A Very Expensive Book Case

 Hi everyone, today is still Sunday and I am just writing to explain the lawsuit I might participate in.  It has to do with the way Barnes and Noble changed their book look up system somewhere around 2010 so that it matched the website more and made it almost impossible for employees to find a book on the computer screen or in the store.  The idea was to promote their website and steer customers online. That might sound like a simple business decision that can’t reasonably be challenged, but I think there was something behind it and within it that was an obvious mistreatment of all employees, and really customers, too, and it contributed to my eventual emotional breakdown in front of my community for two years.  That itself is probably going to be a criminal torture case, and it would seem that I should just sue about that.  But oddly, I am probably not going to even though it might be like one of those forty million dollar cases.  I might do it and donate the money or something, but mostly I don’t believe in lawsuits as part of my religion, I also don’t want to live off of being wronged, and most of all, the crime is so deep and transcendent that I think I should just wait and see how things turn out on Judgement Day.

 

However, this other issue that overlaps with the severe mental damage caused by everything in the store being made unbearable on purpose, is something that I think is dirty and common and also affected most of the employees at the store level.  And that is just the way Barnes and Noble used emotional abuse to steer customers to shop online instead of in the store. They were trying to use us as a storefront, and almost like robots ourselves, and frustration was a tool they used to influence store traffic.  The lookup system was made unuseful on purpose, in order to make us find fewer books successfully, even though that was our stated job, and to make us to try to do more ship-to-home orders from the website- supposedly just like ordering online but really by taking their credit cards and using them on cash registers away from the customer service desk, which made us have to take cards away from people's sight and have personal responsibility for their credit card numbers in a way that caused us to be blamable if anything went wrong.  It also meant that customers wanted to browse the look up system themselves, blurring the customer-employee line on purpose, and causing customers to come into close quarters in an employee only space.  I also think they deliberately used this change as a way to create a mass partial constructive dismissal and tighten up the job duties past what everyone could do, so they could identify some employees to keep and frustrate others into quitting or failing and having hours cut or being fired. In fact, the better and faster you were, the more frustrating and yes, absolutely heartbreaking it was to no longer be good at your minimum wage job. This whole thing might have been what started the torture, because I think that people who were helping me personally with my mental illness survival knew they were doing that and Barnes and Noble knew those people knew and started doing it worse on purpose, and then it just escalated into criminal abuse. Meanwhile I was still trying to keep insurance for a severe mental illness that actually would have been in its least painful phase other than the torture.

 

So now I have brain damage, and though that is relevant, it is not the main thing for this particular lawsuit, and I think everyone whose lives were made worse by being turned into punching bags with impossible tasks in order to boost online sales have a strong case that should take away quite a chunk of cash away from whoever actually gets the money from the stores.  That’s not employees, and like so many other American businesses, people chose not to invest in people through wages and have destroyed one of the world’s greatest and most important resources, which is America’s prosperous free market system.  These people are going to go to hell right before our eyes, but so will a lot of other people for related religion reasons.  Anyway, sorry I always launch into that but I am reminded of it every day with a life affected every second by layers and layers of societal abuse and discrimination, which were in most extreme official form when I worked my last working years at Barnes and Noble.  

 

I think a lot of people would say that the companies make the rules and if you don’t like it, you can work somewhere else.  But there are leverage factors and dishonesty that make this case a little more complex than that. So that is all I am saying, and people probably think it is foolish of me anyway to show my cards. But foolishness is my full time job at the psychiatric housing complex where I live, and I think it is just too interesting to not share that I don’t believe in cashing in on torture but I do believe in standing up for employee rights.