Advance apologies to anyone who isn't able to get their hands on a copy of the latest installment in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, The Gathering Storm by Brandon Sanderson, from us in the next week and a half. This includes Black Friday shoppers. Yesterday I had to scrounge through customer holds looking for outdated orders that people never came to pick up, and pull all of our copies from the window, as I could only find one other copy in the entire store.
Has the book been selling well? Well yes, as it is one of our best sellers. Did we sell through all our copies? Well, probably not.
Shortly after the book was released, we had Brandon Sanderson in our store for a signing. We had a healthy stock on hand for the event, and even a week or so later we still had multiple signed copies in addition to the hundred which weren't signed. There are currently over one hundred twenty copies of the book showing in our inventory which I know full well we have sent back. The book itself never seemed in danger of losing popularity. Why then did we send back at least a dozen full boxes of the book to our warehouse?
Because we're geniuses. Best selling book? In high demand? Still selling well? We recently had a signing so there may be more interest than ordinary? Our stock is generous? Send back all of it!
My mind is unable to imagine the reasoning for doing such a thing, so I have the faith that such a move must have come from a far superior intellect than my own, and that my mind is too feeble to comprehend the advanced thought process which went in to this decision. I'm sure we have our reasons.
We DID get in our shipment for the week yesterday and it wasn't entirely unpacked while I was still there, so there may be a few copies in replenishment, but as of when I left, it looked as though we'd have a whole nine copies to carry us all the way through black Friday to our next shipment the following Tuesday.
I have good news though, our chain IS expanding locally. So maybe the other stores we're opening have received our boxes!
Monday, November 23, 2009
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Good Eats: The Early Years (Now I'm just severly confused edition.)
Now I'm just totally confused. After posting that last apology, I kept looking, with the full resource of the internet at my disposal. There are customer reviews for Alton Brown's new book on Amazon, posted at the end of August. Amazon says I can order the book and have it in a day.
Yet our registers at work won't even recognize the thing when we scan the bar code.
Nobody knows one way or the other whether or not it's been released, but Food Network is some pretty serious business.
I may have to rescind my apology to Alton Brown and Food Network altogether, and opt instead to choose to apologize to whoever may be coming in for the book and we are once again not able to sell it to you, even if we should be, even though we should not be.
I'm still going to err on the side of caution and withhold the book in the back of our store until the release date that I have seen out here in the land of the free, but it's mind-bending to think that we may be restraining it from sale for a month and a half longer than Amazon.
I'm just trying to do the right thing, and it's severely confusing.
Yet our registers at work won't even recognize the thing when we scan the bar code.
Nobody knows one way or the other whether or not it's been released, but Food Network is some pretty serious business.
I may have to rescind my apology to Alton Brown and Food Network altogether, and opt instead to choose to apologize to whoever may be coming in for the book and we are once again not able to sell it to you, even if we should be, even though we should not be.
I'm still going to err on the side of caution and withhold the book in the back of our store until the release date that I have seen out here in the land of the free, but it's mind-bending to think that we may be restraining it from sale for a month and a half longer than Amazon.
I'm just trying to do the right thing, and it's severely confusing.
Good Eats: The Early Years (Early edition)
A very special apology to one Alton Brown and his fans. I don't know if any of you have noticed it, but Mr.Brown has a new book slated for release on October 6th. If you've been through our stores at just the right moments, you may have seen that book on our sales floor. I myself even placed it out there at first, lacking any information telling us not to display it, but then later returned it to the back out of a gut feeling that something seemed a little off.
The next day I worked I found it back out on the sales floor. This is AFTER I left the stack of them in the back with a post-it note saying "OCTOBER ???", having found the singularly vaguest reference to it's release in our stores computer catalog system.
As a book store, we have certain books which we cannot sell before certain dates, and those dates are made known to us in a listing of strict on-sale dates. Yet when all of this was going on, just a few days ago, by the way, our latest current listings only show what is coming out through the rest of September. This month. Anything October 1st or later is (or at least at that point was) completely unknown to us by the resources made available by our company.
The book itsself wouldn't even ring up in our system to display a handy "do not sell" notification. The only thing which made any note of the books release was our catalog system, which only states the month of a books release, not the specific date, and certainly not whether it was a strict on-sale.
Lacking access to the outside internet, we once more had to rely on the limited information contained within our gigantic store full of books and publications, which of course came up short in this particular instance.
So, to Alton Brown, and Food Network, yes we have the books, and I am trying to keep them safe. (You could have sent them in a fancy box with a date printed on them, though!) To the fans, no we do not have the book, it will be available on the 6th.
The next day I worked I found it back out on the sales floor. This is AFTER I left the stack of them in the back with a post-it note saying "OCTOBER ???", having found the singularly vaguest reference to it's release in our stores computer catalog system.
As a book store, we have certain books which we cannot sell before certain dates, and those dates are made known to us in a listing of strict on-sale dates. Yet when all of this was going on, just a few days ago, by the way, our latest current listings only show what is coming out through the rest of September. This month. Anything October 1st or later is (or at least at that point was) completely unknown to us by the resources made available by our company.
The book itsself wouldn't even ring up in our system to display a handy "do not sell" notification. The only thing which made any note of the books release was our catalog system, which only states the month of a books release, not the specific date, and certainly not whether it was a strict on-sale.
Lacking access to the outside internet, we once more had to rely on the limited information contained within our gigantic store full of books and publications, which of course came up short in this particular instance.
So, to Alton Brown, and Food Network, yes we have the books, and I am trying to keep them safe. (You could have sent them in a fancy box with a date printed on them, though!) To the fans, no we do not have the book, it will be available on the 6th.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
What this is.
I work in a large book store. It is located somewhere. The name of our chain is Anonymous! What I will say is that we are location #134 in our chain. It's a store number, not a ranking. Although maybe it could be a ranking, too. You see, very often we let our customers down. Sometimes customers get unrightly upset at us, sometimes the customer has every right to be disappointed and they remain rational anyway. This blog will serve to document the more memorable occurrences of these let-downs, to let the customers know that, yes, we are aware that we are inconveniencing you.
Plain and simple, we are too huge of a store to be as disorganized as we are, and selling out of common books (Wuthering Heights or Lord of the Flies, for example) some times seems inexcusable. The customer is not the only one to think this. We know our flaws better than they do, most of the time, and this blog aims to be the first to admit the short-comings of our store.
Please enjoy! Yay!
Plain and simple, we are too huge of a store to be as disorganized as we are, and selling out of common books (Wuthering Heights or Lord of the Flies, for example) some times seems inexcusable. The customer is not the only one to think this. We know our flaws better than they do, most of the time, and this blog aims to be the first to admit the short-comings of our store.
Please enjoy! Yay!
The Goodkind of Customer
I'd like to apologize to those customers who came in to our store yesterday looking for Terry Goodkind's newest book, The Law of Nines. Yes, it should have been on sale yesterday, and it was everywhere else, and we lost your sales. We have come to our senses and placed it back on the floor for sale from here on out. It's even on an introductory discount! I only hope that one of the other chains you went to after we let you down treated your wallet as kindly as we should have and would have.
Today's apology is due on account of a number of factors. First off is our stores lack of access to the internet of the outside world, we can search only our own database and website. Yes, we could have cleared the whole thing up with a quick visit to Terry Goodkind's website, I know, but our store has an Orwellian sort of information control thing going on where the only reality we are to know is what we are provided by our corporate office. There is a lot of disconnection in who knows what in our store. For example, I, as a cashier, had no way of validating any ones claim about the book in question. I only knew the information that our customer service people could relay to me, which was based on what the managers had told them, which was apparently based on an erroneous entry in our companies listing of on-sale dates for new arrivals.
It all comes down to the chain of command. Even though our check-out computers were permitting us to sell the book (attempting to sell many higher-profile books before their street date typically brings up a message to tell us that a book is unsellable), even though the book rang up in the system at a discounted price, and worst of all, even though we had PROMOTIONAL material including buttons to wear DISPLAYING yesterdays date, we had to play it safe and trust that our company listed it's release date two weeks from now for a reason.
It seems kind of like the inversion of the idea of a strict on sale date. Strict on sale dates are placed to ensure competitiveness of the chains, with harsh penalties for stores that sell certain books before their street dates. Today we had something else going on, this was a head start day for all the other chains in our area. Yeah, we had the book, but we want you guys to get the sale, go on, this one's yours man. Competitors? Nah, we love ya!
Hopefully none of the people who came through today were TOO burned by our disallowing them to buy something which they expected to be available today (and with good reason). But they are the Sci-Fi readers, who I typically put faith in to be the more understanding bunch. Other people may pout when the latest book-they'd-never-heard-of-until-it-turned-movie sells out and place an order for said book only to never come by to pick it up when it arrives, but shoppers of the Sci-Fi aisle are more committed than that. When there's a mix-up, they raise an eyebrow, scratch their chin and ask, "are you sure?" but they don't make a scene, they know things will get cleared up eventually, even if it's after they've taken their business elsewhere. And next time around? They'll probably give us a chance to redeem ourselves. Insert Goodkind related pun right here.
Today's apology is due on account of a number of factors. First off is our stores lack of access to the internet of the outside world, we can search only our own database and website. Yes, we could have cleared the whole thing up with a quick visit to Terry Goodkind's website, I know, but our store has an Orwellian sort of information control thing going on where the only reality we are to know is what we are provided by our corporate office. There is a lot of disconnection in who knows what in our store. For example, I, as a cashier, had no way of validating any ones claim about the book in question. I only knew the information that our customer service people could relay to me, which was based on what the managers had told them, which was apparently based on an erroneous entry in our companies listing of on-sale dates for new arrivals.
It all comes down to the chain of command. Even though our check-out computers were permitting us to sell the book (attempting to sell many higher-profile books before their street date typically brings up a message to tell us that a book is unsellable), even though the book rang up in the system at a discounted price, and worst of all, even though we had PROMOTIONAL material including buttons to wear DISPLAYING yesterdays date, we had to play it safe and trust that our company listed it's release date two weeks from now for a reason.
It seems kind of like the inversion of the idea of a strict on sale date. Strict on sale dates are placed to ensure competitiveness of the chains, with harsh penalties for stores that sell certain books before their street dates. Today we had something else going on, this was a head start day for all the other chains in our area. Yeah, we had the book, but we want you guys to get the sale, go on, this one's yours man. Competitors? Nah, we love ya!
Hopefully none of the people who came through today were TOO burned by our disallowing them to buy something which they expected to be available today (and with good reason). But they are the Sci-Fi readers, who I typically put faith in to be the more understanding bunch. Other people may pout when the latest book-they'd-never-heard-of-until-it-turned-movie sells out and place an order for said book only to never come by to pick it up when it arrives, but shoppers of the Sci-Fi aisle are more committed than that. When there's a mix-up, they raise an eyebrow, scratch their chin and ask, "are you sure?" but they don't make a scene, they know things will get cleared up eventually, even if it's after they've taken their business elsewhere. And next time around? They'll probably give us a chance to redeem ourselves. Insert Goodkind related pun right here.
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