The Shoebox of Handwritten Slips, and Why I Finally Let It Go

I opened a secondhand bookshop in a small town in the Karoo, which everyone I know agrees is a foolish way to try to make a living, and which I would not undo for anything. The town is the sort of place where the main street has a butcher, a hardware store, a coffee shop that opens when the owner feels like it, and now, for the last three years, me, wedged between the pharmacy and a shop that sells everything from wool to fan belts.

I did not open it to get rich. I opened it because my late husband and I had spent thirty years buying books faster than we could read them, and when he died I found myself the custodian of roughly nine thousand of them, and a house that had become a fire hazard. Selling them one by one out of the garage felt like grief. Selling them out of a shop, with a bell on the door and a kettle in the back, felt like company.

How I ran a shop out of a shoebox

For the first two years, my entire business system was a shoebox. I am not exaggerating for effect. It was a shoebox that had once held a pair of veldskoene, and into it went the day's cash and a spike of handwritten slips, each one recording what had sold and for how much, in my own increasingly illegible hand.

I told people this was charming. I told myself it was authentic, that a secondhand bookshop should not have beeping machines, that my customers liked the slowness of it, the way I would lick my thumb and count out change from a biscuit tin. And there was truth in that. But there was also a woman in her sixties standing at a counter every evening trying to reconcile a shoebox of scrawled slips against a fistful of notes, and getting it wrong more often than she would admit.

The wrongness was never large. A few rand here, a slip I forgot to write there. But it accumulated into a low, permanent anxiety. I never really knew what I had sold. I never knew which shelves earned their space and which were just sentiment. At the end of a month I had a rough feeling about how I had done, and a rough feeling is a terrible way to run anything, even a bookshop that exists mostly for love.

The Saturday that broke the shoebox

Market Saturdays are the one day the town fills up. Farmers come in, families passing through on the long road stop for coffee, and my little shop, which on a Tuesday might see four people, suddenly has fifteen at once, all wanting to pay, all wanting to talk, because a bookshop attracts talkers the way a stoep attracts cats.

On one particular Saturday I had a queue. An actual queue, in my shop, which should have been a joy and was instead a small catastrophe. I was trying to add up three books and a map in my head, make change from the tin, remember that the man in the hat had said he would come back for the Wilbur Smith, and write a slip for the woman already leaving with an armful, and I simply could not hold it all. I gave someone the wrong change. I forgot a whole sale. A child knocked the shoebox and a week of slips fluttered under the poetry shelf.

That evening, on my knees retrieving slips from beneath Seamus Heaney, I finally said out loud, to an empty shop, that I was too old and too fond of my customers to also be a human cash register. I could do sums or I could remember faces. I could not do both at once, and the faces mattered more.

Asking the pharmacist next door

I am not a technological person. I want to be clear about that, because the next part might sound as though I suddenly became one, and I did not. I just got tired enough to ask for help.

The young woman who runs the pharmacy next door, who is patient with me in the way you are patient with a slightly stubborn aunt, is the one who talked me through it. She showed me how her own counter worked, how every sale was rung up and recorded without her having to remember a thing, how at the end of the day the machine simply told her what had happened rather than her having to reconstruct it from memory and guilt. When I said that surely such a thing was for proper shops, chemists and supermarkets, not a woman selling used paperbacks, she laughed and said a point of sale system did not care how grand the shop was, that it counted a two hundred rand novel exactly as happily as a box of headache tablets.

She sat with me one quiet afternoon and helped me look at what was involved. I had imagined something enormous and expensive and beyond me. What she showed me was closer to a tablet on a small stand, a little drawer, a way to take a card because half my younger customers had stopped carrying cash and I had been quietly losing those sales for years, waving them off with a vague promise that they could pay me next time.

Letting the shoebox retire

It took me a while to actually do it. I am the sort of person who researches a thing to death and then does nothing, and I circled the decision for weeks. I read more than I needed to about how a small POS system works, what it costs to run month to month, whether a shop as small and slow as mine could justify it. I asked the pharmacist the same nervous questions three times. She answered them three times without a hint of impatience.

In the end it was the card issue that decided me. I did a rough, shoebox-quality estimate of how many sales I had lost over two years to people who only had a card and whom I had let walk out with a cheerful, next time, and the number, even guessed low, was enough to buy a great many books. Sentiment is one thing. Turning away money you need to keep the lights on is another.

So the shoebox retired. I keep it, empty now, on a shelf behind the counter, next to a photograph of my husband, because it did honest service for two years and I am sentimental about objects. But the day's actual counting is done by a quiet little POS point of sale system that sits unobtrusively by the till and asks nothing of my memory at all.

What changed, and what did not

I worried, genuinely, that the machine would make the shop feel less like itself. That the bell and the kettle and the slowness would be spoiled by a screen. It was not. Nobody has ever complained. If anything my customers seem relieved that they can tap a card and be on their way, and I am freed to do the thing I am actually good at, which is putting the right book into the right person's hands.

Because that is the real change, and it took me by surprise. When I stopped spending my energy on arithmetic I could not do well, I got that energy back for the part of the job that is the whole reason I opened the doors. Now, when the man in the hat comes in, I can spend the moment talking to him about whether he has read the earlier Smith, instead of frantically trying to add up in my head while he waits. The counting takes care of itself.

At the end of a month now, I know things. I know which shelves move and which are just my own taste taking up wall space. I know, to the rand, what a market Saturday brings in. It is not a fortune. It was never going to be a fortune. But it is a real number instead of a rough feeling, and a woman running a shop on love and stubbornness in a small Karoo town deserves at least to know, honestly, how the love is doing.

The shoebox served me well. But some things you carry only until you are brave enough to set them down.