I'm weeding the romance novels for condition and these things are so fragile I swear it'll have only 7 circulations and the spine will be unreadable and there will be pages falling out and chips off the cover. It's like they're printed on tissues. And they're all so similar. Dukes. Cowboys. Christmas. Cowboys on Christmas. Christmas with the Duke. The Duke of Cowboys. The Cowboy Christmas with the Duke. One of them is literally called The Duke with the Dragon Tattoo.
So one of the reasons these books tend to be so fragile is that these are the kinds of books you might find in a CVS.
I can tell you, as someone who worked at CVS for 8 years and spent probably over 1000 hours ringing people up: No one has ever purchased a book at CVS before. Not even once. Which considering middle aged heterosexual women are CVS's core demographic seems a little surprising but generally when people wanna get some antacids and shampoo and get on with their day ,they're not perusing the book section.
Back in the day, our book and magazine vendor would come in once a month to do the books - he would pull and rip the fucking covers off of all the books and hand me an envelope for me to scan with the Manager Scanner (The Gun as we called it) so I could print a slip of paper itemizing what books he destroyed so that I could mail it back to them for a vendor DSD credit.
And at the end of the night I would then toss the actual pages into the cardboard compactor in some vague hope they may be recycled. And I think the publishers putting this stuff out know that 90% of them are destined to become corrugated cardboard with an amazon logo on it.
The number of times I have had to stuff Fabio in an envelope is probably in the hundreds.
