Bookshop

Over the Festering Season I received some National Book Tokens, which were pretty cool, as I obviously read a lot, and all that jazz.

Spending them, on the other hand, was a bloody nightmare. Although it did help to remind me why I normally buy books online instead.

First of all, the local bookshop. It’s an Ottakars – not brilliant, but not bad, and (for the moment anyway) at least it’s fairly independent, and not part of a huge chain. (although they may end up being taken over by HMV.) Their stocks are OK, but not brilliant.

I’d taken in a list of books I was thinking of buying. Could I find any of ’em? Could I chuff. Not one. And when I asked the staff, I got told “Oh no, we’d have to special order that – it’ll be at least two weeks”. Useless. I did end up getting a couple of books, which amounted to £12.98, and paid with the £15 of tokens. Great, no problem at all.

Or not. Turns out that Ottakars won’t offer change (i.e. actual coins) for book tokens – they give you the difference back in yet more tokens. Great, 2 £1 tokens. They’ll go towards something useful, I’m sure. Of ocurse, it would’ve also helped if they’d actually had any £1 tokens in the tills, too. Instead they had to a) get a supervisor, b) get the supervisor to go back to the office to get the tokens, and c) wait for them to come back to the till. All in all that took about ten minutes.

So yes, overall, I can’t really see me being converted back to bookshops from Amazon, if that’s indicative of how it all works…