Bargain Shelves

I wrote this as an email in the middle of last night:

I'm awake at 3 a.m. because I couldn't sleep, thinking about that encounter with the young women living rough who wanted books.

These women had bought beat-up books at Salvation Army downtown, 3 for a dollar---including one shabby volume of the World Book Encyclopedia.

This touches my heart so much, that someone would want a piece of an old encyclopedia.

I've been lying awake thinking about how I could price books lower at SVDP.

And I thought,

Well, why not give my book shop a set of BARGAIN SHELVES?

We box up a TON of beat-up books for recycling. It's a PAIN to box them up, and then they get moved to the warehouse--taking up more time and space.

They don't get shredded (yet)--first they're sold to a re-seller for ...something like a penny per 10 pounds? (I don't know, but not much)--and they sell them on (same as with unsellable clothes & fabrics). No doubt eventually a lot do get pulped.

 

While they're either pretty beat or pretty undesirable, they might go for 33 cents--or some of them might... Color Me Beautiful, from the 1980s? Not sure... 

Some I still wouldn't bother to even try putting out--computer books older than 3 years but not old enough to be kitsch (we get plenty of these) would go straight to the box.

We do have empty shelves in the darkest part of the store, around the corner from the nice books. I wouldn't have to do the work of sorting the bargain books into categories like I do the "nice" books---

I'd just dump them willy-nilly on these bargain shelves.

I'm going to give it a try.

Why not?

So... going back to bed---now I've figured that out maybe I can fall asleep. XO Fresca