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The cash/wrap. The cash registers and wrapping station. Sometimes there are two of them, one on each side of the store. One of the most needed and hated areas of the store. People hate being stuck there. I never felt comfortable at the cash/wrap, I felt like there was so much more I could be doing out on the sales floor or in receiving.

Many employees see a cashiering shift and their shoulders slump in disappointment. Four to eight hours of boredom and questioning customers if they have a membership. It sucks.

The sad thing is that if you’re a great salesperson and can get those numbers that the store needs to meet with membership sales and gift cards you are ALWAYS at the cash register.

But on the other end of things, there are employees that are absolutely inept at everything in the store. They can’t shelve books, they don’t know where anything is, can’t tell the difference between fiction and nonfiction, and have the crappiest, self entitled attitude on top of it all, are ALSO always stuck at a cash register. There’s a security camera to babysit them, they’re stuck in one place for the whole shift, and they don’t need to find books to customers, they punch a few keys on the register and ask if they want an emailed receipt.

Beulah had a terrible reputation for customer service. Any phone call she’d take, any customer that came to her was immediately shoved off onto another bookseller, usually one who was already busy helping someone else. Beulah would wait for a bookseller to finish a phone call to give them the customer she was “helping.”

We used to show Beulah where books were, what sections to search, how to look up a DVD, and she’d never make any effort to retain that training. She was absolutely useless at the register too. Constantly calling to ask questions on how to process a return or exchange, what dollar coins were, how to apply educator discounts… We would be better off with a dead walrus than have Beulah on the payroll.