Confessions of a Corporate Bookseller

by Greg Turner, Free Press Contributor

ou've probably heard a lot of bad things about big chain bookstores. Believe it or not, these corporations may be even worse than many people think. I found this out firsthand. I was a corporate bookseller.

I was lucky with my first chain store. I worked for a small Borders in Madison, Wisconsin with a rather headstrong manager who ran things like an independent. When the store had opened it was the only significant alternative to a big college bookstore people didn't like. Taking advantage of this, our manager's store became so profitable they let him do as he pleased. (They even forgave such little indiscretions as dating many of his female subordinates.)

This was the period of time though in which the company transitioned from a cool "independent" feeling group of stores to the publicly held mega-chain it is today. This was also the time of increasing competition between the chain stores. Madison, one of the largest book markets in the country, got its own Barnes & Noble. Sitting in the back parking lot of a mall and encompassing 60,000 square feet, this was the second largest Barnes & Noble in the chain and one of the largest bookstores in the country.

The inevitable pressure of shareholder hunger for ever higher profits that comes with "public" ownership and the competition with Barnes & Noble began to be felt at our Borders. First it took the form of staff cuts, the easiest way to increase profits being to reduce payroll, in this case without regard to the workload. Then later came the draconian "shrink initiative."

Borders had formerly been an open and trusting company, nice to work for because they treated employees like adults who were a valuable resource. Now though, they reasoned that employee theft was too big a threat to their profit margin. They dictated that our bags be searched every time we left the store. Any book, even an out of print library book had to be stickered when you came to work, in order to prove it wasn't company property. The back receiving door that we'd opened onto our quiet semi-residential neighborhood on sunny days was now locked and bolted. Whenever it was opened a manager had to stand guard against potential theft.

Some of the things, like better cash handling procedures, sort of made sense. The company tried to make us see their way on the other things by barraging us with outlandish tales of employee theft. It was necessary, you understand, or so they said.

This profit-driven culture of mistrust created a gradually more oppressive work environment. The employees came back with the now well known unionization drive best documented in the Michael Moore film The Big One. Borders' attempt to stop this became just one more thing that made working there unpleasant.

Thankfully, about the time that was taking place I moved to Seattle. After inquiring at various independents and having no luck, I went back to the big chains. This time it was Barnes & Noble.

At first this seemed like a vast improvement. They paid better and they didn't have such unfriendly policies as bag searches. The management of the University Village store, where I ended up, was quite a step up in their calm efficiency.

Gradually though, I came to see that this company was just as non-worker oriented as Borders was. Signs kept cropping up. One was the chronic under staffing of the store. Another was the blind indifference to my wage or performance. Due to my hire date I actually had to wait nearly a year and a half for my first review. Our store was a nice place to work though, so I tried to rationalize these things away.

Things changed. The high turnover at some point claimed a couple of my favorite managers and I moved to a different position. I now did the merchandising for the store. For all the fun of being able to observe local preferences and choose which books should get displayed, there was a rather disturbing undercurrent: publishers, it seemed, paid for the prime space in the store. Every month there was a thick white binder that dictated which titles had to be displayed and where. This prostitution of book store space is one of the most questionable things I found at the big chains, and something I had increasing ethical questions about.

As an example, at some point John Gray's publisher paid for a big top shelf display of Mars & Venus related titles. To make room for this in the section, all the other titles had to be turned spine-out and pushed together. The effect is that when you went to that area of the store you were forced to look at John Gray's books and probably wouldn't notice other books. When this is coupled with B&N's discounting, you end up racking up bestseller sales at the expense of other lesser known authors.

So much of B&N's merchandising space is paid for and there is such an emphasis on best-selling authors, I used to comfort myself by thinking that we still had the integrity to run such programs as the "Discover New Writers." Then one day a publisher's representative was in and asked why his company's book wasn't where it was supposed to be in that display.

Maybe I'm just a naive idealist. After all, this is the wave of the global capitalist future. Still, if all the space in a bookstore ends up essentially as advertising space, then what chance is there for those small non-corporate authors? John Grisham and James Redfield sold books out of the trunk of their cars at the beginning of their careers. What chance would someone like this, or even someone more worthy, have now?

So I finally bolted the big chains for an independent after four years. The final push came when B&N downsized its management staff by eliminating its supervisory positions. I'm in my thirties, I need at least the illusion that I could advance at some point. This was (and is) a dead end.

I definitely feel, having spent all this time in these companies, that they are destroying the quality of literature with their selling of space. They emphasize moving units, regardless of quality. They ignore the book as an art form, something that can move a person, resonate, maybe even change their.

The big stores are also playing with their employees lives. At both chains, I worked with wonderful people who cared about books. Unfortunately the corporations seem increasingly to view them as expendable pawns in reckless pursuit of shareholder profit.

Of course this is only the tip of the iceberg. There are the chains' questionable discount agreements with publishers, return policies that destroy small presses, Barnes &Noble's monopolistic acquisition of Ingram, the primary book distributor, and Borders hostility to worker organization. What can I say really? Shop at the independents. Just do it.