There is no arguing massive shift from in-person to online sales over the last year has saved many bookstores. There’s also no debate that it has been a pain point for many, if not most stores. Some adapted smoothly, others have faced rocky waters. There’s one quote that really stuck with me:

It’s the same amount of sales for 10 times the work per employee

– Bay Area Bookseller, quoted in localnewsmatters.org

The sad truth for a lot of stores is that they are spending more time on fewer sales, but for many stores it is just the opposite. Why the difference? Largely it’s a combination of optimizing workflow and adjusting perceptions. This post takes a look at the latter. Part 2 of this post will look at some possible optimizations.

Adjusting Perceptions

I’ll start by saying that I have no idea whether the bookseller quoted above had tracked the difference in time in detail, but that even if they haven’t it’s irrelevant. Whether or not the time was actually ten times higher, the perception is that it was. We all know what it’s like to have to do something we don’t want to. How it can end up feeling like time is dragging, and everything took so. Much. Longer.

Whether or not it actually takes ten times more work, the perception is that it does.

Very few of us got into bookselling to pack boxes and drop them in the mail. Most booksellers, at least in my experience, get much of their energy from helping people directly. It’s that moment where a couple returns from their honeymoon and thanks you for the hot tip you gave them about their destination when they bought a guidebook. It’s befriending the neighborhood eccentric and learning all their interesting stories, or the kid who’s been coming in for years looking for their next favorite book. For some, it’s even the monthly phone call asking you to measure the bookshelves.

The challenge, then, is not letting the lack of handselling make us disheartened and want to quit. How do we do that? Everyone is going to have a slightly different answer, but I’ll share some tips and tricks from long hours doing repetitive packing and shipping tasks and some that I’ve seen other folks doing.

1. Engage your brain

Packing boxes, taping them up, and slapping on a label seems, on it’s face, impossible to find anything but monotonous and boring. But, it doesn’t have to be. The thousands of hours I’ve spent over the years packing, moving, stacking, unstacking, and unpacking boxes have led me to find some interesting brain puzzles to keep myself distracted.

When working in wineries, the wine coming off the bottling line gets stacked into a particular pattern on a pallet to ensure it is stable. I spent a great many hours figuring out the optimal order in which to stack those boxes to minimize the strain on my back. I also spent many hours pondering why not stacking one layer at a time was not such a good idea as I opened and examined every case of wine on a pallet after discovering the bottles had been underfilled. Two puzzles in one!

Working in a college bookstore, I set myself the challenge of organizing the boxes I wheeled out of the truck and up the elevator 4-5 at a time to minimize how much walking and moving we’d need to do to put them in their sections. It was a game of memory, Jenga, and a sliding puzzle spread over four years. I don’t know whether I ever “won” the game, but I sure do miss those 2-4 weeks leading up to the start of a new term.

When processing orders online, the challenge became optimizing the website to maintain order in the chaos of ever increasing volumes. What parts of the process could be more automated? Did every order require a personal note, or was there a way to split them up and handle some in bulk? Why was it we could tell who processed an order by the kind of mistake that happened?

2. Be silly!

You can tell I like thought experiments and puzzles. Those aren’t for everyone. A store I shop with frequently has done something interesting. They’ve started collecting “quotes from the warehouse”, which get printed on the back of their complementary bookmarks. It’s been really fun receiving a package with some new, bizarre quote every month, presumably taken entirely out of context. I imagine the booksellers, masked up and across the room from each other, having random conversations. I fill in the context myself, and I hope that they’re having as much fun in real life as they do in my imagination.

3. Take breaks!

Make it a point not to let your whole existence become pick and pack monotony. A friend of mine started hosting Facebook Live events so she could handsell from her store to get a break from loading boxes and driving around town. Even while driving, she’d turn on the GPS and, at the end of the night, post the crazy route around the city she’d taken, complete with anecdotes about hollering a socially-distanced “hello” to a regular customer or cleverly composed selfies with friends designed to hide how far apart they were.

From an ergonomic standpoint, breaks are important too. Being in pain makes everything harder, and staring at screens too long can cause vision problems. Remember to look off in the distance for about 60-90 seconds every 60-90 minutes. Gazing longingly at your favorite neighborhood coffee shop not only lets you ponder how wonderful things will be in the not-so-distant future, but also relieves the eye strain that close-up work can cause.

Do something similar with stretches for your hands, arms, back, legs, neck. Repetitive stress injuries are no joke, so while you’re imagining that perfect pour over, take a moment, too, to shake out your hands, shoulders, neck, and legs. Maybe make a face at your coworker to distract them from getting too bored. Anything to remind your body that it is more than a box-packing machine.

4. Remember, this isn’t “normal”

Anyone telling you that “this is the new normal” is wrong. This is the temporary normal. The short-term discomfort. If pandemics could re-wire all of humanity’s collective psyche to stop getting together in groups and going about daily life surrounded by other people, we would have become solitary beings a few thousand years ago at least. Things may not look the same as they did 5 years ago, but we certainly won’t be stuck 6 feet or more apart from our coworkers with doors locked to the public forever, either.

Every time you feel overwhelmed by a huge list of orders to pack, remember that getting through those keeps the store afloat and gets you one day closer to selling in person again. Each box sent out the door represents another customer who didn’t stop shopping with you despite all the challenges of life. Think how silly the new parent getting “Moo, Baa, La La La” will sound reading it to their kiddo, or ponder what book you’ll suggest to the person to whom you’ve been shipping nothing but Patricia Cornwell titles for the last 9 months once you can fully re-open.

5. Read Part 2 of this post

Next up I’ll cover some ideas for ways to optimize your workflow. I’ll run down the common pain points I’ve seen many stores hit, and give some frameworks for you to use when dealing with them yourself.

If you have any tips or tricks for surviving the monotony and keeping from feeling overwhelmed, drop them in the comments or send us a note!