Reading People
Four groups of customers I see every shift, and the only one I never want to meet
There’s this scene in Clerks. For folks who don’t know it, Clerks is a cult classic film about a day in the life of a couple of, well, clerks—Dante, who works at a convenience store, and Randal, who works at the video store next door. “Works” is a pretty generous interpretation of what Randal does, actually—maybe it’s more accurate to say he has a job at a video store. Anyway. The movie came out thirty years ago, and it’s been at least twenty-five years since I last watched it, but this one scene1 has lived rent-free in my head for all of that time.
It often pops into my head when I’m at work.
Randal is keeping Dante company behind the checkout counter, reading magazines and riling up the customers, much to Dante’s exasperation. He can’t understand why Randal is so easily annoyed by everyone who walks in the door, and in return, Randal refuses to believe that Dante isn’t annoyed by any of them. Randal presses him on the subject until Dante admits that “it’s not the customers in particular but maybe just a group of customers”—a group he calls “milk maids,” for their habit of kneeling in front of the fridge and pulling out “every gallon of milk, looking for that later date, as if somewhere beyond all the other gallons is a container of milk that won't go bad for at least a decade.”
I think about this scene every time I see customers pulling books off the shelf by the handful, and piling them on top of each other on the floor, in teetering, no longer alphabetical piles. They do this because most of our shelves are two rows deep, and though we try to reserve the back row for additional copies of books displayed in the front row, it’s not always possible. Sometimes that first row is obscuring a bunch of different titles by the same author, and many of our shoppers know this. It’s always a little endearing to watch someone discover that second row for the first time though. Their eyes light up, like they’ve unearthed buried treasure. Which they have.
Sometimes these shoppers stuff the displaced books back on the shelf as best they can afterward but more often, they wander off to another section, oblivious to the extra work they’ve created for yours truly. In my head, I call these shoppers milk maids, even though we aren’t in the dairy business.
When a milk maid hits a shelf I’ve recently organized, it’s a little irritating. But only a little. Restoring order to the shelves is a very satisfying part of my job. I like to categorize, to spot patterns and themes, to slot individual titles into the larger scheme of our shelves. I enjoy this kind of thinking so much, I guess, that I also find myself applying it to the readers who wander into our store.
Another group of customers, I call the shelf talkers. These are shoppers who come in, sincerely intending to buy books, but also, in the mood to talk to whoever will listen. And if I’m in the store, that person is me.
One time, back in my very first month on the job, I had a customer lean over the checkout counter and describe, apropos of nothing really, the size and shape of the polyps she had recently had removed. “The doctor said they were really big and flat, like pancakes,” she said. “He said it like I made them that way on purpose, to make his job harder. I didn’t even know I was making the damn things!”
Every other week, there’s a retired gent who comes in looking to see if we have any new Clive Cusslers. He usually wants to talk about one of the following things: a) the prevalence of car insurance fraud, b) how to keep kitties off the kitchen counters, and/or c) DIY home repair. “My first house was a fixer-upper, but I didn’t know that when I bought it!” Of these subjects, this last is one I can relate to, deeply. We could probably swap stories for hours, but G. or another customer typically interrupts our chin-wag about ten minutes in.
The shelf talkers rarely get on my nerves. I’m not a big conversationalist myself, being both shy and an introvert, but as long as I can carry on with my work while I nod understandingly, and they aren’t rattling on about anything too offensive, I’m happy to listen.
One of my favourite groups are the ones I mentally call, unimaginatively, the list people. Classic list people come in bearing a scrap of paper, which they consult with a furrowed brow before looking around the store. I love being the one to say “looking for something specific?” and I adore being the first one to spot the book on our shelves. The other day a woman about my age came in asking if we had a copy of Animal Farm. I had to look in a couple sections, but when I finally produced it she clapped and then exclaimed, in a tone of relieved surprise, “it’s not even a long book!” Turns out it was for her high schooler, whose intense reluctance to engage with it led her to believe it was a real brick. She never would have found it without me.
The piece of paper is a dead giveaway, of course, but some list people come in empty-handed. It’s hard to explain, but there’s just something about their bearing, a kind of purposeful glint in the eye, that betrays the presence of a mental list. I amuse myself by trying to guess what they’re going to ask me for, before they ask. (I’m almost never right.) I love it when it’s a dead easy one (“I’m looking for this author…James Patterson?”) and I’m openly mournful when they want something we definitely don’t have (ACOTAR?).
If I have any plausible deniability at all, like they’re after some random book I’ve never heard of and probably don’t have, I typically say something like “well, if we did it would be in this section…” then I sheepishly back away and let them dig, knowing they likely won’t find it but hoping they’ll find something else.
By far the largest group, after the list people, are the browsers, which are pretty self-explanatory. As Dante says, of the gas station clientele, “they don’t bother me, and I don’t bother them.” It’s a silent pact we both know we’re entering into, just by the way we exchange greetings. If they quickly avert their eyes after that first hello, I know not to offer assistance; they’ll call me if they need me.
The only group that can really rile me up are the ones I call poachers. Poacher is my private shorthand for people who come in, often with a big amount of books to sell, who then use their store credit to get books that they’ll resell on Amazon.
G. says sometimes it’s obvious this is what they’re doing because they have their phones out, but in a more intent, dispassionate way than say, a list person or a browser. You get the creeping feeling that they’re handling the books looking for a barcode to scan, as opposed to reading the cover copy with interest. They look from a book to their phone and a kind of spidey sense kicks in. You’ll just know that they’re not, say, they’re asking a friend if they’ve read it, or something like that.
I haven’t seen one yet, but I feel confident that I’ll know when I do. You know when you see couples in the bookstore, how sometimes it’s clear that both parties are actively looking for books to read, but just as often, only one is doing that and the other one clearly just went along? I think it will be a bit like that.
There’s a kind of readerly quality that our shoppers have. It’s hard to describe but easy to recognize and also easy to detect its absence. It’s got nothing to do with a person’s physical appearance, but rather, with how they regard the books, with a kind of keen affection. Readers inhale the scent of paper and ink appreciatively, the way one inhales upon stepping into a rose garden or bakery. There’s a specific kind of yearning in their expression sometimes, that comes from wanting to take home more books than one can possibly afford or store. I know this look, because it is the one on my face, whenever I walk into a bookstore.
Dante never explains exactly why the milk maids annoy him so much. I don’t think it’s that they make work for him; surely no one is inconsiderate enough to leave twenty gallons of milk sitting out on the floor of a convenience store. And I can’t imagine he’d care very much if the milk maids made an untidy job of restocking—as I recall, he locks the front door during his shift and goes off to play shinny hockey on the rooftop.
If I had to guess, I think what bugs him so much is the petty, penny-pinching, self-serving nature of the milk maids’ quest. Or maybe what bugs him is the smugness of their belief that they are able to see something others cannot, that their cleverness and hard work is what allows them to beat the system—to be the one buying the freshest milk at no added expense, as opposed to the poor schmuck selling it, or the rube who just reaches in and takes the first jug that comes to hand. Maybe it’s a little of both, or neither.
I do know, however, what it is that bothers me about the customers I think of as poachers.
It’s not that I feel threatened by them as direct competitors. Most of our shoppers come for the vibe, as much as they do for the books, and I suspect that more than a few of them are philosophically opposed to getting books from Amazon, new or used. And it’s not that I see reselling secondhand books online as a shady pursuit. I get that it is a legitimate business, like ours—just a more impersonal, more modern, and probably more profitable version.
Poacher is probably the wrong word entirely because I don’t think what they are doing is theft per se, but more like a serious breach of professional courtesy. I mean. Can’t you get your stock someplace else? I mean from a place that isn’t a labour of love run by and for readers—perhaps a place that doesn’t entirely depend upon book sales for its survival?
I’m thinking of places that deal in a wide variety of secondhand merchandise, like thrift stores, or one-offs like garage sales or estate sales. Go on Facebook Marketplace. Or go to a library book sale, and risk getting the Hard Stare from a librarian. Something tells me that librarians, like me, would rather hand it over to a reader—to someone who values the book’s contents, as opposed to someone who only sees its resale value.
I think that’s what bugs me most about the whole thing, apart from the indignity of getting ripped off by a fellow bookseller. It’s the reminder that lots of folks don’t enter into our business for the love of books and reading. I know books are just commodities, like any other object we humans buy and sell or steal, but I guess I just don’t like thinking about books that way. If that makes me naive and sentimental, fundamentally unlikely to succeed in this business, well, so be it.
What about you, dear readers? Have you worked in retail long enough to spot certain recurring behaviour patterns in your customers? Do you chat up the clerks wherever you shop, or carry a paper TBR in your wallet or purse, just in case?
P.S. Here’s a link to it, but FYI before you click: there is some cussing in it.
I recognise so many of these customers from both my days volunteering at a local charity shop (thrift store) and when I worked in my friend's hardware store. Particulaly the ones who came in for a chat! I was always amazed at the obvious "Poachers" at the charity store, when it was run mainly by volunteers, and the majority of the sales price went to charity!
This was lovely! While reading, I was envisioning my local secondhand bookstore. This reminds me of Shaun Bythell’s books, particularly Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops. Have you read them?