HP Sauce

Well that was a very long and tiring weekend of work. We opened at one minute past midnight on Friday night/Saturday morning to begin selling the new Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Considering all three Edinburgh Waterstone’s were opening at the same time and several other bookstores in a relatively small city we didn’t expect a huge amount of people - it was really more of a stunt than anything else. Boy were we wrong.



We thought we’d be finished by 12.30 or so then half an hour to tidy up for the 7am - yes 7am - opening the next morning. Instead we had a queue round the block - we finished serving the last customer at just after 1.30am and got out around 2am. The mood was actually pretty fun, with most folk having a good time and several nice people who actually thanked us for opening at that time of night (thank you). We sold a couple of hundred copies in that time. The very last customer however, was an asshole. He asked for us to look some other books up for him. We told him we were only open for this HP sale and he’d have to come back during normal hours if he wanted other books checked. Then he asked us to get books from the area of the shop sealed off for the evening. When we told him the same thing again he muttered about poor customer service. I pointed out we were open at 1.30 am in the bloody morning - in my book that is damned good service! Some people are never happy. Mind you he was dressed like Gordon Gecko from Wall Street, complete with red braces, so we kind of guessed he was a fuckwit to begin with…Still, at least the sales mean we should get a much-deserved bonus for once.