Bookshop Feng Shui, or "Giving the shop a good stir"

I'd like to say that stocktaking is one of those wonderful, quintessential experiences of bookselling, as enjoyable as spending time with a customer and pressing two or three hitherto undiscovered titles in their hand and watching them leave happy. Well, it may be quintessential, but in my experience stocktaking is tedious, laborious, exhausting and deadly dull. So perhaps we're doing it wrong. (Actually, I know doing it wrong. We use the Gardlink system, and unfortunately - and naïvely - we requested the handheld scanners too late this year, so none were available. Consequently we've had to bring the books to the scanner at the till, slowing down the process considerably. We won't do that again. Grrr.) Anyway, there are several upsides to stocktaking (no really). The big one is the opportunity to give the shop a bit of a spring clean, dig into all the dark and dusty corners and re-aquaint ourselves with some of the less popular titles: dust them down (literally in some cases) and bring them blinking out into the light for customers to see. I like to think of it as giving the shop a big stir. Or bookshop Feng Shui. I'm always amazed how even a minor reshuffle on the shelves can result in titles that have sat quietly for months with nary a glance suddenly get picked up and found a new home. So - what other things have we learned from this annual ritual? Books, CDs, etc with no prices on don't sell. Because the vast majority of books that come into the shop have RRPs (Recommended Retail Prices) on the covers, we've been a bit lax in pricing up those that don't. Audio is particularly bad for this. Customers feel uncomfortable when there isn't a price - I guess it breaks a cardinal rule about how a shop is set up (or perhaps they get a bit intimidated because of the old cliché "if you have to ask the price, you can't afford it"). Either way, people can get quite cross when something isn't priced, bringing it to the till and demanding to know what it is. It's been a bit of an eye-opener just how many items weren't priced correctly, so we've been remedying this (he says guiltily). Books wrapped in cellophane don't sell. When we first opened, some of our initial stock orders came in wrapped in cellophane. "Ooh, dead posh" we thought, "That'll keep the books nice" - and promptly put them on the shelf still wrapped. A few seconds thought should have told us that one of the advantages of coming into a bookshop rather than, say, buying off the web is that you can have a good browse of the books. We had a gorgeous Thai cookbook that sat for a year in cellophane and sold 3 days after we took the cellophane off. Slap. We're less precious about unwrapping them now (or - in the case of very delicate, expensive books with cream coloured jackets for example, we'll have two: one wrapped, one for inspection. You can't do that with every book however). Author balances can get out of whack. Some of our juxtaposed authors were out of kilter. For example, we had - inexplicably - 6 titles by Adriana Trigiani and nothing by William Trevor. Now don't get me wrong, Adriana Trigiani is a fine author, and we have some devotees who come into our shop, but I think we have to work harder at the whole Trigiani/Trevor balance here. We're a small shop. I mean, we only stock a maximum of six plays by Shakespeare... Bookshops get really dusty. Boy, oh, boy. I was like a bituminous miner at the end of Sunday... But the biggest discovery is (as last year): we've got too much stock. We knew we had too much stock. We always have too much stock. We probably always will. We love books. We can't help ourselves. We order more of them in than we should do, and I guess we'll just have to do better at selling them...