Los Angeles, 1994–1999: An English Major Sells Literature as “Product” at Waldenbooks.
Back in the 1990s, as an undergraduate majoring in English at UCLA, I landed a job at Waldenbooks — that bygone chain of bookstores that once occupied a ubiquitous presence in malls across the nation.
For some, Waldenbooks was a bit like the K-Mart of bookstores. But, for me, Waldenbooks was nothing less than the perfect job. Located in the Westwood neighborhood of West L.A., “my” Waldenbooks was just walking distance from my tiny off-campus studio. Of course, the virtue of my new gig went far beyond the convenience of it’s location. As an English major, my passion for the literary expressed itself in a borderline-obnoxious tendency to quixotically immerse myself in anything and everything related to the world of books. So what better place to take on a college job than at a bookstore? — even if it was the K-Mart of bookstores!
You won’t find the position on my resume, but I worked as a “bookseller” at Waldenbooks for 5 years. I started in 1994 at $4.75 an hour. I left my job in 1999. It was a timely exit. By the late 90s, the majority of Waldenbooks stores had already been closed down, replaced by the company’s transition to the larger — now also bygone chain — of Borders bookstores.
I was sad to leave. I was moving on to graduate school. And yet my tenure at Waldenbooks remains one of the more meaningful and transformative experiences of my life.
I could in fact write a whole book about what it meant to sell books at Waldenbooks. And someday, I hope to write that book. It was, among other things, a rich experiential education in the professional basics of work in a service economy: In the joys and challenges of working with customers, negotiating return policies, up-selling and sales quotas — a compendium of memories punctuated by mandates like these:
“Matson, make sure to recommend Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus to anyone shopping in the “relationship section.”
Or…
“Matson, that same customer left empty beer cans in the Cliff’s Notes again. He never buys anything. You need to watch him like a hawk!”
And…
“Matson, make sure to sell at least 3 ‘Waldenbooks Preferred Reader Card’ memberships today!” (Never mind the fact that customers could actually get a better deal without paying for a membership at the “Crowne Books” bookstore down the street!).
Then there was the vigilant commitment to “loss prevention” — an imperative that entailed more than a few awkward encounters with potential and actual book thieves. Like the time a security guard came in to have me ID a tightly handcuffed and (rather pathetically) embarrassed magazine thief. The suspect had been caught running out of my store, surreptitiously bearing multiple copies of PC Magazine.
And because my store happened to be located in West L.A., there was also the necessity of exercising proper etiquette around celebrity customers. I learned, for instance, that those who work retail in Los Angeles should never tell Barry Manilow that “the restroom is for employees only.” Luckily, I did not make the same mistake with Jeff Bridges. It’s one thing to deny Manilow access to the restroom — but I could never deny the man who played “The Dude” in The Big Lebowski. No matter how many celebrities walked through our doors, I never did learn to contain my excitement around personal favorites like Bob Hoskins and Barry Gordy, not to mention Dustin Hoffman (a personal hero — I actually held his Amex card!).
Of course, most of the time, work at Waldenbooks lacked the latter excitement. Usually, the daily round consisted of predominantly quotidian duties: Counting out registers, bank runs for more change, re-shelving the hourly mess known as the “children’s book section,” and the occasional venture in retail merchandising. Ever set-up a cardboard Goosebumps book display? I have — lots and lots of them. I have in fact constructed all manner of low-tech merchandising signage. It’s much harder than you might think. Then there’s the pressure that attends the unexpectedly vague mandate for creative design, like the time my manager said, “Matson, go do something interesting with that new shipment of John Grisham product.”
I want to pause on this last memory — particularly on the word “product.” For my manager’s reference to the “shipment” of John Grisham novels as “product” inaugurated another lesson: The larger significance of the language — the so-called “jargon” — employed in different professions. Now, before I dive too deeply into the issue of jargon, John Grisham deserves a brief introduction — particularly for Millennials who may be too young to remember Grisham’s rise to success in the 1990s.
Grisham, a former lawyer who left the profession to take on a career as a novelist, wrote “legal thrillers” that pursued a persistent theme: The drama of lawyer-protagonists who, despite all manner of criminal corruption in the legal system, maintain a heroic commitment to the higher ideals that originally drew them to the legal profession. Most of Grisham’s extremely popular novels were quickly turned into extremely successful films. My personal favorite is Sydney Pollack’s 1993 adaptation of The Firm, starring Tom Cruise as the idealist lawyer. Then again, Francis Coppola’s perfect, 1997 take on Grisham’s TheRainmaker — with Matt Damon and Claire Danes — is pretty great. Then there’s Alan Pakula’s somewhat under-appreciated 1993 adaptation of The Pelican Brief — with Denzel Washington and Julia Roberts. In any event, I like Grisham’s books and many of the movies that followed. And at bookstores — especially in the mid 90s — the release of a new Grisham “product” represented a major event.
Now, as an English major — and a fan of Grisham — I saw Grisham’s books as novels. So I was a bit taken aback when my boss — in his specific role as a bookstore manager — referred to John Grisham’s books as “product.” And, yes, that’s “product”in the singular, not plural “products” — a tense which would at least have the virtue of acknowledging each book’s singular status as one of many “product units.”
Of course, differences between words like “novel” and “product” may seem slight enough, even trivial. Perhaps I was just being the typically touchy English major: Overly sensitive to details of diction. Who was I to attach so much importance to words? Even Shakespeare questioned their importance — and he did this all the time. Perhaps most famously in Romeo and Juliet, in that commonly quoted line in which Juliet questions Romeo about the importance of names: “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” In other words, Juliet asks, if a rose “by any other name would smell as sweet,” could names really be all that important? After all, if a name does not affect the smell of a rose, then words bear no impact on the reality of things. Juliet’s famous line employs powerful language to indict language itself as nothing more than a trivial invention of human minds. By the same token, wouldn’t a particular John Grisham title, whether labelled a “novel” or a “product,” tell the same story?
Well, yes and no — and there’s the rub.
If, as Shakespeare’s Juliet would suggest, words are fundamentally trivial, why should I care about whether people refer to John Grisham’s books as novels or products? And yet, my experience in the bookstore only proved how differences in language are anything but trivial. In fact, my experience at Waldenbooks only underscored for me how even simple differences in words like “novels” and “product” highlight perspectives based in very real needs and practices specific to distinct professional settings. As an English major, trained in the work of reading books as complex expressions of human experience, I understood books in the more rarefied language of literature and art. My manager, on the other hand, understood books as “products” because this language was useful in his role as a professional hired to oversee the sale of books in a bookstore — especially in a retail environment where “product” served as efficient shorthand for novels, self-help books, magazines, journals, and the many other items sold in the store. The key is that the differences in language reflect differences specific to useful distinctions of training and practice in a particular professional field.
Now, differences in word usage are significantly more dynamic and complex than they may seem in the latter example. For one thing, my manager — Dan (I will preserve the anonymity of Dan’s last name) — did not always go around referring to novels as “product.” I know this because Dan was and remains a good friend. I first met Dan through common friends on a river-rafting trip. So I knew Dan before he ever hired me at Waldenbooks. And, during that time, we had occasion to talk about “novels.” That’s right: Outside of work, Dan referred to novels as novels. And Dan loves to read — he loves novels. If I wanted to look through Dan’s signed, first-edition copy of John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany (great book, by the way), I would not ask Dan for permission to peruse his “high-value edition of John Irving’s Owen-Meany product.”
My surprise in Dan’s use of the term “product” came when I worked with him in his professional role — a role in in which he assumed a language different from that he used in non-professional life. The shift in terms does not expose some devious duplicity in Dan’s personality. To a greater or lesser extent, we all “code switch”: We all use different language in different contexts, often professionally. At work, we “talk shop,” and enter into a new language of technical terms and “jargon” that are useful to the needs of the profession.
Still, as an English major new to the world of retail and book selling, Dan’s reference to novels as “product” struck me as slightly profane. I say “profane” because the word “product” seemed like such a limited designation, one that destroyed so much of the meaning “novels” had come to assume in my experience of the term. Sure, John Grisham may not be Shakespeare. But, then again, who is? Grisham tells great stories. And I thought his novels deserved recognition beyond reduction to undifferentiated commodities.
Simply put, my confrontation with the norms of the bookstore business began with my sense of feeling slightly “offended” by the term “product.” And while innocent enough, that sense of offense felt real nevertheless. As simple as it may have seemed, Dan’s references to “novels” as “product” implied a completely alternative value system — a whole different way of looking at the meaning of books, a transition from a vision of books as collections of human stories to a vision of books as commodified sources of mass revenue. I joked at Dan’s comment, “John Grisham product”? You mean his novels?” I remember Dan’s sarcastic response, something along the lines of “Oh yes — sorry, Mr. English major — I mean the John Grisham novels.”
Despite my initial impressions, I would later come to understand that I was, in many ways, the one with limited views in this scenario. That is, the real limitations in language emerged in my own reductive commitment to referring to books in singular terms like “novel.” After all, my manager did not lack the vocabulary or perspective to understand that novels were more than mere “product.” Rather, his professional experience in retail only expanded his lexicon and thus his perspective. I was the one who possessed a limited language for understanding books, not my manager.
And, ironically, it was my growth as an English major that helped me realize the limitations of my own views. Contrary to popular perceptions, studying English is about much more than reading lots of “great literature” and writing essays that employ proper grammar. The profession of English scholarship is in fact much more concerned with the ways in which language shapes our sense of the world. How we see reality — even everyday objects like books — is determined largely by the words we choose to refer to things in the world around us.
In fact, it was my time as an English major that taught me how a writer like Shakespeare could provide new insight into the relationship between words and world. Take a closer look, and we soon see the problematic assumptions at play in Juliet’s famous take on language: Yes, a rose by “any other name” may “smell as sweet”; however, referring to a rose by “any other name” will still shape our perception of that rose. For instance, if we were to call a “rose” a “thorny stem adorned with red petals,” the shift in labels would likely entail a significant shift in perception.
Simply put, words have real effects. Juliet’s naive attempt to disregard the importance of “names” speaks to her deeper wish to escape the social world — the social world of traditions and rules that keeps her and Romeo apart. It’s this same social world that relies on language to label people with names like Juliet Capulet and Romeo Montague — names that make their love for one another forbidden. Juliet’s desire to reject language reflects her need to escape with Romeo into a private lovers’ world all their own, a world unfettered by the social rules and traditions inherited through legacies of language and family names. Yet, as Romeo and Juliet learn — and as Shakespeare teaches us — words are more than superficial labels. Rather, the words society uses to articulate and understand the world, whether in names like “Capulet” and “Montague” or in terms like “novels” and “product” are themselves real things deeply intwined within the fabric of social reality. And, as such, words have very real effects. Words do not merely represent things in the real world; instead, words constitute our experience of reality itself. Differences in word choice may be arbitrary, but they are by no means trivial.
My experience in retail taught me a related, yet slightly different version of this lesson. Unlike Juliet, I believed — and still believe — in the real effects of language. It was precisely my belief in the relevance of language that caused me to take offense at Dan’s reference to novels as “product.” In my eyes, to view John Grisham’s novels as “product” entailed the reduction of a human story into the “inhumane” status of commodity object.
I still believe that words shape our sense of the world. Yet I also now understand the limitations once at work in my previous tendency to reject different forms of professional language: Dan’s capacity to adapt the language of business to his understanding of novels did not entail a reduction, but an expansion of what these books might be. The diverse terms employed in professional language offer new and fresh views into the nature of things. Professional “jargon” does not reduce, but rather expands our understanding.
For marketers engaged in the creation of written content for diverse B2B markets, effective writing requires a deeper appreciation for the meaning and relevance of professional “jargon.” Doing so involves the ability and agility to traverse across diverse professional worlds, to see beyond the perceived boundaries of unfamiliar professional terminology.
To describe the ethical ideal of “global citizenship,” philosophers like Anthony Appiah have used the word “cosmopolitan.” Comprised of the Greek roots for “citizen” (polites) and “cosmos”(or “kosmos,” a term that implies an expanded sense of the world or universe), the word “cosmopolitan” translates roughly to “universal citizen.” Accordingly, as an ideal, cosmopolitanism involves an openness to seeing the world from a universal point of view — that is, a vantage that aspires to see the world from beyond the limits of one’s particular national or cultural background. As I see it, written content in B2B marketing requires a parallel cosmo-professionalism: Open appreciation and curiosity for the ways in which the language and “jargon” of different professions can broaden and deepen our sense of the world around us.
