What it was like being a bookseller

And the economic realities of working minimum wage

There are not many misconceptions about bookselling; it is a simple profession. The monotony of retail against a backdrop of elevator music, with the occasional Taylor Swift thrown in, doesn’t include much complexity.

However, the responsibility my fellow booksellers and I had on book buying cannot be understated.

Our mission, according to filmed-on-a-potato training guides, was to put the book in the customer’s hand — and that we did. However, the conditions of the job cry out for change.

A large number of customers coming into the Barnes and Noble wanted help finding books, most of them already knowing the title they wanted. Another faction of customers marched in seeking a recommendation from a bookseller. This group had an affinity for saying the ominous words, “surprise me!” when asked what they were looking for.

The motives of these customers were elusive: was this a new form of psychological torture? And I, a lone bookseller in the twilight of my professional health, a chance victim? And the way they evaded follow-up questions like “what are some books you like? Authors, maybe? Genres? Do you read at all?” was skillful to say the least. Ungraspable as they may have been, it was always a delight to walk around the store doing pickups (where we picked up misplaced books on other floors) and found The History of Steam Heating that Todd, and only Todd, just had to find thrown to side like he and I didn’t spend blood, sweat, and time looking for that obscure, cobwebbed corner of the store where the secrets of steam heating were hidden. But I digress.

Truthfully, it was a wonderful feeling to be asked for the location of a random book and knowing exactly where it was in the three-storied building. The look of gratitude and happiness that sometimes glowed on people’s faces when we found what they were searching for was priceless.

Many of those books were recommended to the customers on TikTok. TikTok had shifted the industry quite a bit and us booksellers on the bottom rung, as our minimum wage implied, felt it. We were encouraged to do the difficult task of keeping up with the ever-changing BookTok trends and landscape to better inform our recommendations. Luckily, most of us were English majors or had an invested interest in books to begin with. There were always at least a few of us that had read the trending books, providing vital information for the strength of the rest of our recommendations. Though booksellers kept the store in business, and book store sales have increased since 2020, with sales exceeding 8.9 billion in 2022 (Watson), booksellers were given little thanks for putting the books in people’s hands.

Beyond direct interactions, booksellers shaped the store environment through displays, shelves, and special sections, fostering an atmosphere conducive to book, bookmark, candle, planner, toy, and trinket purchases.

Although the displays were largely to our discretion, there were a couple of guidelines we had to follow. For example, tables that had the books facing up had to have either bestsellers or books that were published within the previous few months. For the shelves, the books had to fill the entire space, requiring some of them (usually newer hardcovers or bestselling hardcovers) to be faced out.

Finally, the sides of the shelves had their own shelves that had books under special categories like “LGBTQIA+ Manga” or “scream, cry, throw up” and were supposed to be newer titles. These rules were often broken for the sake of space or quantity issues but stood as a guiding star above the forest of disorganized books. Values of unity, beauty, and organization, though ostensibly prescribed, were often followed intuitively.

Bookselling had other pros such as understanding the main precepts of customer behavior. Customers often based their purchases on the cover of the book. Though, they are not easily fooled; customers want a unique cover that doesn’t just follow every trend of book cover design. Regarding book recommendations, customers most often asked for books that resemble the bestselling books of the genre. Books that match occasions well are also recommended fairly often, for example, a novel for a graduate or books that are inspiring. Customers loved series and had an attraction to collecting all the books in a series or collecting the limited edition versions of books.

Being a bookseller wasn’t all glamorous though. The daily work, if you weren’t stationed at a cash register for 7+ hours, was to organize the shelves. If there was nothing to do, you were to appear to do work and the easiest way to do that was to check the shelves… repeatedly.

In his essay “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant”, David Graeber says “and more and more employees find themselves, not unlike Soviet workers actually, working 40 or even 50 hour weeks on paper, but effectively working 15 hours” (2). Most of the work was done when the day started. Also, there were many booksellers on days that did not require so many like in the middle of the week (though with the inverse problem of being too few of us on the weekends). Hours were often docked from longtime employees in favor of new interns that did not know how to do the job and would leave at about the time they were to get good at it.

It begs the question, why would Barnes and Noble pay employees a wage and lose money when part of, or all, that work is unnecessary? Graeber explains, “the answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political. The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger” (3).

Long gone are the days one can sit at a register and be serendipitously approached while reading a book. There were more effects than just simply not being able to discover latent steam heating knowledge. As Graeber describes, “This is a profound psychological violence here. How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labour when one secretly feels one’s job should not exist? How can it not create a sense of deep rage and resentment” (3).

Practically every day I felt that exact rage and resentment at the existence of the job and had to suppress it. Putting on a smile for customers may have been more tolerable if I were paid a livable wage. $15 per hour (for a Barnes and Noble bookseller in New York City) is a measly rate, especially in a city where the cost of living for a single person is $25.65 .

Minimum wage labor is often neglected labor. People often say “get a better job if they don’t like the work.” But people need to work these jobs. Technology is not at the point where it can “put the book in the buyer’s hand” at a physical storefront. Therefore, the book industry’s essential workers deserve better work. Work that is paid a livable wage and isn’t reduced to the arbitrary pressure of appearing busy rather than allowing booksellers to focus on tasks that require time and attention and giving them the space to breathe and create a genuinely welcoming environment, with a workforce that are given a number of hours that isn’t dependent on dividing hours against an endlessly increasing supply of people.

Barnes and Noble is one of the last bastions of storefront bookstores. Therefore, it is important for them to adjust how they go about their business for the sake of the industry and the many people they employ.

I wouldn’t categorize the bookseller as a useless job as Graeber might. The store environment needs to be crafted and maintained by people, though, the corporatization of the experience creates a job that is more akin to bullshit than it needs to be.

Thanks for reading, clapping, and commenting. See you in the next one.

Works Cited

Graeber, David. On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant. 2013.

“Living Wage Calculator — Living Wage Calculation for New York County, New York.” Livingwage.mit.edu, livingwage.mit.edu/counties/36061.

“U.S. Book Store Sales 2019.” Statista, www.statista.com/statistics/197710/annual-book-store-sales-in-the-us-since-1992/.