Seven Oaks Magazine.

When I started working at Chapters in 1999, I was 18 and very naïve. It was my first job, and I often wonder what exactly I expected from it at the time. Certainly, it only took a few months before my expectations changed considerably. Although I had more control over my workplace than most of my co-workers, because I worked in a recessed and relatively under-supervised section, from the start I still found the control my employers had over me stifling and frustrating. I left Chapters soon after it became Indigo (or at least a subsidiary), and was glad to leave. Things had become considerably worse at my store after the take-over; it was clear that Chapters, and box-store book retailing in general, was turning an important corner. Recently, with the completion of a process of mechanisation that began just before I left Chapters, this corner was fully turned, and book retailing in Canada is joining the majority of late capitalism's industries subordinated to machine power.

When I started at Chapters, we were clearly a mechanised workplace. I used a till that did all the math for me, and was attached to an electronic credit card reader that was permanently connected to a bank system through the most advanced of telecommunications. Also, we shelved with hand held scanners, which interacted with an inventory system that was entirely digitised. Finally, our time-clock was electronic as well, and all employees received a unique scan card once they were hired, which they used in a machine that offered instant updates about when we started and ended work in the manager's office.

Despite all of this technology, the work was largely done at a human pace. We were in charge of our work; we told the computer what to order, we received it, we shelved it, and most importantly, we sold it. If helping a customer took a minute or an hour, we were clearly able to do what was required.

When Heather Reisman and Indigo Books purchased Chapters, however, a new program was in order. Reisman had experience in an industry that has little resemblance to the book industry. (Before becoming the CEO of Indigo, she was in charge of Cott Beverages, a bottler and distributor of soft drinks.) As the participants in the recent boycott of Coca-Cola products can tell you, the beverage industry is one that has perfected the exploitation of its employees. From Taylorisation and mechanisation of their plants - in third world countries almost exclusively - to their willingness to murder union activists, soda companies are dedicated to paving the way for late capitalist management techniques. Soon after her arrival, Reisman brought her experience to bear on Chapters.

The first major change, and the one that convinced me I was ready to go, was the introduction of a "bookmark" system, to allow for the tracking of employee behaviour and the Taylorisation of their selling technique. "Booksellers" (our nominal title, soon to be changed to CSR, or customer service representative) were given a handful of bookmarks with a unique number attached to them. We were ordered to hand these bookmarks out to customers, so cashiers could record the number, and thus our individual sales, in a computer system. First introduced as part of a contest for booksellers - to win, as I recall, a pizza party, piling humiliation upon humiliation - the bookmarks almost immediately became the key element in a new organisation of our workplace. We learned quickly that they would be used to track our efficiency, mostly through the introduction of quotas on sales, in terms of both quantity and quality. Accompanying this was a streamlining of the customer experience as well. Chapters rid itself of its comfortable seating areas, a clear indication that just as we were expected to work faster, customers were expected to buy faster. They were expected to buy from a smaller selection, with thousands of titles dropped over a short period, and they were expected to buy crap that was in no way related to books; Indigo now markets its own bottled water. Of course, a major aspect of this was the introduction of Chapters.ca, a process by which they encourage customers to circumvent the in-store experience, and instead purchase their books from a service with a fraction of the overhead. (Note: They do not pass on the savings.)

At first, this process was dependent on the supervisors for its enforcement. The store I worked in was soon top-heavy with managers, with three floor managers and a general manager augmented by several others in training and a co-GM. These supervisors also lost their assignments in terms of books (they did not do the ordering anymore) and instead became purely supervisors dedicated to managing employees on a minute-to-minute basis. To make this possible, new computer programs were launched that allowed managers to determine our sales at five-minute intervals, compare them to previous years (in the same five minutes!), other stores in the area, and even stores of a similar size in other cities. Soon, budget numbers were hiked up, and stores were punished for not meeting their budget. Usually, decreasing the hours available for employees did this, which was ironic considering the company's need for them to sell the product. Despite enormous employee resistance, especially to the bookmarks, these econometrics did not go away. Instead, by the time I left, they had become key elements in employee management within the company, leading to a series of firings, including those of employees who had been working for more than two years before the introduction of the bookmarks. I left then, in theory on my own accord, but I had become so dedicated to resisting these changes that I was bound to be removed at some point anyway.

That was almost two years ago. Since I left, this process of change has continued along its logical path. Soon after I left, the need to have people managing the employees declined and then disappeared. Indeed, in the (in)famous phrase: "The workers' brains were under the manager's cap." The manager now, however, was in Toronto. This was true of booksellers (pardon me, CSR's) and of managers. CSR's had become extensions of carefully designed displays of limited selections of product, with all of these ideas originating with marketing specialists in Toronto, while the managers were replaced by the econometrics that personnel had become enslaved to. Instead of working to keep their immediate supervisors happy - an experience fraught with abuse, but also filled with opportunities for at least an illusion of humanity - workers were now working at the pace dictated by machines, programmed to ensure a certain number of "turns" of every title in the store (that is, every time a book sells that title "turns" once). Into this system was built an impossible growth pattern: Budgets were determined by the previous year's sales, including a healthy increase. Of course, this meant that meeting the budget from year to year required permanent growth. Chapters had begun the transition to becoming a new type of service sector employer.

It is only in the next few months, however, that this process will officially reach its conclusion. The company has revealed to its employees that it intends to install a new inventory program in its stores, purchased from Wal-Mart. The system offers no control to workers in individual stores, and will not change the selection of product according to the store they are sending the books to, except in terms of size. Thus, the Chapters I worked at, with its huge clientele of students of English as a second language, will lose its selection of ESL textbooks. It will also presumably eliminate several areas that account for a significant portion of the store's sales, including their corporate sales department and the ability of the music section to sell local independent artists' work. All in all, the store is completing its transition from an example of classic capitalist exploitation - that is relying on human skill for the creation of surplus-value - to an efficient, mechanised example of the modern service economy.

At first glance, all of these changes make it appear that profits will be lost through customer dissatisfaction. One reason I wrote this article is to encourage readers to make sure that is exactly what happens. But clearly, these are advantageous changes for the company. Part of this is the layoffs engendered by the changes - certainly there is much less management in the stores, and likely fewer employees as well. The effect on the pace of work is equally important, however. Workers, of course, as well as selling books to create profits for the company, sell books to pay their own wages. Perhaps this is obvious, but by increasing the sales they do in a given hour, salespeople increase the amount of profit they produce, as compared to the portion of the hour dedicated to paying their static wages. Often workers spend significant time fighting for better wages - and at Chapters this would be a worthwhile fight considering the close adherence of wages to the $8 minimum wage (and soon one would expect the $6 minimum). But also significant is the fight for control over the use of these hours. Workers literally trade their health - jeopardised by increased stress and a quickening pace of work, both on the floor and in receiving, where heavy boxes of books can easily cause hernias or worse - for increased profits for their employers. Obviously, this is old news for most industries (just ask workers in the injury-plagued construction and logging industries), and even for most service industry positions (think McDonald's or Wal-Mart). When I started at Chapters, though, I thought it was one of my better employment options. After all, the job appeared to be about books. Ultimately, though, as Chapters' new changes demonstrate, the job was never about books; it was about profits. The changes over the next few months are only the final stage in a process intended to secure as much of these as possible.