Things book stores are not:

-Public toilets

-Music stores

-DVD stores

-Stationary shops

-Free day care centres or, relatedly, indoor playgrounds to take your children to when it's raining and you want them to burn off some energy

-Rad indoor obstacle courses where you can try out your new hoverboard

-Free conference centres where you can host your business meeting

-Free therapy clinics

-Creches for people who are really, really high on hallucinatory drugs

-Convenience stores

-Post offices

-Weed dispensaries

-General information booths

-General complaint desks

-Public clubs where nerds who are keen to do your homework for you congregate

-Tea or coffee shops

-Emergency rooms for providing emergency health care

-Dumps where you can abandon any unwanted rubbish that happens to be made of paper, including old school notebooks

-Bars or other rendezvous points for lonely people who want to have lengthy conversations with hostage strangers

-Copy centres where you can copy or fax things. Libraries often have copy machines; you are probably thinking of a library.

-Actual libraries.  We sell books, not lend them.

-Places where you can go and read books for free while we charge your phone for you.  Again, not a library.

Naturally, every one of the examples on this list are things for which we have been mistaken.

Constantly heard:

"I don't understand.  How does this work?  This is too complicated."

They're talking about this:

It's a roll of wrapping paper on a stand.  It has a metal bar that functions as a blade to tear the paper; all you have to do is lift the paper up.  This particular piece of technology has probably existed for thousands of years.

Helpful Information

As bookstore employees we often have to utilize our skills in deciphering jumbled, nonsensical descriptions  in order to obtain enough information to find a certain title.

Example:

Customer On Phone:    " I was told to call your store, and that you might have what I'm looking for."

Me: " Okay, what title are you searching for?"

Customer On Phone:  " I don't remember. Something about music in the ears, and the author is dead."

Translation: Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks

It all worked out for me, so you should do it my way.

When working retail, it's important to indulge in small pleasures to keep your motivation up.

We received a couple of used copies of this book--How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life, by the author of one of the world's most humourless and perplexingly long-running comic strips. 

It's a recent book and we have two copies, so I put them on an endcap--but not without printing this image out a couple times and tucking one snugly into each: