Bookmarkism: The New Ideology

Last week TeleRead editor David Rothman and I were strolling together around Old Town of Alexandria. We spent most of the time shooting the literary breeze and suddenly found ourselves in front of a chain bookstore (where a giant display of  Glen Beck awaited us). We walked through the aisles (making the usual snide remarks) and I mentioned  Daniel Stolar’s hilarious article about his unsuccessful attempt to persuade his local bookstore to carry his book. I also regaled David with stories about working at a chain bookstore in summer of  1997.  I found that job after working as a Peace Corps volunteer in Albania and being evacuated as a result of civil unrest. What follows are generous excerpts from a 1997 essay I wrote about that summer of working at a bookstore chain. By the way, if you like reading “insider accounts” of working at bookstores, be sure to check out Rick Klaw’s great Geeks with Books columns at SFSite.com .

In this land of abundance, value is underappreciated, underreported, underrepresented and yes, even undermined. Abundance is ultimately overwhelmed by triviality. One of my unpleasant jobs at my summer bookstore job was scanning each and every new book on the shelf with a computerized inventory gun. If the gun made a chirping noise, I would need to remainder (i.e. destroy) the book because it didn’t sell fast enough or didn’t justify the shelf space needed to stock extra copies of “More Chicken Soup for Idiots” or autobiographies “written” by half-literate basketball players.

During the coup and massacre in Congo, the famine in North Korea, and the battles in Afghanistan, Americans were overwhelmed with the crises of Kelly Flinn, Clinton accuser Paula Jones and the “coming out” of lesbian Ellen DeGeneris on her TV show. On the day of crucial Albanian elections, the day that would determine if Albania would devolve into chaos or recover from its throwback into anarchy, the lead story on every news program in America and probably the world as well was (I kid you not!!) the biting off of a boxer’s ear in Las Vegas. The international media, which had given generous coverage to Albanian gangsters waving Kalashnikovs in the air, now provided around-the-clock analyses and reanalyses of this lost ear, followups and commentary, medical updates and on-the-scene reporting. Albanians may remember this day as a milestone for peace and democracy, but for the rest of the world, it was simply the Day of the Lost Ear.

In capitalism, prices are a relative and even subjective term. A 2 liter bottle of Coca Cola can be bought for 79, 99, 129, 159 or 189 cents, depending on where and when you buy it. A person seems to spend half his time chasing after sales advertisements or coupons or special discounts. The Consumer Reports ideology predominates: don’t get screwed and keep hunting for the best price. With one bookstore, you can get 10% off if you buy a little card. With another store, you can get 20% off only on Sunday if you have a coupon. With another store, you can get 50% if you’re lucky enough to find the book you want, and 75% off if you shop on a special sale day. American economists laugh at the communists’ futile attempt to set prices for consumer goods. But how much better are American merchandisers at setting prices? At a department store like Foley’s, everything is on sale, ranging from 10-75% off, but the “list price” was artificially high to begin with. Prices can easily be manipulated to make it appear that the consumer is getting a great deal. A coat that costs $100 is on the expensive side, but if the original price was $400, you somehow feel that you are beating the system. Ever since the day I saw the complete works of Shakespeare (discount price =$3) on the same bookstore shelf as “More Joys of Sex,” (discount price= $12), I realized the folly of hoping that modern society will place an  appropriate value on goods. This hit me again in the Ukraine where pirated versions of American software sold for a fraction of their “list prices.” I don’t condone software piracy, but does anybody in the world consider the $200 “list price” of Microsoft Word, the most popular word processing program, to be fair and reasonable? No pricing system is more artificial than that of the airlines, where a one way trip from Houston to New York cost $800 ,$700, $600 , $500, $400 or even $250, depending on which travel agent you call, and sometimes even what time of day you call. When I booked an airline reservation to Ukraine, the travel agents recommended that I book a “phantom” return trip in October, and plead ignorance of reservation restrictions when trying to redeem my return ticket home in the spring. Why did the agent  automatically assume I would lie for a better price?

Bookmarkism

People under communism in Eastern Europe and Russia had to “pay lip service” to the state ideology, while looking out for themselves as much as possible. They lived in a world where conformity in belief was expected, where people were afraid to speak their minds openly. Thank god America was different, I thought. Earlier this year I worked at a summer job in a mall bookstore chain. The job paid barely minimum wage (lower than workers at Mcdonald’s, I later learned), but it would keep me out of trouble until my Ukraine teaching job began later that year. My parents nodded their heads disapprovingly, with my mom warning me that a lot of retail managers of malls were tyrants. No matter. I could put up with anything for two or three months.

Many people in Albania had a stereotype about Americans: they worked too hard. It’s true. Our hourly productivity is the highest in the world. And the bookstore seemed determined to wrench as much work out of me as humanly possible. No idle time was permitted. I was to be helping customers, straightening or putting new things on the shelves. Fair enough. And if ever I happened to be caught at the checkout counter waiting for customers to check out, the manager would chew me out. Also fair. And I had to accost every customer with a “Can I help you find something?” and answer the phone every time with “Thank you for calling National Bookstore Chain where you can find “Into the Storm” for 15% off, this is Robert, how may I help you?” Everything seemed  excessive, especially the phone greeting. Probably it annoyed a few customers, but I could deal with that. But something about the whole thing seemed seriously wrong. You can’t impose friendly service on potential customers, especially if it seems robotic. And if the same clerk must ask the same question, “Can I help you find something?” for every
single customer, the robot in a person tends to come out.

A crisis loomed at the bookstore. According to the regional office, sales figures were down. Sales clerks were not selling enough of the discount cards offered by the chain. That was the big thing; that was their creed. It was their method of guaranteeing repeat customers. Here was the sales pitch I was required to give to every single customer:

Do you know about our “Preferred Reader” card?

Well, if you join, you get 10% off all your books. Plus you get one point for every dollar you spend, and if you get 100 points, you get a free (!) $5 gift certificate mailed to you. And on the first purchase you make with your preferred reader card, you get double the points. Would you like to join?

Here was the slight bit of deception—to join meant paying an annual fee of $10. For $10 you get a 10% discount. In other words, if you spend $100 at the bookstore, you’ll come out even. Hardly a bargain, especially since our nearby competitors offered everyday discounts without a discount card. Okay, have you figured out yet  I wasn’t too keen on the whole thing? The worst part was having to explain the convoluted rules of the program (No, magazine purchases are not included. No, you could not redeem the $5 for cash, etc.) As explained above, the program sounds easy to understand. But imagine that you are a customer waiting in line to buy a card or comic book and some fast-talking clerk is explaining something about “10 percent” “points for dollars” “double the points for the first purchase” and “$5 back.” The math was confusing, and most customers simply gave me a blank look at my explanation. Surely, the reader’s card was a good deal for some customers, especially if their first purchase was more than 30 or 40 dollars. But the details were so complicated that only an idiot would agree to it without understanding them fully. Then again there are many idiots in the world, and many of them would love to have “preferred idiot” cards, whether they needed one or not. But for every person that bought a card, 32 had to listen to the sales pitch and say, “Thanks, but no thanks.” From the standpoint of the company, that was okay, but for the customer and clerk, it was one more needless hassle.

I mentioned my reservations to an old college friend who used to work at the same bookstore chain as an assistant manager.  He cringed.  “No, you can’t knock the Preferred Reader program!” he told me. “That was the life and soul of the chain.” He went into all the reasons why the program was necessary, reasons I’m sure were justified by the market data. The store computers in every store tracked the number of discount cards every worker was selling. Apparently, the minimum quota was that 4% of all customers should buy discount cards, and I was selling them only to 2 or 3%. And besides, my average transaction was not particularly high–$16 compared to the $18 or $19 of the other workers. The national headquarters set regional goals, and the regions set district goals, and the districts set store goals, and the stores set goals for each worker. Albania was bad because it was a command economy; but what wasn’t this essentially the same thing?

The store manager had printouts of numbers about our weekly productivity and used them to evaluate our performances. How meaningful were these numbers? Did they take into account the different hours in which we worked? Were they statistically significant? Did some people figure out how to make their numbers look as good as possible? (I knew that old trick from working at Randall’s supermarket for seven years. By scanning each individual soup can, I could make my “scanning time” higher than anybody else’s and was later awarded the distinction of “superscanner” at my store).

According to these printouts, the bookstore was losing money. The earnings didn’t meet projections. And the data clearly showed that some people were not selling enough discount cards! (At this point in the employee meeting, the manager glared accusingly at us). All my coworkers listened in silence. By now we’d heard the same reproach a hundred times. Sell those discount cards!! We were used to it, but this time it really stung. We were the problem. Why could we not do better?

Several times I had tried to approach the manager about the discount card matter. After my college friend  stressed how important the discount card was to the company, I knew better than to challenge the concept itself to the manager. When I suggested that nearby competitors might have more to do with the inability to sell discount cards than our personal salesmanship, she dismissed the idea. . When I explained how difficult it was to explain the terms of the discount card, she said, “Well,Tom at Store #47 sells cards to 7% of customers, and he seems to have no problem.” (Was there another explanation here? Was #47 at a more affluent zone? Did it have less competition? These subtleties didn’t seem particularly important to her). At the employee meeting, my manager mentioned that without any prompting, her own father told her how much he loved the discount card. I don’t doubt this. But how many customers disliked the mandatory sales pitches? Of course, negative feedback from customers  never showed up on weekly computer reports.

At the employee meeting, the district manager stopped by and stressed once again the dire consequences of not selling the requisite number of discount cards. Our bookstore was the lowest performer in the city, and until the sale of discount cards reached 4%, they couldn’t begin to train us on how to sell “Reader’s Choice Visa cards.” You guessed it, the company wanted us to sell Visa credit cards to customers while we were busy selling them Reader’s Choice cards. And then she unveiled the new corporate strategy (accompanied by bargraph illustration—clearly she had spent a lot of time preparing this presentation). This strategy could be summarized in 3 words—“Sell more bookmarks!!” Somebody at corporate headquarters had figured out that if every worker sold only 3 more bookmarks every day, average transactions would rise, and this low-performing branch of the company could make a miraculous turnaround. And if we started greeting customers by mentioning the Reader’s Choice card right off the bat, we’d have time to throw in the “would you like a bookmark with that?” right before hitting the total button. (The pitch for the “Visa card” could wait until a few seconds later). We sold these bookmarks for $1.99, and undoubtedly bought them for a tenth of that. Bookmarks, cards, and “cute posters” were crowded around the register already, so each of us had to choose our “favorites” to mention to customers. This was no joking matter. Our jobs were on the line, and the Garfield, Dilbert and cute baby bookmarks would really become our salvation. As cynical as I was about all this, the strategy had its own logic which we weren’t in a position to oppose. And the rally cry, “Sell more bookmarks!!” was one we had to adopt unquestioningly or risk unemployment.

I had been under no illusion about the retail industry. It was hard, low-paying work. At least 50% of my customers were mothers buying the latest romance to feed their dreams for another week. But I expected my extensive knowledge of books to come in handy and even to benefit the company. Perhaps it did. I am not a salesman, but enthusiasm for books always came naturally to me. I don’t know the genre stuff, but I can find value in books that might easily be overlooked. A woman came wanting to buy something for h
er 15 year old niece who is half Indian and lives in Nebraska. I threw out to her the titles, “My Antonia” by Willa Cather and “Love Medicine” by Louise Erdrich, and sure enough, she bought them. But these sort of feats don’t occur very often, and besides this did nothing to raise my numbers on the weekly scorecard. And really in the retail industry, knowledge of books wasn’t really essential. The manager and the district manager, by their own admission, had no special interest in books. As management consultant Peter Drucker once wrote about new bookstore chains, “any salesperson who wants to read anything besides the price tag is hopelessly overqualified.”

Much as I hated to admit it, the bookstore was being run well, almost too well. People overseas admired the American way of doing business, and my bookstore used all the newest tricks. Just-in-time delivery, anti-theft security alarms, special orders, worker empowerment, sales contests, fancy in-store displays, carefully controlled inventory by computerized data guns, in-store events, book-drives and a smooth-talking district manager sincerely committed to motivating employees. And although I preferred other bookstores, this one appealed to its niche market of housewives almost perfectly. Perhaps the bookstore would go out of business. Amazon.com’s online booksellers threatened to take away the lion’s share of the market, and other competitors in the city threatened to erode our market share. Our bookstore would do everything to put off that day, even if in the process it had to browbeat its employees. All the time during my three months of employment, I was struck by how little the employee’s opinion mattered and how essential it was for employees to subscribe to the corporate belief structure. Albanians had Stalinism; I had Bookmarkism. Yes, I could leave any day if I wanted (and I eventually did, though not because of the bookstore), but practically speaking, people preferred the devil they knew to the devil they didn’t. Perhaps  more sophisticated jobs involved less of a personal investment in the company’s philosophy, though I doubt it. The more the job pays, the more responsibilities you are given, the more difficult it is to say no, the more you are expected to jump as high as the boss tells you. One day in Albania, after a grueling day of lessons, I looked out the university window and saw two shepherds yawning and relaxing on the ground next to their sheep (they had probably lain there all day). I had to laugh. My dedication to work was pure folly. After my lessons, I would go home and crash in exhaustion on my apartment bed. Ahh, what price civilization!

(This excerpt comes from a longer 1997   essay Sava’s Feet by Robert Nagle).

Note:  More photos of bookmarks can be found on the Flickr Bookmark Pool.