Jonathan Saggau's Blog

So I went to Borders on Wall street today, thinking "hey, let's have a look at Fake Steve's book." I go to their little search engine kiosk, punch in the title and see "Humor" under section and "Likely in store" under availability. Hmmm. Ok. So the kiosk isn't hooked into their inventory. Fair enough, as a friend of mine likes to say. I go to the little help desk and ask "where's humor?" (they didn't get the joke...It was a dumb joke). I head in the direction of the pointing and grunting. I seek. I do not find. I approach another help desk, this one nearer to the section in question. I follow the nice Borders "associate" (when did we stop using "employee" and "clerk," by the way?) over to the section I was just examining, where she proceeds to look for Fake Steve's book on the same shelf I was. Apparently, alphabetical order is still alphabetical order. Glad I'm not crazy. "Let me go ask if anybody has seen it," she says. "Um. Okay," I reply. Now I don't think that I'm expecting miracles. I just want to know if they have a certain book. After about five minutes the (ahem) "associate" comes back with a "I don't think we have it, but we can order it for you." ...to which I reply (admittedly snidely) "If I had wanted to order it, I would have done so from the comfort of my own home from Amazon. Thanks for looking."

I have questions. Why do the Borders associates clearly have no access to inventory numbers? Why could she not tell me "we have two copies." I can understand having difficulty finding a specific volume, what with the abundance of end caps and special tables in the book stores these days. How hard is it to track inventory? Isn't that what those neat shiny computer doodads they have scattered all over the store are supposed to be good at? Grrrrr.

Shipley! Make a distributed version of Delicious Library or something. These people need help.