[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by drofgnal

I was in Barnes and Noble a couple days ago. I bought some Christmas cards on sale and a calendar. I frequent the store browsing books and having a coffee sometimes at lunch. When I checked out they asked if I wanted to purchase a $5 book as a child's Christmas gift. I said sure. I finish checking out and she hands me a stack of very thin paper back books. The first book was titled "Who Were the Beatles" A kid would even care? The other titles were even worse. I wanted to ask for my five dollars back, but I had already checked out. In the back of the stack I found a book on dinosaurs so I picked that. None of these flimsy books were more than 30 pages.

So I went and had a look at Who Were the Beatles? which is part of a series of Who Was (historical figure/s)? put out by Penguin. It has 103 reviews and a rating of four and a half stars. It doesn't seem like an egregiously bad kids book to me. And the book is 112 pages and has a retail price of $5.99. So it's not the pamphlet you describe.

$5 may not be a deal of a price, but the book doesn't appear to be garbage.

I can't defend the other books, because you didn't list them. But I agree with the Mountain<Molehill argument.

Originally Posted by drofgnal

You didn't get the point. I didn't receive or expect anything in return. The child receiving the book got a crappy book, B&N got rid of crap inventory, and I paid for that. What I would have expected was for B&N to provide books for donation that would have been a bit more memorable for a child.

There's just not enough evidence to prove that. You didn't mention what other books were available nor what books had already been donated from the on-hand stock at the register you were at.

I pick it out, buy it, and put it in the bin. We do that yearly. B&N could take a lesson from that model. Let you go buy any book, but it in a bin for donation, not just books they are trying to get rid of.

I no longer work at B&N, so I don't know their current policy. But I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if you purchased ANY book from the children's section and donated it, they would accept it. But realistically, they have to keep some stock of something at the registers.

In my store for instance, if I asked a customer if they wanted to donate a kids book and they did, but I then told them they had to go back upstairs to the children's section, pick out a book, go through the line again and then donate, there wouldn't be many takers.

I also wouldn't be surprised to find there was signage around the store mentioning the donation effort (business do like to pat themselves on the back), so you likely had opportunities before reaching the register.