Life is full of adjustments and compromises, so is the life of a store.

Fifteen years ago, when we moved into this current building, we set up the Shipping and Receiving area. It was a handy arrangement. We could receive deliveries and ship to customers while also being available to help visitors in our bricks and mortar store as well as those on the phone.
In these past fifteen years the numbers of products and sales has increased, as it should have. We now process several times more items in the same space and the same configuration of counters and computers that we did when we moved in here.
It is past time to increase the size of the shipping and receiving area. It is also time to rearrange the store to handle the increased traffic. More space required in Shipping and Receiving, in a building of finite size, requires a reduction of space for other things. We will use the space where the children’s books have been for this enlargement. That means a chain reaction. Children’s books will be moved further back in the store. This means that Fiction, Biographies, Poetry, Cookbooks, and others have to move to make room for Children’s. It’s like the classic slider puzzle game where you need to move other tiles so that you can move the one that you want to move.
These named book categories are in the back of the store. We have begun the process in the front of the store by consolidating the displays of books and gifts to make room for the books that need to be moved so that there will be room for Children’s books to move over a few feet so that the Shipping and Receiving areas can expand.
Life is full of adjustments and compromises, so is the life of a store. Hopefully this adjustment will improve the lives of our customers and of our staff, at least concerning the shopping of books and gifts. We are not decreasing the number of books in the store. We are simply reorganizing them, hopefully for the better.