I will never enter another Barnes & Noble again.

Today I went to get a book from Barnes & Noble. After wandering for ten minutes looking for the right section, I couldn’t find the book anywhere. You see, it’s not that the shelves are disorganized; they are organized. It’s just that they are organized completely illogically. Obviously, the staff at Barnes & Noble are possibly illiterate and probably have never heard of library science. So, when I went to the information desk to ask the disgruntled employee to search for the book for me, she was perfectly unhappy to do so. I asked her to search for the title Flesh and Spirit. None of the books listed under that title or under any of the other searches that we tried matched that description. Not wanting to tax the skills of this obviously well-trained customer service representative any further, I exercised my prerogative as a consumer in a capitalist nation and drove one hundred yards down the street.

There I entered Borders Books and Music. I passed through the lobby, which unlike Barnes and Noble was not cluttered with cheap picture books for illiterate people, and entered a large room with books stacked neatly on well-arranged shelves. A quick perusal of some of the shelves that I passed revealed several classic titles in attractive editions that I was interested in and not lopsided piles of Arts and Crafts for Dummies and such like. I went to one of several computer kiosks and this time I typed in the title Flesh and Spirit myself. (At least this time I could be sure that it was spelled correctly.) Lo and behold! the first title on the list was Spirit and Flesh. I had the title backwards, but somehow the Borders computer was smart enough to know exactly what I was looking for anyway. The computer gave me all the relevant bibliographical and price information and even gave me an exact location for the book (section 2a, shelf F1). Two minutes later I had the book in hand and could have been out the door minutes later. However, I stayed for another ten or fifteen minutes just looking at the books in the religion section. Unlike Barnes & Noble, whose religion section consisted primarily of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Zen Buddhism, there were actually books that a conservative, evangelical fundamentalist could read—even own—with profit. My perusing completed, a happy, smiling, competent (and cute) employee helped me pay for the book while chatting pleasantly. Borders even gave me thirty percent off the next book that I buy there. Since they gave me an enjoyable and profitable book-buying experience, I’m sure I’ll be back to use that coupon. Barnes & Noble ain’t got nothin’ on Borders.

I will never enter another Barnes & Noble again.

Disclaimer: This post is the first in the new category entitled “My Two Cents.” Posts like this one will be so labeled, not so that you can seek them out but so that you can seek to avoid them. I will try to keep the number of these posts to a minimum.