If a wine shop were a book store...

I work in a pretty cool little wine shop in a fairly touristy area. As of late, my daily interactions with customers have led me to wonder what life must be like in a cozy, happy, dusty little book store. I’ve decided that these are things that their employees hear on a daily basis:



You seem like a bright, young lover of literature, so come on over here so I can tell you all about how Cay-muss wrote this one when he went to France during the outbreak of the Black Death.

Oh, I can’t read. But the books are really pretty!

I know a guy with a book shelf. One time, he read War and Peace!

Yeah, I’m an author. I write some books back home in Indiana. Not too bad!

This is this all the Tom Clancy you have?

Which one of these Grishams is the sweetest?

I hate books. Can you recommend one I’d enjoy?

I don’t read poetry! That’s for girls! Bleh!

I appreciate the heartfelt suggestion based on our preceding conversation, but I’m gonna need you to look up what NYRB said about this one over here.

I enjoy a really heavy, hard-cover book with a lot of pages and NO dust jacket. I’m very serious about my books. So which one has the most nudity and explosions?

If my wine shop was a book store, it would look more like a comics & magazine section.

Dumbed-down, one-dimensional fluff, puff pieces, and abridged versions of the standards. hitsfan

Ah… yes! But then there are the people that come in and know quite a bit about books. They make up for most of the comic book readers.

grouphug

It’s like that with most kinds of retail, or at least, the retail I’ve been involved with. Wine is pretty easy - just smile, and point them to the cheap section. I used to manage a hardware store, and oh, the stories I could tell! Here’s just one quickie:

One day a lady came up to the counter, holding a hammer. She asks me, “Can you show me how to operate this?” Now that was a situation ripe with temptation, I can tell you!