Shenanigans!

Borders and their minion Waldenbooks have irked me. That's right - irked. I don't particularly like Waldenbooks in general because the selection is lousy. If I want them to order a book and have it sent to me, I'll go to Amazon and get a better price. The staff, in my experience, while nice and earnest, is not very knowledgeable of the books they stock. Perhaps it's the categorization system they use and all of the other miscellaneous places that books can be displayed, but they can never find anything. Last week I asked if they had a particular book. The woman helping me looked it up in the computer and told me that the computer told her that they might have it. What kind of system is that? What kind of inventory system gives book statuses as might be in stock? Do they have other statuses such as likely in stock, not likely but not impossible, or even probably, but I'm not going to tell you where? Well today, they pushed me over the edge. I get the weekly coupons from Borders which work at Waldenbooks. One of the coupons was worth $2 off of a fiction book. I took a book and the coupon to checkout and the lady at the counter said that I had a Fantasy book; the coupon is only good for fiction. I won't even go into how many responses went through my head in the next second. She seemed like a nice old lady, so I only said that fantasy is fiction. She said the book had to come from the fiction section. I'm giving Waldenbooks the benefit of the doubt here. I assume that they don't actually think that all of the sub-genres of fiction aren't actually fiction. I've read some pretty interesting stuff with a very strong leaning towards sci-fi and fantasy and I would be a bit worried if it weren't actually fiction - no matter how cool some of it is. Waldenbooks, you just continued to disappoint me, but Borders, you have taken a huge step back that took me close to five years to be willing to go back into one of your stores again. Granted, that was because you were half an hour closer than Barnes and Noble, but I say this to you now. I am looking forward to the Barnes and Noble opening locally in 2010.