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I was a retail employee during the shakeout that occurred because of tech innovation

I was a supervisor at Borders Books for several years before they got crushed by Amazon

btw - I'm not looking for sympathy - I know this happened to lots of people - we all just needed to suck it up and do something else

I started there in '97 and the store was booming.

I worked in one of their huge flagship stores - it was the 2nd largest and 2nd highest volume store in the country

I've told some people this and some said they didn't believe it:

in the late 90s the store I worked in was doing about $2 million a month

at corporate headquarters they called our store The Beast because of how it turned over inventory

trucks dropped off thousands of pounds of books at our location almost every single day

before Borders came the large city I lived in only had small bookstores - the better ones did around $40K per month

in 2003 Borders had 1,249 stores when including Waldenbooks which they owned

I came to Borders from being a supervisor in furniture stores. I was astonished that a bookstore was doing about 4 times the business that one of the furniture stores I worked in was doing

slowly and painfully Borders got beat down mainly by Amazon - but there were other reasons - namely mismanagement at the highest levels

the store revenue kept going down each month for a long time until they finally threw in the towel, declared bankruptcy and disappeared









a memory from Borders that I'll never forget:



a young mother was going up the escalator of our 2 level store with her toddler, a 3 year old boy behind her

the little boy fell backwards - I was about 4 stairs behind him - I caught him preventing what surely would have been a serious injury

the boy started crying but he wasn't hurt and I told his Mom he was okay

the young mother just grabbed the boy stony faced and marched out of the store

she didn't bother to thank me







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believe only half of what you see.....and nothing that you hear..................Edgar Allan Poe




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There was a Borders in London, I think. There are still Waterstone's and Daunt's about. Foyle's moved down the Charing Cross Road; the old Foyle's was quirky, and the place for obscure, pre-internet information, such as books on gambling. Bonus points for anyone who remembers Collet's.

I really enjoyed going to the Borders in Santa Monica in the 90s...

I used to like getting jacked up on Starbuck's coffee inside Barnes & Noble and then skimming thru a bunch of cool expensive books while lounging around on their plushy couches. Those were the days, baby.

been there many times also decades ago.

powells books in san francsico is the best bookstore ive ever been to.

I know that it is more convenient and you have a wider choice on the internet but there is something magical about bookshops.

Although public lending libraries >>>> bookshops.

powells books is in portland oregon. not san francisco. i typed too fast.

its huge. a whole city block.

Everybody should work retail at least once in their life -- preferably in high school when they are young. It's almost impossible to grasp the stupidity, the venality, and the general irrationality of the human race unless one has dealt with customers. The younger a person learns this lesson, the better.

Ferlinghetti's City Lights is the famous bookstore in SF, although nowhere close to the same size; and you are correct Powell's is an amazing place if you're into books...although they seem to in the news quite a bit due to sketchy labor practices.
i have bought (used) and sold back (more used) several Ray Zee and other 2+2 poker books at Powell's. apologies for not giving you your cut

and more consistent with the thread topic, i somehow have avoided ever needing to work retail. worked one restaurant job when in high school (making pizzas at a small local chain) but most of the early work was physical labor based: maintaining baseball fields, irrigation/landscaping/maintenance, moving furniture, etc. those types of jobs seemed to pay at least a few dollars more an hour when compared to retail & food service.

i read one of lawrance ferlingehttis books of poems when he was in grenwich village new york
when i was a kid. i thought it was disgusting. and not poetry at all. which it wasnt.

A Coney Island of the Mind is a classic.
you seem to be the very audience he was rebelling against

more like, something of a gone world, was the book.
he should rebel he was part of the monsanto family clan and his stuff was considered too sexual for the time.
he recently died of old age he was really old.

I have a lot of retail memories that I’d prefer to forget.

My favorite memory of working high school retail is working in a collectables shop. About two months after I started, the store was a little busy but I noticed this guy coming in and out of the store. I said something to him and he mentioned he was just checking for his ride so I didn't think much of it. A few minutes later I noticed him leave again, but this time having literally just picked up something pretty large (like...say the size of a toaster) and walked out.

I ran out after him and around the corner and he was sitting there with a pile of stuff along with my boss that had clearly started small and gotten progressively larger, who said "we need to talk about your attention to shoplifting". I thought I was toast, but he just said this is a lesson for you in paying attention to what people are doing and remembering that there are people there to steal. Never forgot it and after I finished high school and quit to go to university, a couple of times I got to be the testing thief for him for other new employees.

I worked at Target in HS. My lasting memories of that job are:

1. Playing hand held jacks or better video poker game while lounging/hiding in the stockroom for hours at a time, nursing hangovers, on Saturday mornings.

2. Having to hand write out rainchecks for products that were on sale and currently out of stock, so that when the product was once again available, the customer would be notified with the card I was filling out being mailed to them, allowing them to come in and purchase at the sale price. I never turned any of those in -- not maliciously, just super forgetful/lazy -- I would put them in my back pocket and forget to turn them in at the end of my shift, then I would go home, take off my khakis and find them, and throw them all away.

3. You clocked in/out with a 9 digit # on an electronic timekeeping system akin to a wallmounted ADT security system. You did this in front of the receptionist/any managers hanging out in the employees-only area. Each time you entered a #, it would beep, and then a confirmation beep would happen 2-3 seconds after you were done. Whenever I was to clock out for lunch, I would enter the first five #s, then hit delete four times, then pause, and hit delete a final time, to simulate the acceptance beep. Years of paid lunches (at $5/hr). Sticking it to the man!

Truth. Those adjectives are Tesco's bakery counter in Edmonton Green.

I'm not sure what good it did me, however.

Elliott Bay in Seattle is the best bookstore I've ever been to...just amazing in every way

When I was working in a cafe the boss would get us to replace the salad on a plate of pork pie when the salad got mouldy. “Nothing wrong with that slice of pie.”
Also used to get us to put cooked chicken in the freezer, then if it didn’t sell the next day he would get us to put it back in the freezer and reheat it for the day after.
Very popular with people with a food poisoning fetish that cafe.

that is so true

but I met my hottest girlfriend ever working retail

at Borders there were lots of jerks but there were also a few brilliant people who hung around because they loved books

the bookstores you guys referred to may have had better ambience but during the GoGo years the store I worked at stocked 160,000 different Titles




another memory not from retail but from my young working life

during a brief time during a recession I took a job driving a laundry truck

I always had the same truck every day - and every day I would go into the Manager and tell him the brakes were really bad on the truck

it was like I was talking to the wall - he and the Company did nothing

then one day I started out on my route and the truck had no brakes at all

they finally fixed it

we started on our routes very early in the a.m. - around 5:15 a.m.

the old beat up trucks needed constant maintenance

the mechanic slept in the warehouse - he often came out in his pajamas and slippers to try and fix my truck

one time in the middle of heavy traffic the muffler fell off in the street

the mechanic came out and fixed it - he attached it to the chassis with a wire coat hanger and told me I was good to go



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Same here. I worked in an independent bookstore for nearly 30 years(my parents opened a franchise store "Paperback Booksmith" in '73. The franchise went bankrupt in '79, making our store an independent by default). We had to close it in May of 2008. It was fun, and I know I was lucky to grow up working in such an environment.

I miss working in a bookstore, and also miss the conventions. They were always fun. 2-3 hour workshops on how to position books on a display table, author meet and greets(you name a main author from the 80's or 90's, and I probably met them).

There are still bookstores around, but I don't think I would be able to support my family managing one. Too bad, too...30 years of very specific knowledge gone to waste. Oh, well.

Evil secret: I now have an Amazon account. lol don't tell my parents!