I read recently that Barnes & Noble may soon be acquiring Borders. Borders belongs to K-Mart which is now combined in some weird and not very successful way with Sears, and K-Mart is struggling. Sears is doing even worse, much worse, and so Borders is about to go the way of all flesh. When that finally happens, there will be exactly one bookstore in the city of 300,000 where I grew up:

Barnes & Noble. King of the hill.

It wasn’t always that way though. Fifteen years ago, we had lots of bookstores, most of them independently owned and operated.

I actually worked in the last independent bookstore in that city for two of its final three years. At the time that I worked there, the store was not making money on selling books. The reason was that the distribution center gave bulk discounts and early release privileges to the big box stores only. So if a new Harry Potter novel came out, it would show up in Barnes & Noble and Wal-Mart the day before we could even get our hands on it, at 30% off. We would get it the next day, mark it 10% off, and make pennies per book. Sometimes we would go buy a dozen from a big box store just to have a few in stock the same day.

In order to make rent, the owners, two Jewish brothers, decided to sell Beanie Babies too.

Remember Beanie Babies?

Beanie Babies were little bean bag toys shaped like animals. They all had heart-shaped tags attached with their “birth dates” (the first date they were available for sale in stores) and their names written on the tags: Smooshie the Slug, Stinky the Goat, Tickly the Tapeworm, whatever.

Anyway, Beanie Babie birth dates were a huge deal at the bookstore because on those days, hundreds of insane people, mostly adult women, would cluster around the door waiting for the store to open. We had a drill for those days: one beanie per customer, no inspecting dozens of beanies for the best one, and so on, one by one, until everyone was gone from the store. It could take hours.

But the most important rule of all was this:

Never open the door until the beanies are behind the counter and ready to be parceled out one at a time.

The first Christmas season I worked there, a temporary employee who was unfamiliar with the drill opened the doors just as one of the owners was halfway to the counter with a cart filled with Randy the Reindeer (or, Stupid the Snowman, or whatever). Immediately a tidal wave of customers came crashing in, surrounding him on all sides almost instantly, all shoving and yelling and grabbing for reindeer. You could see reindeer flying through the air, but you couldn’t see the owner or much else, just lots of big behinds, lots of shoving and then, not very long into it at all, a bloodcurdling scream,

“My daughter! He shoved my daughter! Police! Call the police!”

Someone did call the police. Or maybe they just heard all the screaming. At any rate, the police were there in seconds. Once they got Randy and his reindeer friends behind the counter we began our routine of parceling them out and ringing them up one by one, and the crowd shifted our direction. But as they queued up at the counter still complaining and cussing, we saw that the owner, two policemen, and two enormously fat older women (apparently the mother and daughter) were still in the center of the store, all attempting to shout over one another.

Finally, the owner was escorted out of his own store and down to the police station. About an hour after that, the last of the beanie psychotics got their Randy the Reindeer, and we spent the rest of the day not selling books and waiting, worrying, and feeling horrible, especially the new kid, who went to lunch later that day and never returned, not even for his check.

When it was almost time to close, a very frazzled owner showed up with a bottle of peppermint schnapps, a box of chocolates, and a weary expression I will never forget for as long as I live.

“They dropped the charges.”

That was all he had to say about it, and none of us pressed him. Sometimes you can look at a person’s face and know that, well, now is not the time. No words are needed. He tossed the box of chocolates at us on the way to the back room with the schnapps, proclaiming as he strode out of sight,

“Merry #@?!* Christmas.”

And to all of us, a good night.