chapters on bloor becomes winners

I get the Toronto Star's headlines in my email box every day, but I rarely find time to read them. So I only just discovered that Chapters on Bloor, the venerable mega-bookstore that once had welcoming overstuffed armchairs on the 3rd floor, far away from the cash registers, and where I worked part-time for a year in 2002-03 while I sojourned in Toronto, closed its doors in June!

The only reason this came to my attention now was that the new resident of that space is about to be Winners, the discount emporium of some higher-class merchandise found most often in big suburban malls. It's about to open up on the two-block stretch of downtown Toronto referred to as the closest thing Toronto has to Rodeo Drive or Fifth Avenue. The snooty are up in arms.

So that makes one more former employer's establishment I will never again revisit, another metaphorical bridge burnt, as it were, which makes me a bit nostalgic. Working in a megabookstore was a kind of candy-shop dream job until I'd been at it a couple of weeks. But work is work of course, and the reality is much more painful than the illusion. Seven-hour shifts on one's feet, walking customers through the stacks back and forth, wheeling 2-ton trolleys of new hardcover stock to their places on the shelves at the height of the pre-Christmas shopping season, enduring the endless mind-bending torturous loop of Christmas music throughout the decades for nearly two agonizing months -- "not THAT ONE AGAIN!!!!" was all that went through my mind -- answering phone calls, searching the database for titles, finding the book supposedly in stock, but never being able to find the mis-shelved book in actual fact ... and a whole lot of directing people to the washroom, because a lot of people need the washroom when they're in a bookstore and come all the way to the 3rd floor to find it.

I know the relaxation response that is triggered soon after I start browsing in a bookstore is a peculiar phenomenon I've witnessed repeatedly, to my annoyance. As if the blissful perusal of fresh text is a cue to peristalsis. Bummer. Reminds me of a Seinfeld episode where George took a book to the store bathroom (this was discouraged at Chapters, but impossible to prevent) and the staff obviously labelled it as such, so that he could never return it. So I suppose that would make the phenomenon universal, n'est-ce pas?

I was hired at Chapters exactly three years ago, just as the shopping season was revving up, and worked for close-to-minimum wage until the next Christmas began to loom. By then, three-quarters of the store's staff had turned over, including the management. The complex layout of the different sections of books had been changed several times, and the disorder was making specific titles harder and harder to find. My feet were killing me, and the thought of those terrifying musical loops was beginning to make me nauseous.

It had been a fun ride, but it was time to move on. I said good-bye to the long-suffering "lifers" -- two especially smart guys who had been there years too long (who shall remain nameless, but both were tall, thin intellectuals, one a long-haired scraggy type, the other a short-cropped blond Scandinavian), the smart women who would have been in power jobs if it wasn't a recession (and probably are by now), and the harridan boss [insert here the witch-on-bicycle music from The Wizard of Oz] who took over from the mother-hen manager who was in residence when I was hired.

I was tired of retail, and had had enough. But now I'll never be able to return to the scene. And that's a tiny bit sad. Ciao, Chapters.