Characters: Teagan Mitchell & (OPEN!) Setting: Axis City Books Content: Family friendly unless someone decides to be a pottymouth. Summary: Random retail interaction? I got nothing thus far.
After setting her bag down in the back office and pulling her hair up out of her face a final time, Teagan ventured forth onto the main sales floor. There weren't many customers milling about at that moment, which wasn't exactly unusual for an early Thursday afternoon. Most people ate during their lunch hours and did their book shopping after work, or on the weekends. If past weeks had been any indication, it was going to be a dull day.
Still, it was so much better than her shortlived job at Sips & Stems, a local coffee store/flowershop hybrid two blocks West of the college campus that also sold various types of herbal tea. Teagan had lasted a little less than a week there. Somehow, most of the floral arrangements had died inexplicably during that time, and the shop had also been investigated for reports of mild food poisoning. Whoever heard of food poisoning from coffee? It wasn't as though Teagan had been blamed for any of this (though she suspected that her black-as-pitch thumb might have had something to do with the bad luck of the flowers), but the shop lost a good deal of business and couldn't afford to keep her on. After two days' worth of absentee customers, all of the newer hires had been asked to leave. Teagan had been the newest, so was duly numbered among them.
She hadn't been sorry to go. Wilting flowers aside, pulling coffee wasn't anybody's idea of a dream job. Within seven days, she'd managed to scald herself five times. There was also a talent to executing complicated orders in a time-efficient way that she utterly lacked. So it had really beeen a blessing when one of the bookstores she was applying to responded to her resume, rescuing her from any further humiliations in the barrista or flower arranging trade.
Her shift manager was an utter pill, and seemed to have something personal against her, but other than that the job at the bookstore wasn't particularly aggravating. Dealing with customers had its moments, but most of the time Teagan's actual work consisted of losing herself in sorting, re-shelving, and various menial inventory tasks. Scanning in new product, making sure everything was properly tagged and shelved, and then occasionally sneaking off to flip through a newly released genre novel. Once she'd clocked in, she was sent out on the floor to offer people help and collect any misplaced books while her co-worker ran the till. Nope, nothing much to complain about here. In theory, she was also supposed to be keeping an eye out for shoplifting, but who in their right mind stole books? It wasn't as if they had any true resale value, and most of the shop's inventory was used to begin with. So Teagan admittedly wasn't keeping an exceptionally close eye on the few patrons who were about.