Garden Bloggers' Book Club inspires a rant

I finally have my copy of "The Essential Earthman", the November selection for the Garden Bloggers' Book Club. You wouldn't believe what I had to go through to get it. I don't think I've ever really ranted about anything before on this blog but this experience was so egregious, I just have to get it off my chest.

Begin Rant Here

I prefer to own books rather than borrow them from the library. At one point, I had over 1,000 volumes. Then I moved to my current house and unbeknownst to me, the basement floods. I lost almost all of my books before I even had a chance to unpack them. I've been slowly rebuilding my collection ever since.

Mostly I read history and 18th and 19th century novels. My gardening section is woefully small. Buying and reading books for the Garden Bloggers' Book Club seemed like a great idea. Normally, I order from Amazon.com when I know exactly what I want, but to save shipping charges, I decided to visit my local Borders store. They have everything, right? If not, I can always order it through them and do some browsing while I'm there, right?

My first clue that this was going to be a less than optimal undertaking was that at first, I was completely unable to find the gardening section. When I did finally locate it, it was tiny and filled with books written by celebrities, how-to books, "weekend" garden books, "two hour" garden books and other horticultural impossibilities. Nothing by or about Henry Mitchell or anything else I might be even remotely interested in reading.

Undaunted, I proceeded to the Information Desk. The Do-It-Yourself computer was out of order. My heart sunk at the sight of the clerk there who was obviously younger than my own child. I handed him a piece of paper with the author and title written on it and he proceeded to look it up on his computer. He stared at the screen for a long time.

Any parent of teenagers knows that look. It's the "I have no idea what I am looking at, but I would rather die than admit it" look. Obviously thinking that due to my advanced age I knew nothing about computers and would believe anything he told me, he said that not only was was the book not part of their inventory, he wasn't able to find it at all. It didn't exist. I took a deep breath, thanked the young man for his trouble and left.

It took me a week to calm down. After which I visited another Borders store. I didn't even bother looking for the gardening section. I headed straight for the computer and looked up "The Essential Earthman". I understood immediately what was puzzling the clerk. The screen displayed about a dozen versions of the book, all but one labelled "out of print". A single one was labelled "order". Another extremely young clerk asked if I needed help just as I was muttering to myself "I can't believe that this book is out of print". She said "Too bad!" and walked away. I placed my order on the computer, collared the impertinent clerk and demanded to see a manager. Who was not any more helpful. She didn't care that her clerk was rude and refused to help me. She was unable to answer any of questions about the listing on the computer. Her attitude appeared to be that since I had successfully placed my order, I shouldn't waste any more of their time. I took another deep breath, thanked them both for their trouble and left.

I received an email yesterday that my book was in and I picked it up today.

I have some words of advice for Borders: If you are going to drive all of the local bookstores out of business, then hire their employees. At the very least, hire people who know and care about books. You missed a sale. In fact you missed two sales. I don't like leaving a bookstore empty-handed. If I had been waited on by someone who was willing to take some time and "talk books" with me, not only would I have ordered the book I was looking for, I would also have purchased at least one additional volume. Ditto, when I picked up my order. If, instead of wasting time looking for my order because the cashier didn't know the alphabet and then trying to figure out a cash register he was obviously never trained to run, he had "talked books" with me, I would have purchased yet another book.

Now about your inventory. I understand that to lure people into your stores, you have to stock all the latest trash on the bestseller lists. But once you have people reading, you must offer them something more substantial. Classics, books that withstood the test of time. Books that make people think. Books that will make readers want to delve more deeply into a subject and therefore buy and read more books.

Until then, I'm buying my books from Amazon.com.

End rant