InsaneJournal

Everything I learned about what not to do in a business . . .
Okay, so I'm starting to really hate Borders Group.

Lately they've been forcing the sellers to push these two books, The Middle Place and Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet. We absolutely have to sell these books, or we all get bitched at, written up, or possibly terminated. Grouchy anonymice at Lj's iworkatborders aren't having success either--and yet Borders Group doesn't care. We've still gotta sell it.

Because nothing sells books like a frantic salesperson fearing for their job, right? Other than a used car salesman, of course.

The fact that this particular book push runs until the middle of June doesn't help things in the least bit. We get regulars in our store. Think we can push the the same book to the same people for a few months? Without driving them away? Think again.

But who really wants these books, anyway? The Middle Place is about a woman who finds out she has cancer, then finds out her dad has cancer. It's like The Last Lecture, only with a bratty narrator that I have all kinds of problems relating to. She's at the doctor's, talking about cancer treatments. The doctor tells her she has to use this hormone therapy, and one of the side effects is that she won't be able to have kids for five years. The woman starts freaking out--she wants kids, she'll be 40-something by the time she's done with it, she can't wait that long.

The doctor points out that she already has two kids.

She doesn't care. She wants more. Now.

And at this point I'm waving the book around and going, "What the fuck, woman! You've got cancer! You could die! Get some fucking priorities! Fucking adopt!"

But yeah, I'm supposed to be able to sell this to people with some modicum of effectiveness. We've tried, of course. Two coworkers have had two separate customers start crying because someone in their families has or has died of cancer. Most customers pretty much put their hands up and rapidly back off. "Cancer, huh? Thanks but no thanks." I understand--I just wish the company's higher-ups did as well.


And for the Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet--It's like if Mitch Albom wrote Snow Falling on Cedars. I liked Snow Falling on Cedars. But when you rework that with a stagnant and contradictory narrative composed of pedestrian 4th grade reading level prose--you get a decent if stereotypical feel for the one character, but there is no joy to the writing at all--then slap a cheap bendy cardboard-feeling cover on it and try to charge more than $20 a pop? Especially in this economy, and in a market where genre fiction sales are showing an increase? Let's think about how well this works.


And yet the company continues to flood their shelves with things that don't go anywhere. Dozens of large paperback horror novels from small presses with drunken editors. Dozens more Anne Brasheres, which take up a whole shelf and don't go anywhere. Stacks of manga versions of novels. Boodith. Cassie Clare does not move in our store. Her second book only sells in conjunction with the first; people who buy the first book by itself don't come back for the second. The copies of her second book that we have? They're ones we got when it came out, a year ago. I have absolutely no idea why we haven't sent them back yet.

And yet Borders' buyers, who won't give us Joe Hill, who won't keep us stocked with steady sellers like Kelley Armstrong or Jim Butcher, who won't send us any manga series but Naruto and won't fill in starter volumes and gaps in the series we already have (The fuck you mean, we can't get the first volume of Bleach?), who think it's fine to only stock unrelated segments of any number of Nora Roberts's series and no mass markets of anything Gregory Maguire, who only sent us three of Ariana Franklin's new work though we've sold ten of her first in the past two weeks, and who somehow feel no need to send us Rothfuss's Name of the Wind--even though we sell out of that faster than anything in SF/F besides Charlaine Harris--are sending us two dozen of CC's fucking third book.

You know how many of her books we've sold since December? One.

Either someone's a fucking moron or someone's trying to force this one into bestseller status. Or both.

The one similarly snarky coworker postulates that the buyers are grabbing up whatever they can get for cheap and trying to create a market rather than deal with things from the bigger publishers--whom we as a company may or may not have book credit problems with. Guiding a market is possible. Creating your own niche product/service in a market is a feasible aim. But even I know that if you nuke your employees' morale as you sink a shitton of money and hours into trying to forcibly make a market without properly thinking things through or researching your demographic first, then you've just fucked yourself.

The first step to making money? Having a product people want to buy. What we're seeing here is the equivalent of trying to force-feed plain oatmeal to a crowd in search of fruit-stuffed and whipped-cream-topped Belgian waffles. You can hope to hell they're hungry enough to eat the oatmeal, but don't expect them to not head straight out your door and to the IHOP down the street.


Business issues aside, I'm still stuck in the morass of this disaster. I can't suggest the books I know are good fun reads (since we don't have them) and can't effectively suggest the things the company is demanding I sell (because they annoy the piss out of me or because I find the original version superior). Add in the lack of raises for everyone this year, the slashed hours, and the perpetual browbeating about everything we absolutely have to be selling (beans, bunnies, these particular books) and doing (Pull stuff to send back! Tag all these things with red stickers! Tag all these other things this way! Move this! Move that! Clean this! Rearrange that!) with the constant nasty emails from Corporate (YOU'RE JUST NOT TRYING TO SELL THIS ITEM HARD ENOUGH!) and the overhanging threat to our jobs, and . . .

Yeah. It's like watching something drown, and it's towards the end, and the flailing is going into its final panicked stages and you know that if you reach in to attempt salvation, the thing's just gonna sink its teeth into your arm and drag you down with it.

Only a few months left before we find out if the company'll go on for another year. I'm not optimistic.