Bookshop continues to do well

 Working/volunteering in a charity bookshop can be exhausting at times.

Because we sell a lot of low value items, we have to sell about twice as many items per day as a typical charity shop to make a similar amount of money. Sure, we sell the occasional book for £50 or more (specialist book on Spitfires last week), but the bulk of our sales are paperback fiction.

On a really busy day, we may need to restock around 150 items. All our back stock is up one or two flights of stairs, so we get plenty of exercise if we're not on the till.  (And even being on the till can be tiring for a long busy stint as you've got to remain alert and focused.)

Of course, the sales aren't the only items that need replacing. We also have to  turn over the stock to remove unsold items that have been on the shelves too long, so that's even more books to move up and down stairs.

Then there's the incoming stock.  We get boxes and bags of donated books every day, typically around half a dozen.  Those have to be sorted, priced and filed in the back stock.

We've improved all these processes in various ways since we started in the shop over a year ago.  Richard can sort incoming stock incredibly fast now.  Pricing is surprisingly fast. (He prices much faster than I do, though I'm probably a bit more accurate).  Speed is necessary - it's the only way to avoid unsafe levels in the incoming stock area.

Stock turnover is a smooth, regular process using different volunteers on different days.  We've built up a system over time that gives higher value books a longer period on the shelves (and a better position in the display).

We could always use more people - it is very labour-intensive because of the sheer volume of books involved, but we're doing well.

Sales are consistently averaging £250 a week above the same period for last year.  That's really good for the charity, and we hope it will be enough for the shop to be given permanent status when the lease comes up for renewal.  

The sales are also a real morale boost for us and the volunteers. Last week was the third best week since the shop opened three years ago.

We have regular local customers, and we attract far more tourists than in the past.  (better display)

Addressing the poor

 It's dead easy to find online resources as to how to address ever titled person who ever existed, and it's pretty easy to find out how Victorians addressed their servants (even servants had different forms of address depending on their status in the servant hierarchy), but the poor?

Invisible.

My best guess, from a quick browse of Dickens (whom I hate) is that lower class women (xcluding servants) were addressed by their first names by  the well to do, and that the men were addressed by their second names.  This is partly surmise as Dickens's characters don't seem to do many introductions, but the way he uses names in text follows this pattern. 

Upper class men are always 'Mr Jones', lower class men are 'Jones'.

I shall go with this format for the time being.

I seems odd to never let the audience know the first name of the main protagonists, but I accept it happily in Shakespeare...