We had a 50% markup on them. I suppose publishers do, but it’s better for them to get rid of the books, period, rather than have them take up valuable warehouse space.
Not as bad as the computer nerds who come into a section, sit on the floor in that section, pull out all the books, read all the books, then wander away, leaving a big pile of random computer books in the store. In order, I’d rate shoppers like so:
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Computer Book Buyer/Reader-These tend to be info-greedy. They want their book, they’d run over their own mother to get it, and no, it doesn’t bother them to stand their with their big butts blocking the aisle while people try and get around. These also tend to be anti-social. If you happen to be working in the section they want books out of, they WILL NOT ask you to get it for them. Instead, they will pace through the computer section, giving you extremely dirty looks, for about an hour, before departing in a huff.
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Business Book Wanter-These aren’t so bad, except for the I Must Have This Book subculture. Business book readers tend to general cluelessness, except when they’ve heard about some great new book on marketing and they absolutely have to have THAT SPECIFIC ONE. The fact that the book is out of print baffles them, but doesn’t phase them in the least. This usually requires explaining two or three times that this book is no longer obtainable through normal retail channels. Explanation is followed by, “So, do any of your other stores have it?”
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“I Just Saw It On Oprah Three Months Ago”-This group tends to be female, though men are not immune. They saw it on that one show that’s usually on in the morning, you know, right around that time, and you MUST have seen it, cause there was that really famous guy on there, and he wrote a book…oooh, what was the name of it? Well, c’mon, didn’t you see it? These group is usually offended by our looks of polite bafflement.
Not that any of these apply to the fine people in this forum. 
I get that at LEAST once a week. And usually they are insisting that I MUST have seen the show when, in fact, the TV reception in my apartment is utter crap, and I don’t have cable. This fuses their brain. And even if I had TV, I would’ve been working.
Oh, and sorry for slow responses. The SDMB and my ISP tend to not AGREE.
Heh. If you guys are doing 50% margin on remainders, you’re actually being pretty generous -when I worked for a fairly large store in a large chain of bookstores (in the Atlanta area, no less), our margin was usually in the neighborhood of 80%.
Do you have Ethel the Ardvaark Goes Quantity Surveying?
Ok, now that that’s out of the way, as a book lover, I’d always imagined working in a book store to be sort of a dream job. Then again, as a classic rock fan, I’d also imagined working at a classic rock radio station to be a dream job too, only to have my heart crushed when I did that internship at WZLX.
Is bibliophilia a plus in this job, or does it actually get in the way sometimes?
Do you have to scrap many books because people mangle them on the shelves? In B&N, I know that if there’s only one copy of a given book left, it’s certain to be dog-eared, have bent pages, etc. and I wonder whether those ever get chucked.
I’m responsible for doing the returns at the small independent bookstore I work at. (Oh, and kyla, a 40% discount is better than a 46% discount, it means you only paid 40% of the cover price for the book rather than 46% of cover price). My bookstore works on practically no margin whatsoever. We all work on minimum wage (well all the new people at least…after you’ve been there a year I think your wage goes up to $5.75). We struggle to get by in competition with the B%N and Borders who get the crazy low discounts from the publishers because of their high quantity orders.
I don’t mind when people come in and read the books. I’d like for them to buy sure, but I’m not going to be like the French magazine ladies who yell at you for reading their magazines before you buy them. The books do get kind of worn. A lot of times the big publishers will take them back if it’s not too noticeable, otherwise we just put it in our used books section.
Bibliophilia is definitely a plus! When people come in asking about such and such a book, if I didn’t care about books at all or read them, then I wouldn’t be helpful at all. It also helps to listen to NPR…we get a lot of people coming in asking “there was a book on the Diane Reihm show this morning and I don’t know the title or author…” and then they gush about how wonderful we are and how we’re the only bookstore who would be able to tell them what it is (well, hopefully at least, given someone was listening). I also love taking people to the scifi section, because that’s where I can really say “you should read this and this and this and this one isn’t worth your time.”
There was one guy who called once who wanted this book about motorcycles and insisted it was called “The Health Book.” Well. My coworker looked for it diligently in the computer inventory, in Books in Print online, on the internet (google probably), Amazon even. Couldn’t find it. So she suggested some other motorcycle books and he got really irate that she couldn’t find this so-called motorcycle book called “the Health Book.”
And there’s there’re the people like the guy who came in last week. We have a fairly large alternative section (Sexuality, gay/lesbian) and he was looking for s&m books. I pointed him towards psych and sexuality. About three or two hours later I go back to tell him we’re closing and he’s all adjusting his pants and looking at me like he’s going to jump me or something. Ugh. A bookstore’s not the place for that, that’s when you buy the books and get hot at home.
But other than the few and far between weird customers, I love my job!
Perhaps not a couth question, but how much money do people working in bookstores actually make? I’ve always thought it would be the best job–and then had to wonder.
Also, no matter how big the chain is, why can I never find the books I want on the shelves? GRRRR.
I make $5.40 an hour, but then, I’m working in an independent bookstore which has no margins and barely scrapes by. I like the atmosphere so much better, but it doesn’t pay as much. I do get full medical and dental though (and I don’t pay to cover like at some other bookstores). I think B&N would make at least a couple dollars over that, just because they have more cash flow…can anyone confirm that for me? It is the best job…as long as you don’t have too many financial responsibilities.
As to not ever having the books you want…do you know how many books there are in print??? If it’s a bestseller, sure it should be in stock, or a classic. But otherwise, in a bookstore with limited space (even the humongous chain stores have limited room when it comes to stocking titles), there’s no way they can have all the books. It kinda bugs me when people get all pissy about us not having a particular title in stock. I mean, what do they think we are? Magicians? You can order pretty much any book that’s still in print, and sometimes ones out of print (but please think enough in advance so you’re not going nuts when it takes us four or five days and you needed it tomorrow).
Relax, I wasn’t being Pissy. It was just an aside. I’m sorry. I was merely bemoaning the fact that my tastes are so obscure, I can never find what I want–or what I don’t know what I want until I see it. It’s my own fault really, when your tastes revolve around French Feminism and post modern women authors you should expecty to be relegated to the margins.
Why do Borders and Barnes & Noble always turn the music up so damn loud? It’s REALLY distracting, especially when it’s Billie Holliday or someone else who seems incapable of singing without screaming!
(sub-peeve: singers who refuse to sing the damn song the way it’s written)
I’m gonna take all these at once…
Working in a bookstore as someone who loves books has its ups and downs. On the upside, we get fairly liberal borrowing privledges and decent discounts–though Amazon beats our staff discount most days, honestly. It’s a lot of on your feet work, for one, and for another, everything becomes YOUR responsibility. If there’s books all over the floor, YOU have to put it up. If the section is out of order, YOU have to fix it. And if someone is screaming at you cause the latest Oprah book is out of stock, you have to be nice to them.
Our managers, generally speaking, haven’t been the best and brightest. Accepted rules and customs may vary by day and by who’s around and who’s in a bad mood. It’s like any other low-paying management job, I assume.
Loving books can get in the way too. We tend to get people who spend so much time looking at the books that they don’t actually do their jobs. It’s a plus, but it can get in the way.
Let’s see. We get the perverts too. I always find porn in the men’s bathroom (the ladies don’t seem to do this). I always find porn mags shoved in obscure corners. Or in big art books. Or I get the VERY nasty people buying the nudism and porn magazines and get the willies for the whole day.
The music varies in volume depending on our tolerance and how much atmosphere the manager decides we should have that day. If it makes you feel better, we hate it too. I’ve heard Mack The Knife so many times, I wanna die.
Pay-wise, I make $7.50 an hour ($7 is considered minimum wage in Atlanta) after a little over a year, with pretty decent health and dental benefits.
And Sival, do you have an opening? I hate being in a chain coz of all the politics the managers seem to love.
Sorry CMC, I wasn’t trying to be pissy I totally understand when people would rather that the book they’re looking for is in the store, I think I just got carried away! I really don’t mind looking stuff up and dealing with people (most of the time they don’t get upset about it, just a few people here and there).
Oh, and btw, the stuff I said about discounts above is totally incorrect :smack: Apparently when I took over the returns position, the person who was training me either had it totally backwards or I heard it wrong. The way Kyla said it was correct…
elshatan…yes we have two openings! But we’re in St Louis… we’re losing two very good people at the end of the month 
It’s great working for an independent, but it’s hard. We’re the only one left in Missouri (of general books not just used or special interest). The chains have run the rest out and we’re running on really low margins. Thankfully we have good managers…it’s a lot like an extended family, everyone tries to help out everyone else, we go out to movie nights and stuff. Planning a club night sometime soon.
If you’d like to move here, great!!! We need people!
And yes sometimes we play the music too loud. Generally during the weekdays it’s fairly soft, but at night and on weekends sometimes it’ll get turned up louder. Problem is, all the speakers are on the walls and the desk is in the center, so those of us working are the one’s who can’t hear it as well and we’re the ones listening, so sometimes it gets a little loud at the edges. I will say I’m getting fairly sick of this world/jazz beat cd that someone puts in every day.
Having to listen to the same thing every day, even if it’s your favorite song, will drive you to madness after a while. (I don’t know how anyone can listen to commercial radio nowadays.)