About 20 years ago, a friend of mine worked at a beloved bookstore in my town. It was a family owned bookstore, with just two or three outlets across the city--something unheard of today or even yesterday. First the family owned bookstores fell to the chain bookstores, and now the chain bookstores have fallen to the internet and digital media. How things change.
My friend was a literature nut, so this small but packed bookstore was the perfect place for her to work. They wanted people working there who were well read and could talk intelligently about books and make good suggestions to the customers. She fit the bill.
What she wasn't so good at was doing math in her head. They had a cash register--old timey of course--and a calculator for figuring out sales tax. But they didn't want the employees using the calculator. They wanted them to figure all this out in their head. I had been a customer there for years and never knew this, until my friend told me. Unfortunately, my friend didn't last long there, because she could not do the math in her head. Her stomach would get tied up in knots everytime she had to ring someone up.
How stupid of the store, I thought. Doing math in your head has nothing to do with reading books. I don't know whether this ridiculous policy had anything to do with them going out of business, but maybe. If they were this stubborn about the calculator, what else were they stubborn about? I felt bad for my friend. She lost a job, and they lost a valuable employee. Even if they didn't know it.
Today, of course most establishments, bookstores or otherwise, have POS systems to make their checkout and sales easy. I would hate to think of the messes there would be today if stores insisted on employees doing the math in their heads.
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