Take It Off

I stripped at work last night. I came in at 5:15 and was told that I had to strip because no one else wanted to. Nobody likes the way they feel when they strip, so they leave it for the new girl to do. For like an hour, behind the register, I stripped. Customers kept giving me weird looks and asked why. It sometimes got awkward. And I definately didn't like the way I felt while stripping.


Ok ok, enough sillyness. At Borders, stripping is when you rip the covers off paperback books. When the store has too much inventory of certain books that aren't selling, the publishers ask for the excess back. Usually the books that have to be stripped are the silly romance novels, like "Three Nights in Sin" or "The Forbidden Lover". Rather than mailing the whole book back, we rip the covers off and send those. The worst part about stripping is that the cover-less books have to be thrown in the dumpster. They can't be donated or recycled. They have to go right in the trash. Sad. If you've ever looked at the copyright page on the inside of your books, you might have seen a warning like, "If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property". That's because cover-less books are supposed to be destroyed, not stolen and re-sold.

I've had to strip magazine before but it was no big deal. There's something about defacing a book that makes everyone at Borders sad.