|
|
Barnes & Noble disappointsDec 20 '00 Write an essay on this topic.My local Barnes & Noble bookstore and I have a symbiotic relationship: I enjoy complaining, and it gives me plenty of reasons to complain. By way of background: I'm a programmer by trade, but an avid reader in my limited spare time. Both of my parents are librarians, so I've spent much of my life around books. As a result, I have very strong opinions about books and know what to expect from a bookstore. Anyway, tonight I was looking for a book for work, McKusick's "Design and Implementation of the 4.4 BSD Operating System." My first stop was the nearest Borders bookstore. There was a kiosk for locating books, so I typed in the search terms "mckusick" and "bsd" for an author and title search, and the kiosk informed me exactly where I could find the book. Unfortunately, the book wasn't on the shelf. I asked the employee at the information desk, and he promptly located the book on his computer and said: "Sometimes the kiosk is wrong, and it looks like we don't actually have this book right now. Apparently we have a single copy in transit, though, and I'd be glad to reserve it for you if you wish. It should arrive sometime next week." If I didn't need the book by the end of the week, I would have gladly taken him up on his offer. Instead, I thanked him for his help and left for the Barnes & Noble two blocks away. Having been to the store before, I knew where to find the computer books. I was shocked to discover that the computer books were arranged not by author, not by sub-topic, but by *publisher* within a topic. My first reaction to this was a verbal "what the... ?!?", followed by my making a beeline to the information desk. After waiting in line for two minutes while one of the employees chatted with what appeared to be two friends and the other was engaged in an apparently fruitless book search, a third employee arrived and offered to help me. I asked her to search for a book by a McKusick containing the acronym BSD in in the title. She glared at me and said, "There's a lot of books by McKusicks, and it's going to take a while to find the right one." Umm, okay. The employee searching fruitlessly asked a question of the employee helping me, to which she replied gruffly, "I'm going to be a while looking for this stupid book." Huh? Even if their computer system had been designed by monkeys (apparently it was), there was no cause for her to take her frustrations out on me. Finally she finished searching and said, "We're don't have it. Do you want me to order it?" I replied that I needed it quickly and that I'd look elsewhere. Before I left, I decided to offer a bit of constructive criticism. The conversation went something like this: me: "By the way, may I just say that organizing the computer books by publisher is profoundly unhelpful?" her: "We got a lot of complaints and so we changed it. You know, people like books by O'Reilly and they can find them easier this way." me: "Okay, fine. But I still think that organizing books by author or even topic would be more helpful." her: "They *are* organized by topic!" me: "The topics are pretty broad [I was looking in the 'Unix/Linux' section which was about fifteen sections of shelving]. I urge you to reconsider." her: "Fine." And she turned away. Needless to say, this is not the first problem I've had with this Barnes & Noble. One month ago I was looking for a copy of McSweeney's a literary journal. B&N didn't have a separate section for journals and didn't carry it. Three months ago I was looking for a children's book and waited for a staffer in the children's section on the second floor for twenty minutes before retreating to the first floor and asking for assistance (someone was paged up five minutes later). Again, they didn't have the book I was looking for. Never before have I seen a bookstore so large with so few books worth buying. Every time I've been unable to find a book at Barnes & Noble (except this most recent time), I was able to find the same book in stock at Borders. I suppose I'm just frustrated with my experiences, but it all adds up to disappointment. Borders, your excellent selection and helpful staff have yet to disappoint. Barnes & Noble, you have failed to impress me even after many chances.  |
| Write the first comment on this review! |
|
Ads by Google
|
by texas-swede
by PacManY2J
