I applied at a chain bookstore when I was 20 for a seasonal temp position, on a drunken whim. I knew Iâd never get it. I was a high school drop-out with nothing but food service, assembly line and âfreelance cable access camera personâ on my application. It was the original location of the chain, the ur-store that all the others across the world were based on. It was staffed by original employees of the indie store it had been, unreconstructed pro-labor anti-corporate problem-causers. They still had a âbook testâ then, which was about two dozen titles and you had to write in the authors name, or as close as you could recall. (This was later made illegal.)
I donât know how, but I managed to score the fourth of four positions. My family were all very excited, maybe there was a chance I wasnât a fuckup after all (they were wrong.) I attended a week of training in the nicest pants and shirt I had. It was a wonderland. The pay was better than any restaurant gig Iâd ever had, I didnât have fish juice or backwashed coffee in my socks when I got home, and they all had a good laugh at the end of my first shift when I asked about brooms and emptying the garbage. (That was just part of every job, right?)
And all day, every day, it was books. Books on subjects Iâd never heard of. Books by amazing people I hadnât even known existed. I was assigned a section to maintain, one that nobody else wanted (religion & spirituality) and I devoured it. I borrowed and spent time with all the big sellers, and then branched into the books those books had recommended. I talked to the people who came in to browse those shelves, and I learned what they shared. I took on a second section (humor & occult) and began cross-shelving. I shared smokebreaks with choreographers and cartoonists and organizers and musicians and so many lost souls searching for their doctorates and people from my age to 80.
And while a lot of the customers were, you know, customers, sometimes people would come in with quests. This was pre-search-engine, pre-Wikipedia, and if you needed to know everything about the US Naval Academy or the childhood of president Taft or the migratory habits of the swallow, you went to the library or the bookstore. And while I certainly didnât know any of that stuff, I learned how to find out.
At the end of the season I was let go with thanks. There were three permanent positions and four seasonals... soooo... so I went back to the deli and asked for my barista gig back. A week later I came in to pick up my last check and the on-desk AM was frantic. âTheyâve been looking for you! Thereâs another position open and they want to hire you! But your phone doesnât seem to work?â (The phone didnât work because I didnât like paying my phone bill and constantly abused the voice mail system with five-minute long outgoing messages from various unconventional books.)
I stayed there for about three years, and it was my education. I jumped around from section to section, department to department, gobbling down books and music and film like a black hole, like Pantagruel, like the toxic forest. It shaped me in so many fundamental ways.
And I learned about corporations. I learned how easy it becomes to shrug and say âIâm just a cog! What control do I have?â I learned that if they can fuck you for another dollar, theyâll do it. I learned about contracts and distribution and logistics, I learned that itâs easier and cheaper to destroy books than store them, when you can just reprint. I learned about waste and shrink and volume discounts and how selling the hot new title at a deeper discount than anyone else could afford would guarantee shoppers would always come to you first. I learned that itâs âgood businessâ to lose money and wreck the industry for whatever you could grab. I learned about corporate toadies who would go into other book and music shops and ask to see merchandise that was behind a sale date, so they could contact the publisher and get the indie store fined, or blacklisted. (I never did this, and I bullied the managers who did.) I learned that a CEO could take all his compensation in stock, hire all his buddies and pay them in stock, drive up the price and then all quit on the same day and cash out, tanking the benefits of tens of thousands of employees, costing people their homes and their childrenâs educations.
I started shopping exclusively at co-ops and small businesses and owner-operated shops. I might have started to forget to charge customers for their purchases. I may have started leaving locked display cases for high-end items unlocked. It was a long time ago, itâs hard to be sure.
Eventually I quit. I loved being there, among the co-workers and the customers, the thousands of books and albums, but I just couldnât keep taking their checks while my friends at the indies were getting ground into the dust. I took a job assembling patio furniture and glazing windows, and later moved to the city where I had some other book and publishing and printing adventures, but Iâve always wished I could go back and visit that place, the way people go back to visit their old schools. It was a splendid moment that we wonât see again.
The takeaway is that while I treasure the time I spent there and the education it provided, I also got to see a preview of where capitalism leads and how glaringly unsustainable and cruel and stupid and short-sighted the whole goddamn endeavor is. A*mazon isnât some cruelty inflicted on us by aliens, itâs a totally predictable outcome of the âmust grow at all costs must dominate must wipe out every other competitorâ mentality.
So fuck the algorithm and fuck the voluntary surveillance state and fuck making it easier for them to categorize you and quantify you and profile you. Donât cooperate.
