Another guest post by Therese Holland
As a Bricks and Mortar book store owner I find one of the most difficult things to manage is unsolicited offers to sell or exchange books. Some offers are so patently unfair it is difficult to fathom whether the customer has any comprehension at all of the costs of doing business (not to mention the fact that I am trying to make a living).
One of my first experiences of this was a retired lawyer who exchanged Mills and Boon romances for her mother. She had a domineering personality and because her books were new releases insisted that she get 2 book in exchange for every one of hers. I stood at the counter dumbfounded holding six paperbacks while she waltzed out of the shop with 12 books. She said the previous owner had been happy with the arrangement. The previous owner was terrified of her. I resolved to let her know that that arrangement was NOT satisfactory to me.
There never was a showdown as for whatever reason she never came back.
Another gentleman had finished reading Dan Brown’s Da Vinci code and wanted to swap for Angels and Demons because as he explained it would be just as easy for me to sell one as the other. I politely declined his generous offer.
The previous owner had given cash on exchange but in an area with a known drug problem we knew that books were being stolen and returned for cash. I gave notice when we moved premises that that practice was going to be discontinued. Four years later I still have the odd customer gleaning our Box Hill stock from Oppportunity/Thift stores and garage sales and hopefully bringing it in expecting to get cash. I blithely inform them that we stopped giving cash refunds in 2006 because people were getting discarded books from charity stores and garage sales to sell back to us.
Not to mention the odd customer who steals my books to sell back to me…
Initially I was giving pretty generous store credit to find customers picking the eyes out of my stock and carefully calculating the prices so they just used up the credit and paid no cash. Too many days of being busy and no money in the til made me rethink that and start to insist that they spend at least $5.
