How We Did It

Sometimes I like to tell the story about how these young punks came down to Oakland so they could take a look at our book packaging and shipping operation. This was back in the day when "we" were Bookpeople, an employee-owned book wholesaler who specialized in the kind of stuff you might expect to find in a business run by Berkeley folks. Which it was. Owned and run. And these upstarts from up north wanted to see how a bustling distributor like us could move so many boxes of books out the door every day? Bring 'em on.
The punchline being that they were thinking that selling books over Al Gore's Internet might be a good business model and we scoffed quietly behind their backs as they looked at our shrink-wrapping apparatus. Didn't they know we were getting by on the razor-thinnest of margins and they wanted to ship a book or two at a time to private customers. Didn't they know there were these giant bookstores like Barnes&Noble and Borders out there just waiting for our best customers the neighborhood bookstores to make a tiny mistake? How could they compete.
Take a look around and see how many Borders or Barnes&Noble you can spot on your store locator app. Borders? Well, you know, nothing Borders stays. And those neighborhood bookstores? Good luck.
Meanwhile, those same young punks have figures out a way to sell you just about anything on Al Gore's Internet. How do they do it? Volume, volume, volume. They can be like Costco at the very same time they are pretending to be the corner drugstore. Need some toothpaste? Don't worry, we'll run it right over. Or someone will. In a hurry.
Which brings me back to Bookpeople. Back in my warehouse days we had a rubber stamp that we used to place in red ink at the top of special orders. These were the "SPRI" or Speical Priority orders. As my erstwhile minions scurried about the shelves and stacks compiling the titles requested by those sellers, the less-than-SPRI orders sat beneath, waiting and hoping for their chance to see daylight. Picked, pulled, packed and shipped. My absurd goal each day was to clear all the tiers from those dot-matrix printed order sheets. Quitting time was when the UPS driver came to pull our forty foot trailer out of the bay. Every box out the door was a dollar in our pocket.
Of course we rushed around. We were all shareholders in the company, so if we skipped a break to get one more book out the door, there was some honor in it. Amazon workers don't own their own company. They don't have a union. Somewhere out there, a warehouse worker in a yellow vest is rushing now to a shelf to grab a copy of The Celestine Prophecy,  a book that was being sold out of the trunk of the author's car before young punks like Bookpeople picked it up and turned it into a bestseller. And right after that, they're headed across the warehouse to snatch a value-pack of Total Health Crest to fill out that order.
All. My. Fault.