Sunday, December 21, 2008

Moving Books from One Place to Another Place

I'm moving books in the store again. The Novels section is too packed and I have already culled out a lot of non-sellers and more culling is not really the answer now. So, I got to looking around and thinking. Generally, moving books is not a simple thing as books elsewhere must be moved to make the necessary changes to move the books first planned to be moved. Hmmm, the children's books could be consolidated in a more efficient manner to open up a shelf. Then what could go on that shelf that would help the novels. How about...nah...what about this other.... nope... what if... yeah, that works.
Rearrange some of the children's books and open up that shelf as the first step, then move the foreign language books over to that shelf as well as the magic books, which opens up three shelves on the red-cloth table. Ah-ha, looking good now. Then move the trade paperbacks out of the novels onto the newly opened shelves under the red cloth section (which has mostly memoirs). And a brief pause here to tout the trade paperbacks. There are some excellent books published in this format. Many of these titles never are published as the mass market sized books. Yes, their new price is expensive, but they are only $5 in the store and you can use your trade-in credt on them to save another $2.50. If you were to take a real look at these books, you would find something worth reading, really.
Now with the trade paperbacks moved, comes the shelf shifting to make more space on each shelf. Shelf shifting is an art and takes some time to do. Meanwhile, in the back room, the Louis L'Amour duplicates need to be stored differently then they are. And the L'Amour books on the shelf need restocking. Thinking, pondering, then the action--redo the dups while restocking the shelf and open up space for novel duplicates that are on the floor under the novels shelves, then move some novels down to the floor. The ones on the floor will be one that rarely are browsed but sometimes asked for; they need to be kept in the store, but not taking up prime shelf space. They will get moved down to where there were duplicates which are now in the back room where the A'mour dups were.
It got done on Saturday, taking some longer then planned since the L'Amour on the shelf were in awful order. Looks like customers picked them up, read the back cover and then put them back randomly (yeah, blame the mess on the customers!). But it did get done--L'Amour restocked and the dups different and open space to move novel dups to.
Tuesday--back to the shelf shifting of the novels.
Just another day in the book store.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

There is an excellent children’s book called Other People’s Shoes. It does a great job of teaching kids the importance of kindness inside of a very captivating story. You should check it out! Here is a link: www.eloquentbooks.com/otherpeoplesshoes.html