Garish
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I finally found time to sit down and go through some fan emails I’ve been harvesting for a while and adapting them into comics. Shawn sent me a great story here:
“I work almost exclusively in our music department and it really does feel like its own separate store over there. It functions totally differently than the book floor. One day our regional manager decides to pop on for a visit and decides that the music section feels a bit cramped so he asked us to 2 remove 2 entire fixtures from the middle of the department. So of course they do it. We just lost 4 end caps and 4 bays worth of space. Now everything else has been crammed onto the remaining fixtures, I have moved vinyl twice in 3 months and the best part and the whole reason I want to share this with you; Under the fixtures the carpet from 10 years ago was still there. So in the middle of the flat green the rest of music has are what look like 2 giant capital letter I’s made of this off yellow carpet with bluish green swirls. It is so ugly it doesn’t even match its self much less the green carpet of the rest of the department and the orange linoleum that was just had put down on our counter in music. A true and total mess.”
For a lot of employees who’ve worked for The Bookstore for over a decade or more may remember the old carpets. They were not the kindest to the eyes. When the new carpet replaced the old a lot of what happened was the old carpeting was cut around existing displays and new materials added after. Those displays still contained the hideousness of The Bookstore years of the past.
Things change and fixtures and shelves will move from time to time unearthing things best left in the past. Shawn’s email jogged my memory of moving displays and finding old carpets like that. There was plenty of carpet uncovering when I was closing down the Westgate store and here and there a display moved at Stevens Creek to reveal more ugly carpet. Bright, garish patterns and uncomfortable colors, the decision years ago to change it all to a boring green was for the best.
Thanks for the email, Shawn!!
