Opinion – Support your High Street – Local retailers and small shops

 

 

 

 

 

Opinion – Support your High Street – Local retailers and small shops.

Fantastic opinion piece from Eddie Olliffe on supporting local businesses – this retailers thanks him for his support and thanks all my customers for their support – please tell others, if each customer to a local business took one friend in with them imagine how we could grow our local businesses and in turn our local communities by regenerating the local economy and growing the availability of employment!
Go on – tell others about your local shops, take them in with you, spread the word – be community.

Some days the dragon wins

There really are some days the dragon wins, and there are some days it just doesn’t win but it chews you up, spits you out and then flame roasts you to top it off! and today was one of those days.

First of all everyone is suffering cold symptoms thus making the day feel full of fun from the start, then its Christmas decoration time (Bah humbug – can we say carbon emmission protocols! what’s with the lights and electricity overuse!) so lights are going up and thats a lot of work for the minions to do – though they seemed to be enjoying it and after decorating one space wanted to continue on! maybe i should get them some elf ears to go with the red noses from the cold symptoms??

So anyway thats all going on and customers are coming in ( that we like) and we are getting on with the serving when in the middle of trying to do one thing, I am expected to  multitask another job. so not fair and the day goes on.

Anyway suffice to say slightly later on we have a minion meltdown – probably caused by an excess of christmas lights and cold symptoms – but one of the minions has a dosey of a meltdown and goes home. Lets hope it all blows over soon and they are back at work as normal in due course as life without minions is so unfulfilling at times.

Anyway life goes on after minion, and I begin to re-enter the order that the computer ate on Saturday – I kid you not, saturday was a busting day – very christmas shopper busy – lots of Military and Steam Engine DVD’s whizzing out the store, along with books,  jigsaws and Paint by Numbers and to top it off I had a spinner and four massive boxes of Velvet Arts delivered – very nice designs of Playboy Bunnies being Exterminated by Daleks whilst Betty Boop stands and screams and Homer Simpson wonders whats going on! hey whizzed out the shop too, well at £1.25 or 5 for £5 they are just too good a bargain to stay still!

So anyway they came in and i had 2 bumper boxes of Fairway Christian Books to get on the system and out, so i duly batch them through like a trojan, all scanned found and entered, and then shelved – I then whizzed on to putting out the 186 secondhand books that were sitting on the counters waiting to be stickered and shelved – did that just to have  a woman bring in 56 Josephine Cox books that then have to be dealt with – and I do, but then someone else comes in with 27 various sci-fi authors, I tell you it was never ending! but by the end of the day it was all done! yahhoo! 

However today i go to do stock re-ordering and find that the fairway books that have been sold are showing as not on the system!!! so i dig deeper as that cannot be right! and sure enough it isn’t right, they are on the system – they are there, i did not dream entering 37 lines oh no – I did indeed enter them but in the wrong darn database! it would seem that there are 2 databases on the system and that on saturday the wrong one was opened for some reason and all the days work was entered onto the old dead database and not the nice new live one! and can they be transferred? no they have to be re-input! 

Still at least it explains why the database seems to sometimes eat titles we know we have had in! They are there in the wrong database! so what causes the wrong database to open occasionally – well on that one we do not have a clue, but at least we now know to check the database first thing in the morning so we can rectify any future fiasco’s like this.

Talking of dragons! 

Anne and Todd McCaffrey’s latest dragons of Pern book is now on the shelves, both American and UK covers are in!

It’s called Dragon’s Fire (ISBN: 978-0345480293) and is priced at £6.99 and is an absolutely brilliant book for Pern fans, what is so brilliant about it for me though is that one of the main characters in it is disabled, he cannot speak, and this really adds some extra dimension to the story. So anyway this is a really good book and well worth a read – I must admit to liking the collaborative books between ms McCaffrey and her son in the pern-verse and this one is good – pop in and get it ( oh and the US cover is much more colourful than the UK edition!).

So anyway that was the fun today, being a bookshopboss is sometimes a lot like work! see you in the shop tomorrow.

http://www.lincolncentralmarket.co.uk
Unicorn Tree Books, Central Market, Lincoln. LN5 7ET
http://www.browseawhile.co.uk
http://www.alsarts.co.uk
http://www.lincolnmarket.co.uk

OOH how time flies & we have an officially nominated charity to support!

Ohh, who knew bookselling could be such hard work, and so grubby, boks just are filthy filthy things – and no thats not a referecne to those black lace books up on the top shelf at the back of the shop, or those paranormal sex crazed vampire novels such as Laurel K. Hamilton and Sherilyn Kenyon & Christine Feehan write, or even the Blaze range of Mills & Boon books, though it could be an apt description – how rude!! no I mean that books are dust gatherers, I reckon even if the building ws hemetically sealed books would still get grubby!
White shirts are out, cream trousers! never, black is the cool and sensible colour of the bookshop manager!
Anyway enough of that, I have in the last three months been busy rejigging the shop so all the books fit and are in some semblence of order! We are almost there with cataloguing and zapping them into the computer system too! it will be great when its done, well one hopes it will.
Last year we gave £87.00 to various charities through the pennies that people are generous to leave behind, so see that addage about looking after the pennies is apt! as after all when I say the pennies left behind I do mean exactly that, that £87.00 was from 1p pieces left over from lots of £6.99 books etc. Actaully we gave more than that but thats the amount that came solely from Customers pennies.
So this year we are doing the same sort of thing but adding a bit more kick and emphasis where we can!
We have read a book (well more than one! but only the one on this subject!) about being socially and ethically good, so we are attempting to redunce our carbon footprint in the shop – turning off equipment we dont use often and just popping it on when we need it! and we are recycling our cardboard and paper and plastics, we also have a recycling4charity collection box for inkjet cartridges and mobile phones and £1.00 for each cartridge and up to £20 for each phone will go to Habitat for Humanity (GB) to help provide low cost and essential housing both in the UK and abroad! so if you are visiting then drop off your old cartridges!
And we are also supporting a great charity called ClearVision – they take ordinary books and using a clear acetate sheet they braille it and then pop it back into the rebound books, this means that these books can be used by both Blind and Sighted readers! so Children can read to parents and parents to children, young people can read to each other or share their books regardless of whether they can see or not! is that not the best idea!! It costs about £7.00 to turn an ordinary childs book into a braille/sighted book that can be used over and over, so we would like it if you would help us support this great endeavour – to that aim we have set up a justgiving charity fund raising page and would love it if you could find it in you to visit and donate! by the way if you are near the shop you can come in and see one of these great books! its really impressive. So come by and visit and find it to help this great charity if you possibly can by going here:

Anyway so thats what we are doing for this year so far, well that and cleaing books and book shelves over and over again!
oh yes and remember to come visit our nearly proper website at http://www.lincolncentralmarket.co.uk if you have the time.
anyway enough from me – have to go runa bookshop by myself again tomorrow and its already very late! ta ta for now!

http://www.lincolncentralmarket.co.uk
Unicorn Tree Books, Central Market, Lincoln. LN5 7ET
http://www.browseawhile.co.uk
http://www.alsarts.co.uk
http://www.lincolnmarket.co.uk