For one week, I worked at the most popular bookstore in Paris. You know the one: there’s a queue to get in, it was in that Linklater film, and its tote bags are owned by anyone with at least two cardigans in their closet.
After my interview, I was put on a one week trial period. The first day was just shelving and telling customers to please stop photographing the store, but the second day, they put me in the shit: behind the register.
I have worked in retail before, but I have never worked at a store that has a bouncer. The security guard would let a stream of people in, who would then roam the store and not-so-discretely take photos. Then they would select one of three books:
Le Petit Prince
A Moveable Feast
A pocket-sized collection entitled French Love Poems
The herd would then migrate to the cashier, which only had two registers. I was quickly trained to do a number of different operations, but really, I only needed to know how to ring up these 3 books, plus various tote bags. I did that for 4 hours straight each day.
Though it’s an English bookstore, I thought maybe I could improve my French working there. But again, I only needed to know three things:
How will you be paying? / Vous payez comment?
Would you like a bag? / Voulez-vous un sac?
Photography is forbidden. / [Sternly wag finger.] C’est interdit!
When I was in high school I had High Fidelity-tinged dreams of working in a bookshop or record store since my favorite books and music constituted my entire identity. This dream was quashed long before I worked at the Paris bookstore,1 but my week there left this fantasy as trampled-on and scattered as the New Releases section.
When my week behind the register ended, I never wanted to see a Hemingway book again. But then the next day: Notre-Dame caught on fire. The bookstore is right next door, and understandably, was shut for a few days. Their hiring process came to a standstill at the time, but I never followed up.
Now I can visit the bookstore (early in the morning before the queue starts) and not be reminded of my week of disillusionment. But once in a while, I’ll see their tote bag on a stranger in the metro and my fingers will twitch with the muscle memory of ringing up hundreds of those cursed totes a day.
It turns out people with excellent taste in books and music can also be terrible sociopaths — whoa!
Hahaha I totally bought A Moveable Feast from there!
I love this post.
My first job was a dream come true working at a Virgin Megastore. Most of the time, I loved it. I did not mind flipping through cds and dvds. I learned about various music artists and movies, all the while dusting off the merch. I watched and heard music vids all day while "working". But the part I hated was cashiering especially in the store was busy.