Disorderly Conduct

So apparently the past year has been a bit tough on my employer what with competition from online marketplaces and other giant corporate bookstores. In an attempt to set themselves apart, they have recently decided to focus on "G.R.E.A.T" customer service (and yes, that does stand for something). This means that every customer entering the store must be greeted within 6 seconds and asked an open-ended question so that they can't get away with a simple "yes" or "no". At first, I thought that this was just incredibly annoying for both the customer and myself...ok. I still think it is annoying though sometimes I can get a bit of a laugh out of the confusion on people's faces when I ask "what brings you in today?" and they stumble over how to make "no thanks" the answer to that question.
The fact is that despite how obnoxious I seem when I leap out from behind a table of books to accost you as soon as you come in...you are going to need me. And the reason: It is really f-ing hard to find a book in this store.
Now one of the things that shocked (and bored) me when I started working here was the amount of time spent on training. I think the grand total came to 30 hours. And I am pretty sure that at least 8 of those hours were spent going over the nifty search engines that will magically help us to help you find the book you are looking for. Ha. Even if I manage to put together the perfect string of words and find what I am looking for, the system might tell me to look in "business" but may not specify to look in the "leadership" section within the business section. Or it may tell me that the book has been put on one of the special tables out front so that I am forced to wander aimlessly through the front of the store trying to search out one title amidst piles of un-alphebetized merchandise.
But then there is the wonderful moment when the system tells me that the book is in "computer programming" and "Java" and I know just where that is and I lead the customer there with a bounce in my step...only to find that all of the books in that section are dreadfully out of order and so a book by "Allen" is not in fact at the beginning of the section, but buried somewhere near the end. Yes, it is true. We have forgotten how to alphabetize. At least that is what I thought until I realized that the biggest problem area is the "Erotica" section. Think about it for a minute: You pick up "How to Have Great Sex" just to take a peak, but then forget exactly where you got it from and suddenly other people are walking by and you just want to get that book out of your hands and back onto the shelf as fast as possible!
It is all about time really.
See, most books either get put back on the shelves by customers in a hurry (as in our erotica example), or reshelved at the end of the night by employees who just want to get home and whose eyes are blurry from staring at the tiny print on book bindings all day. Thus we have a mess.
The moral of this posting? Hmmm...