The John McCain Event

This is going to be the rant of the century. This is an explicit warning at the beginning that the below comments are going to be highly opinionated, highly political and highly cutting. This a look at the underside of Taylor. The fierce, righteous and expectant Taylor. The calm Taylor reading over it questions whether to should publish it or not, so what the hell? I work at BookPeople in Austin, Texas. This is me, making my opinion heard and in no way represent the entity of BookPeople. All accountability for stated comments below apply to Taylor Romero, me. Texas is for the majority a pretty, darn Republican state. Austin is a bastion for those of democratic or liberal belief. I fall into the political example of Austin as being a liberal democrat and proud of it. BookPeople is an Austin business. It reflects its community's desires. Anyone who knows anything about economics understands supply and demand. Many people consider us to be a "liberal" bookstore and for the most part the staff is. The bookstore on the other hand happens to be a business. We supply what people demand (am I making this clear enough). Does that mean we have Anne Coulter in all her nutty, biased splendor? Yes, we have her republicanisms. Do we have Al Franken’s biased, liberal splendor? Yes. Does most of the store and do most of our customers prefer Al to Anne? Yes. I am amazed when conservatives come in and rant at the difference in number of books between Al and Anne. Well, if Anne sold as well as Al, I'm sure we'd have more of her books. This leads me to the John McCain book signing event. I was pretty excited about this event as were a lot of the people on the staff, regardless of our political affiliation. We love to have high profile, high purchasing events and McCain is definitely one of those. We have had his books on display for quite some time, and have advertised for this event quite a bit. Did people have more than a month to buy this book ahead time? Yes. Did they? No. They all came the day of, an hour before the event, oh, or my favorite, thirty minutes into the event and actually expected some books to be available. All, I repeat, all of the books we had of John McCain, the new and the dated, sold. We sold every one of his books and have tons more we are trying to get into the store. Rock on for John. John McCain is a republican. Our "liberal" bookstore had a republican speaker. I state this because the reactions of the people who came and did not get a book, that they actually believed to be available, were of cynical skepticism in all their republican arrogance. They genuinely believed that our "liberal" bookstore, in some grand conspiracy, didn't order enough books because he was a republican. These people obviously missed my economics lesson above. We are a business, a local business, an independent business. That means that the corporations kick our butts on discounts, salaries, sales, etc. because they have the largesse and capital that has destroyed hundreds of other independent bookstores across the country. Do you really think that we would limit the number of books based on a political agenda? That we wouldn't make money where we could? We, BookPeople, believe in the freedom of expression and reading. We do not limit or censor books in our store. Anyone who actually looks at our shelves can see that and some of our liberal shoppers are offended that we carry some of the conservative works that we stock. We tell them, tell everyone the same thing; we supply to the demand. We would have ordered more books if we expected more sales.

One of the reasons for our limitation (I am guessing because I do not share a brain with our events coordinator) is that McCain had a deadline, a limit on the amount of time he would be signing books (we were told) and that even the number of books we did provide might not all be signed. There was also the complaint that we didn't let people bring books from other bookstores, especially when we ran out. There are a couple of reasons for this; first we have to survive, we have to make money and Barnes & Noble cuts their prices to bring people in. They can take the corporate hit. Another reason is that there was limited time for signing and regardless of how many books came in, only a few would leave signed. Since the event was at our store, we offer the privilege of this signed copy to the people buying it from us. Finally, the last reason I am going to offer is that many times publishers set regulations on what books can and cannot be signed. If you attend any of our other book signings (example Neal Stephenson) the people who attend this event can bring multiple copies of books from home and as long as they buy one of his new books they can get all of them signed. WE didn't make this rule, the publisher and probably, ultimately Neal, made this rule.

The main reason this entry came into existence is because of the treatment I received as a cashier when people were told that the book had sold out. The service industry can provide amazing insight into people. I was raised with the concept of manners. I try not to take my anger out on people I love and I never take my anger out on strangers. I have seen more rudeness, arrogance and conceit in my 2 ½ years at BookPeople than I have in most of my life. There is something about being in the service industry that somehow makes people think I am a servant, lower than them, undeserving of basic manners and respect. These people make me tired and hurt on a bad day. On a normal day they seem miserable and pathetic and I feel sympathy despite their rudeness. I cannot recount the number of snide comments I got at this event, disparaging remarks about our store, our event, as if they were entitle to a book and John McCain, as if it wasn’t a privilege, as if I was solely responsible for their loss. That people act this way and don’t think it reflects on their character is amazing, outrageous. Don’t they know that we see them? I feel like honor, integrity, compassion and empathy are sometimes greatly lacking in our culture and I am an optimistic person. If you read about my life and my experiences and my family you can see this but when I talk about work, about bad days… it’s like I can feel them sinking in, instead of flowing off. They provide amazing examples of what I vow to never become, to teach my children never to become. People are people, regardless of what job they perform and money does not equate respect. There are many monetarily privileged people who come into the store that I don’t and won’t ever respect, no matter how much money they make. They show that money is not happiness. Many people who act this way are far removed from happiness. I have to believe that these actions are produced from misery rather than joy because who could take pleasure in hurting someone else? I feel that the great divide in the spectrum of money in our society produces so many intolerable problems. I find that the absence of extreme wealth and extreme poverty would solve many of the world’s problems.

Note: in an example of poor communication and mistake, because we all make them regardless of if we are imperfect people or imperfect bookstores. We did not sell out of John McCain’s new book because there were some in back stock and the floor staff was not informed. Now there are signed copies of back stock books being sold. Call and reserve one if you were unfortunately turned away before these are all gone too. Please accept my apologies if you were one of these people, it was unfair (but if you were mean to me or any of the people on staff with me, I would like to say that I am still sorry but it is just a book and you cannot treat people that way.) We are in the process of attempting to rectify this mistake so that it does not occur again.

Thanks Frank for the pictures.