In the world of accommodating the public, be it shops,
cafes, theatres or whatever the question of what is banned where is an
interesting one and something that a lot of the big chains just don’t tell you.
Going back to the 1970s we had some bookshops in
Hertfordshire and didn’t ban anything until about 1975, after a particularly
bad year on the public behaviour front, summarised thus:-
Customer burnt hole in carpet with cigarette.
Customer exploded cardboard cup of cola over motoring book
section.
Dog cocked leg at set of encyclopaedias.
The last straw with this was finding someone’s half eaten
fish and chips on top of a shelf of books, needless to say the grease from them
had soaked into the books.
Overall people eating and drinking in the bookshops caused
the most damage in terms of cost and insurance claims or not claiming and
covering the cost, so as not to increase the premium.
Anyway we decided to try banning the whole lot, food, drink,
dogs and smoking expecting some sort of slump in book sales, strangely enough
sales actually rose after the ban, so we have stuck with it since then.
I have a sign on the shop door that says something along the
lines of, no smoking, food, drink or dogs and have had with the various
bookshops I have run since the 70s.
The main justification here is that books are made of paper
and you can’t get paper cleaned easily.
The main area where I occasionally have issues is “No Dogs
Allowed” something I think is pretty strange as if you take a dog shopping you
soon find out that the dog just won’t be allowed in most shops, so taking one
into a shop with a sign on the door saying no dogs seems pretty strange
behaviour.
Smoking, of course, has been banned by the government. The
vaping i.e. various forms of electric cigarette is a very grey area where some
places allow it and some don’t but very few have signs saying it isn’t allowed.
The other side of all this is what your other customers feel
comfortable about, the sharp end of this being that not everyone wants to
browse with someone else’s pit bull investigating their shopping.
On the food and drink front these days a lot of bookshops
seem to be moving in the direction of being a café or bar that sells books. I
think this is mostly about profit margins and certainly not a road I want to go
down.
Something I did find interesting though is that theatres
seem to be moving towards banning eating during the performance, see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-39126467
I don’t think dogs are generally allowed in theatres, I
suppose the barking would put the actors off.
Then of course we come to the whole technology thing, with
pretty much everyone now carrying a smartphone, which contains not only a phone
but, camera, video recorder, television and music player, we are in all sorts
of grey areas.
The one I come across most often is people being asked not
to take photos or video things, as the cameras in smartphones become faster and
work better in lower lighting conditions though, it is becoming progressively
more difficult to tell if people are taking photos or sending a text.
Fortunately this doesn’t affect me in the bookshop, where I expect people to
take photos of the books, look them up to see if they can get them for a better
price elsewhere, or just look at photos of which books they have already got at
home, so they know which ones to buy in the bookshop.
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Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.