Tales from the Underpaid: Open Borders
Of all the shitty jobs I’ve had, my stint as a bookseller-barista at Borders was the least shitty.
Every well-read young person wants to work in a bookstore, unless they come from so much money that the idea of a job is foreign and worthless. I did not, so I had rent to pay in Portland during my two-year Pacific North sidequest. A job at a big bookstore by the river sounded like a real score, even if it was seasonal part time and paid only Oregon state’s minimum wage.
At the start, I was just wrapping presents. Borders offered free gift wrap in the mad season between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and the cashiers couldn’t both ring and wrap at the requisite volume. Books are easy to wrap, and getting trained to ring was a breeze since I had done it previously in other shitty jobs. Portland counterfeiters were surprisingly unsophisticated, handing me twenty dollar bills that looked to have been printed on copy paper.
Proving I could count change led to a more lucrative spot in the cafe: Seattle’s Best Coffee. Set up as a sort of a laboratory for Starbucks to try new things, working the espresso machines was a welcome change because it meant I could eat soft pretzels stuffed with herbs and cheese, and receive cash tips. I had not been, until that time, a coffee drinker. I remain one to this day.
I loved advising readers most of all, but it was the job I got to do the least. It was a guarded position; the booksellers with the longest tenure would jump between me and a customer like a bodyguard taking a bullet rather than let me tell someone who just read The Da Vinci Code that they should try The Club Dumas.
This job proved something important to me, and I’ve been chasing the simple satisfaction of it ever since. People will do work that they believe matters even if the hours are bad, if the pay is insufficient, if the break room is a closet and the bathroom is regularly occupied by someone who has shot up and passed out. I loved that job, and so did everyone I worked with. We showed up with songs in our hearts, shot whipped cream into our mouths, shelf shifted with a smile and helped the person passed out on the toilet to a chair and a cup of tea. When my husband was working at the Strand in New York, I saw the same thing in him and the kids he managed.
A lot of jobs are nothing more than a support system to someone’s real work; their art or their family or that novel they suck on like a secret butterscotch in the night, dreaming of publication. A bookstore job is that AND when you tell people you work retail they know that this is the coolest version of it. Nobody at Home Depot ever asked me about Shakespeare. It was a bad job I held with pride.
(Borders Books, liquidated in 2011 by private equity, 2005-2007)