Well, I’m back.
As of last week, I’m a bookseller again, at the bookstore/gift shop within a mammoth hospital complex a couple of miles from home.
The term “bookseller,” though it remains my official title, fits a bit more loosely than before. Books are a much smaller fraction of our business than in my previous stores. We [...]
I haven’t posted much here since the liquidation started. The process has been grueling, with the added overhead of hunting for the next job tacked on.
I have had some good stuff happen, though, mostly connected to publicity for 19th Nervous Breakdown: Making Human Connections in the Landscape of Commerce. The most fun was my appearance [...]
I submitted my first job application in a long time today. It was for another bookstore that had put out word that they were looking to hire booksellers from my soon-to-be-defunct chain.
Ten thousand booksellers will soon be out of work. Ten. Thousand. (Yes, more than eleven thousand will lose their jobs, but some are in [...]
I’m surprised that, looking back on the day, nothing surprising seems to have happened. Things just continued on from yesterday, with slightly slower torrents of customers, slightly more entropy on the shelves, and slightly fewer really maddening phone calls.
I’m having some trouble handing are the customers to whom I sold the $20 rewards cards in [...]
When I was a kid, one of my favorite books was Dan Greenburg’s How to be a Jewish mother, a very lovely training manual. Decades later, all I can remember (or possibly misremember) of it are the Jewish mother’s two rules of shopping:
Never buy anything that is not on sale.
Never fail to buy anything that [...]
On Wednesday, we expected business to be even crazier than Monday. To our surprise, it wasn’t. The instant vultures, having hit on Monday only to discover no news, stayed away. We saw more of our usual customers, who appeared with gentler questions, condolences, and, of course, tons of gift cards to use before they would [...]
For much of the afternoon, a young girl wandered around the store strumming and plucking at something between a ukelele and a mandolin. She had just bought it and had no experience playing it, but since the instrument had only four strings and a pleasant timbre, what she played as she [...]
This is it. We’re liquidating. We were to have an auction on Tuesday, but no one other than the liquidators submitted bids. So we’re skipping the auction and submitting the fait accompli to the judge on Thursday.
Liquidation sales will start at some stores as soon as this Friday. We don’t yet know for sure when ours will. The stores will all be closed by the end of September. Again, I don’t know when ours will.
There’s word of the first two events (San Francisco and Cleveland) on the official 19th Nervous Breakdown web site.
Be there, or be … not there? (Suddenly I like Yoda sound.)
The ad-hoc pledge drive went pretty well. I raised about $300, enough that I was able to get a carton of the books shipped out to San Francisco for the book event and, with some added funds from The Book of Voices, get another carton shipped to me to get to the right people. It [...]
There's more at josephzitt.com.
From the author of 19th Nervous Breakdown: Making Human Connections in the Landscape of Commerce
"Customers have told me that I approach bookselling like a ministry. Sometimes I find people exactly what they want; I hope that sometimes I find what they need. And helping the store make a profit is probably a good thing, too. But what I look for is the human contact, the communication, the chance to help people leave the store happier than they came in."