Originally Posted by
Drake69
This happened several years ago, but it's something I still feel giddy about. I used to practically live in mall bookstores in the eighties and nineties when I had nothing else better to do, and back then there was B. Dalton Booksellers, Waldenbooks, Border Books, and Tower Records along with the big B&N. Anyway, I wandered into Tower Records to peruse their music and Anime movies, actually having nothing on my mind about books, when I walked past the art book section and stopped.
Now I love hardbacks and all, but I feel an incredible disdain for coffee-table-sized books as a b@stardization of gaudy reading due to their oversized height and overbearing weight, so on the whole I avoid these like the plague. BUT, I suddenly remembered I had found a previous art book called "Nightmares In The Sky" from this very store, which coincidentally, was the last time I had come in here, and decided to see if anything interesting like that showed up again (that book had completely caught me off-guard when it arrived in stores since I never followed any publications for new SK books back then...).
As I looked through the selection, this ugly bright red-and-white monster wrapped in clear plastic fell out of the bottom right corner of the shelf, hidden behind the stack of other books. It had "MY PRETTY PONY" in giant, horrendous letters across its cover, and all I could think of was the glitzy, girly, diabetic-coma-inducing cartoon show and toys that my sister played with, so naturally I was immediately repelled by it. BUT, since my sister's 11th birthday was around the corner, I figured "Cool, here is her gift... she can keep it locked in her room with all her Ponies, Care Bears, and Cabbage Patch dolls and have something to read while she looks at the pictures. I checked the price sticker on the plastic and was equally rewarded with a nice, low, coffee-table book pricing.
$2.50 plus tax - Closeout....... Sweet.
So, I hoisted up this thing and headed to the registers with a corny smile on my face (notice that I never even read the spine, not even ONCE...), and plopped it on the counter. The guy behind the register looked over at my intended purchase....
...and froze, I mean completely FROZE.... with a look on his face like I had just handed him a note saying...
"I HAVE A NUCLEAR DEVICE STRAPPED TO MY CHEST WRAPPED WITH BALL BEARINGS AND RAZOR BLADES AND WANT ALL YOUR GOLD BULLION YOU KEEP IN YOUR SAFE."
Fortunately, the assistant manager happened to be back there as well and told the guy to put the book down and he would handle the transaction. As he did this, I thought, for a moment, this guy might actually start CRYING...
Over some gaudy kids book...
...about glitter-junk...
Ohhhhh-kay.
As he was ringing me up, he then asked me how much I liked Stephen King, which I obviously thought was an odd question, and I told him that he was my all-time favorite writer, to which he responded, "Not surprising".
Curiouser and curiouser.
So, already long story now being shortened, I get this thing home, take it out of the plastic, and set it on the coffee-table for my sis to find when she got home from school later in the day, only to see the spine with "STEPHEN KING" written on it. I opened it up thinking it was probably some author who had the same name, only to find out it was really a King book I had never known about. I went back to TR and chased down the manager and got the backstory to all this.
Apparently the guy behind the counter was a big King collector like me and had ordered the book for himself, but without some sort of special approval he was supposed to have in order to get it (probably from the book dealer he had ordered it from...). THIS time it had pissed off his manager something fierce, so he tried to get the dealer to refund the money back but was refused. AND being that there was no bar code in the computer system for this item, the manager had no choice but to price out the book on the shelf, with the condition that if no one bought the book before the guy's shift ended at noon, he could claim it (and it would be the last order he would ever receive there). I looked at the time on my receipt which read "11:45 AM".
15 minutes later and I would've never even known about this book. Nice.
So... why was the price so low I asked? Since it wasn't bar coded it had to be earmarked as a special order, the only cost attachment he could find was the shipping on the item since the approval situation had been bypassed (something about the cost of the book going against the company rather than the store I guess...), so he marked it out to the only pricetag he had for it, which was $2.50 + 4.5% sales tax.
WOW.
And he wouldn't go into any details on why they didn't fire the guy, just that he was reprimanded. As if losing a limited-run SK book to a customer wasn't bad enough.