America’s Largest Bookstore Chain Just Dismissed My Entire Life with One Sentence

Pondering employment, bookselling, and vengeance on Highway 80

I was flying down old Highway 80 yesterday toward the big town of Wills Point, Texas (population 3,863), getting some serious first season of Supernatural vibes (Christine Carmichael knowns what I’m talking about) and actually missing the concrete madness of Dallas, all the while stewing over an e-mail I had received earlier in the day. Prior to receiving the e-mail, I had been stewing over the fact that every story my stepdad tells is about something that happened prior to Richard Nixon’s election as president. I had taken him to my apartment in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex to get him out of his house for the first time since my mom died a month ago, so I had several days of such stories, along with comments like, “that shopping center was a cow pasture in 1963.” The e-mail pushed all of this into the background.

Like many on this site, my reads/views/earnings have taken a significant tumble over the past year or so, and since Medium is one of my main sources of income, I have been forced to seek actual clock-punching employment again. I’m too old to dig ditches, too young to be a Wal-Mart greeter, and have found freelance writing jobs hard to come by since everyone fell in love with AI. I did, however, find one that should have been a slam dunk: assistant manager at a Barnes & Noble bookstore.

I applied for the position with considerably more hope than I’ve had with many others recently and only had to wait three weeks for a reply:

“We have carefully reviewed your qualifications and have decided to pursue other candidates whose experience is currently a better match to the requirements of this position.”

I realize that this is boilerplate rejection language common to HR drones everywhere, but it still pisses me off because (in this case, at least) it’s simply not true, and that’s not sour grapes either. I have 20 years’ experience managing a department of over 100 employees for a Fortune 15 company (the department was outsourced to India in 2016 and I don’t like curry, so I stayed here) and more time working retail than anyone should endure. I have also sold books for more than 30 years in multiple venues: online, through pop-up shops, at flea markets, and finally at a brick-and-mortar store I owned. I may have more flaws than any employer would want to deal with, but lacking the experience to be an assistant manager at a Barnes & Noble is not one of them.

As I pondered it further while slowing to 5 mph below the speed limit while passing through Wills Point (small town cops do not play), I came up with three possible reasons why Barnes & Noble essentially dismissed the majority of my working life with one sentence:

1. An AI bot scanned the resume and application and did not find the required buzzwords: synergy, granular, deliverables, move the needle (I have to stop because I just threw up in my mouth a little).
2. I have more years of experience than the store’s whole management team combined and they’re afraid I would be running the place in six months (which I would).
3. Their application forms are designed in a way that enables them to determine that I am approaching 60 without ever asking my age. I can sometimes disguise this enough on a resume to get an interview; the look of disappointment when they first see my white beard is always satisfying. But this can’t possibly be the reason because ageism doesn’t exist (right, Patrick Metzger?).

The reason doesn’t really matter, though. What matters is that (like Maximus in Gladiator) I will have my vengeance, in this life or the next. Until I received that e-mail, my only true nemesis was Half Price Books (for running every used bookstore in the state of Texas out of business), but no longer. I had even foolishly been encouraged by B&N’s recent resurgence under James Daunt; I saw them as kindred spirits in the fight against Amazon, embracing the old adage, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

What I had forgotten was that, as we learned with the Soviet Union in WWII and Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq War, the enemy of my enemy is ultimately still my enemy. Never forget how many indie bookstores Barnes & Noble crushed on their way to bookselling dominance before Amazon slapped them down like a red-headed stepchild. They are not now and never were a friend to indies.

This might be little more than the bitter ramblings of an angry old man except for one key factor: this angry old man has reached a point in life where he has nothing left to lose. The general public doesn’t need to be alarmed the way they would if I was told I had six months to live and thus would not spend much time in prison, but B&N (and Half Price Books, too; I haven’t forgotten about them) should be forewarned.

I don’t know what form the initial response will take, but I will be looking for retail space as close to the store that rejected me as soon as I finish this rant. I’ll need funding, so I might start a GoFundMe or start running guns to Latin America again (I’m just kidding; as far as you know I’ve never done that). And I need to start scouting for books to stock the future stores (yes, plural).

With regard to that last part, though I normally don’t believe in “signs,” I received one near the end of that drive back to East Texas. The only way to calm myself after the e-mail was to spend time in an indie bookstore, and there is an excellent one in downtown Canton, Texas (amazing, given that it is in the heart of “Trump 2024” country). The minute I entered the store, the “sign” was staring at me from a shelf at eye level, shining like a beacon on a pitch-black night. It was a slightly bruised but otherwise fine copy of the book that I sold the most copies of in my old bookstore: Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s masterpiece, The Shadow of the Wind.

Barnes & Noble may have AI Human Resource drones and buckets of money, but I clearly have the book gods on my side; I’ll go to war with that advantage every time. Stay tuned, my friends; just like in my next novel, The Bookstore War, the first shots of this one are about to be fired.

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