The Diary of a Bookseller

MONDAY, 21 JULY

Online orders: 0

Books found: 0

Laurie was in today, a lovely sunny day.

Monsoon was still not working, probably a consequence of the power cut on Friday, so I emailed their tech support team.

The first customer of the day was an Irish woman, who turned up at the shop at 9.09 a.m. and asked, ‘Tell me now, does everything in Scotland open at 10 a.m.?’

After work I went to a meeting organised by the council, chaired by someone called ‘The Shop Doctor’, whose job it is to help retailers improve their businesses. It turned out to be a complete waste of time, and I spent three pointless hours being tortured by his PowerPoint presentation, an abomination rich with revelatory insights like ‘If you keep your door open, more customers will come in than if it is closed’ and ‘The name of your business should reflect what you sell’. Well, I think I managed to nail that one. There’s not a lot of ambiguity about ‘The Book Shop’. I reached my limit and left when he showed a series of photographs of seriously run-down shops and asked us – like a group of pre-school children – ‘Can anybody see what’s wrong with this one?’ By this point everyone was seething, and for a brief moment I feared a lynching, a fear that rapidly became a hope the moment he addressed me. ‘You. You’ve been very quiet. What do you think is wrong with this shop front?’ he oozed, as his projector clicked to a photograph of a shop with no sign, a smashed window and a burned-out car in front of it.

Till total £187.60

30 customers