Women’s Wear Daily and People Magazine as Fine Literature or, Door County’s Questionable Literacy

[Note: Early this year I asked readers to suggest some of their favorite columns from the past to celebrate 20 years of writing this column. Aside from some of my April Fool’s columns, the following seems to have stuck in people’s minds more than most. It originally appeared in the Door Reminder on July 31, 2001, and the events described happened in my old bookstore in downtown Sister Bay.]

One of the things the tourist season brings is longer hours for the stores and the bookstore is no exception.

As I think those of you with some longtime familiarity with the Door County tourist season can imagine, evenings in the stores can prove to be very, very interesting. So allow me to share what has become one of my all-time favorite interesting stories from my ever-growing compendium of Door County retailing adventures.

The weather on this particular day was warm, but comfortable and, as evening rolled around, the temperatures were delightfully mild – the kind of evening you can walk around in short sleeves and shorts, or a long sleeve cotton shirt and slacks and be comfortable with either ensemble. It was an ideal night for strolling through Sister Bay after a meal and doing a little shopping and I was being kept quite busy (to the delight of my many, many creditors).

So with the scene now set we can turn to the actual events. At slightly after 8 pm, two young men, probably 16 and 14 years of age, strolled into the store. A nicely dressed gentleman, that I took to be their father, came in a few minutes later. After doing a quick survey of the store and realizing that there was no one who was on the verge of checking out their purchases and no one, seemingly, who was about to approach me to ask if I had “that book by that woman who was on one of the talk shows about three weeks ago that’s on dieting and has a blue cover,” I grabbed my coffee cup and headed back to the office for a fresh cup.

It was while I was adding some creamer to my cup that I heard a rather loud and new voice in the store, but since things didn’t seem too out of control I finished pouring my coffee and went to the computer to print out the order I would place after I got home later that night.

One of the little features in the bookstore’s office is a window that looks out into the store (my father had this installed so that when he was writing his column he could still keep an eye – sort of – on the store). So when I sat down to print out my order I glanced out the window and noticed that the loud voice I had heard was coming from a rather attractive blond woman in a turquoise blue pants suit. From my vantage point, it seemed that she was the wife of the nicely dressed gentleman I had spotted earlier and, presumably, the mother of the two boys who had entered the store just before I went to get my coffee.

When the pages began to issue forth from the printer I noticed the pants suit woman seemed agitated as she paced about the store, so – being the dutiful store owner that I am – I grabbed my coffee mug and returned to the sales floor.

As I began walking toward the front counter the blond in the blue pants suit stopped, put her hands on her hips and, after one more rather frantic survey of the store, caught my gaze and held it.

“Can I help you find anything?” I asked as I approached her.

“Yes,” she replied, almost breathlessly. “Where are your magazines?”

I should interject an aside here, folks. My store doesn’t carry magazines. You see, I worked in a bookstore in Chicago that had an entire wall of magazines. I know all about magazines. I know about the lousy discount on magazines. I know about the incredibly high maintenance they require on the shelves. I know all about the annoying “subscription cards” that get all over the floor and the racks and everything else. I know how much time is required to process the returns. I know about … well, you get the idea: I know all about magazines in a retail environment!

So, returning to my story, when this blond woman in the turquoise blue pants suit asked me where the magazines were, I (with a restraint that you now can fully appreciate) replied simply, “I don’t carry magazines. I’m sorry.”

Over the course of my years of not carrying magazines I have seen and heard a variety of responses from customers who suddenly discover they will have to go elsewhere for their periodical fix but, in all honesty, I was not prepared for what happened next.

Just so we are clear here, folks, the setting is this: the blond woman in the turquoise blue pants suit is standing approximately one third of the way into my store in the center aisle, I am standing approximately 5 feet from her, and the store has about 12 people, in addition to the pants suit woman’s family, standing in various locations surveying all manner of books on the walls and on the free standing displays.

So on hearing my reply, the blond woman in the turquoise blue pants suit throws her arms in the air and exclaims in a voice loud enough to capture the attention of everyone in the store (in addition to several people out on the street), “You don’t have magazines! Doesn’t anybody in Door County read?”