1) The chain store in the mall
My first real job was at a chain bookstore in the suburban mall five miles from where I grew up. On the one hand, it was a cramped, overlit little box shoehorned between a McDonald’s and a card shop with few titles beyond the bestseller lists, lots of activity books I didn’t feel should count, and no one who could recommend the perfect book based on the last one you loved or point you towards anything other than what you had come in for in the first place. On the other hand, we had two such bookstores in our mall, bookstores to browse and kill time in while our parents shopped for boring stuff in other stores, bookstores to push us towards life out there in the rest of the world...