Monday nights are hellacious even on the best of days. All the publishers bring out new titles on Tuesdays, and the store bestseller list changes over, which means that significant portions of the store need to be moved around after we close. To make matters worse, we had a skeleton crew. One person for the registers, one person for customer service, one person for music, one person for café, one manager, and me. I was supposed to be shelving from 6:30 to close, but a bunch of people called out and I had to cover music until 6:30, which resulted in my not having a lunch until then and having to start shelving at 7. Furthermore, there was no one to cover the cash register breaks, which meant I had to take care of it, and there was almost no one to recover the store, which meant I had to stop shelving at 10. So ten shelves' worth of books didn't get done.
Now this isn't the best of days. This wasn't even the best of Mondays. The customer service desk, where all the unsorted crap people leave laying around the store is put, is completely covered with books. The floor in front of the customer service desk is covered with stacks of books. There are carts that are completely filled with stacks of books. None of these have been put away. I have no idea when there will ever be time to put them away. They are languishing in the middle of nowhere where no one will ever be able to find them, and they will result in lost sales every time someone is looking for them and has no desire to look through stacks of probably at least a thousand books in order to locate where they are. It's atrocious.
And the customers are just awful lately. It's pretty telling that Etiquette for Dummies was one of the misplaced books I found tonight (about as far away from its proper location as it could have been). I also had people ask me for a section that was literally right in front of them, proceed to completely fucking trash the thing, walk out with no books, and say loudly and in earshot of me "let's go to Books-A-Million then". Even though, apparently, they had already been there and it didn't have what they were looking for. The least you could fucking do is wait to endorse our competitor until you're out of earshot of the worker you just interrupted.