It's a BOOKSTORE! <Rant>

I finally found my gift certificate to B&N so yesterday seemed like a really good day to go since I had to be out anyway for a jewelry class. The second I walk in, I hear a howling toadler. Thankfully the handlers were taking it out, so that made me happy. I keep hearing sounds of kids but I figured it was in the back where the kid section was. Nope. Three fucking little tweens are running through the store. Not just running but playing around, laughing and opening books that are sealed. To top it off, while I'm browsing the Sci-fi/Fantasy section here comes creepy fuckaduhd with his trophy. And he starts BABY STALKING me and doing that "let's engage the single womban to see what a good fuck I am hurk" baby talk. The loaf was quiet until he started that shit. At this point I had enough. Screamed out "FUCK IT!" dropped my full basket on a display table and left. It's a BOOKSTORE not a breeding ground! This used to be a place where people went who could at least rub two brain cells together. When did the idiots find it and decide to use it as their fucking playground? I want back the days where you went there, it was quiet, they had some Indie music playing, you could grab a coffee and read. It was NICE to get out and do this, now the Breedersons have taken over every damn thing .

I swear I wish we had our own island where kids and breeders were not allowed. That would be freaking Utopia.

It's become totally insane to just leave the house anymore. My husband and I just got back from a weekend away and it was wall-to-wall kids. We found a cute set-up of eclectic stores with a cute duck pond in the middle of it - complete with howling toadlers harrasing the ducks and whining for crap. The local aquarium? Screeching children acting like apes and screaming out pointless shit like "Look, it's a penguin!!!!" :drool We went to the maritime museum, which had old, restored ships and an old reconstructed village with people there working as coopers and carvers. It was blessedly QUIET there... until a group of high school students arrived (on a Saturday??) and started screaming and shrieking, too.

Every-goddamn-place is "for the kyds" now, and nobody else is allowed enjoyment or peace. Even the aquarium had fish tank displays set so low into the wall that an adult couldn't see the fish unless they practically laid down. Hopefully you're not a graduate student interested in those fish - studying them will literally be a pain in the ass. Zoos, aquariums, etc have stopped being about conservation and scientific work and have become overpriced playgrounds "for the kyds!!!!!"

I guess you could email b&n and complain, but it will probably not come to anything. Parents who buy their snotlings whatever they want in there probably make up most of their revenue. I've noticed the b&n in my city has become half toys and games.

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stillwaters
Even the aquarium had fish tank displays set so low into the wall that an adult couldn't see the fish unless they practically laid down.

Oooo, I HATE it when aquarium tanks are deliberately made "accessible" FOAR DA KYYYYYDS.
Fish get stressed so easily, and I hate it when the fish are viewed as simply entertainment fodder for the fucking kyds to slap their slimy hands against the glass and scream.

ugh what a nightmare, I used to love going to the book store to browse through manga before purchasing 20 or so books per visit, they had a café downstairs on the general public level that filled the store with the aroma of coffee and savory treats.

downstairs had all the mainstream currently popular and promotional books and extras, and up stairs was kinda devided into two separate areas with a lift and register between them, one side was all things kids, the other side was history, war, sci-fi, manga sorta stuff, I used to love spending a good hour browsing through the manga books to see if any that I hadn't yet heard of took my interest, while I searched for new releases of the ones I was already reading.

the upstairs was usually quiet, and rarely ever had more than a moo searching for a new story book of school required text book. so it made it a bit easier to concentrate on how much my pile of books would add up to, if I had enough money for an extra book, or if this pile was a little over what I could afford, i'd need to pick one to put back and replace it with a cheaper one.

thus getting the most out of my trip and purchase each visit. the book store eventually closed down, but towards the end, it started putting more kid fodder on the bottom floor with arrows pointing up stairs for more, people were aloud to pick up a book, and go read it in the café, buy it if they liked it or put it back and come back tomorrow and read the rest of it without ever buying the dam book or more than a cheap cookie.

the new crowd of people brought in by all this, was loud and rowdy, I could hear the bottom floor from upstairs, and upstairs was now full of kids playing hide and go seek while their moo read the latest twilight in the café for free, i'd often get hit by kids running past while im juggling my stack of books, and the noise level made deciding on my purchases very difficult,

to the point I reduced the number of books I would buy per visit to compensate for not being able to sort out how much it would cost in advance and not wanting to risk going over on my budget even it if meant sometimes I would get to the counter and the total wouldn't be much, so I'd go back up and pick out a couple more, doubling the time I spent deciding, and waiting in line to do multiple purchases that would total the same amount I would have spent originally if i'd just had room to think.

I actually got to the point, i'd write down in advance to leaving my house, the titles and number of several books I wanted to find in the store, find them and jot down the prices, leave the store, sit at mcdonalds with a drink, and sort out value for quantity of books and how many I thought I could carry in my back pack/hands, making less visits to the store, with more money saved up, so I could walk back in, pick out to buy 30-40 in one hit, and leave within minutes.

this is the point where I stopped buying new series, and didn't spend time browsing for things I might have wanted to buy in the future.

you know its bad when you have to go to McDonalds to get enough peace and quiet to think through a purchase.

eventually I had to just order my books online, which wasn't cheap because most of them came from America in different warehouses and would cost multiple $20 freight, which is a lot for 1 or 2 books here, 2-3 there, 5 somewhere else, some books weren't/couldn't ship to Australia, but the book store had stocked them, and sometimes the books would arrive with damaged covers, and I take pride in my book collection being blemish free.

I don't mean to join you in ranting, but I do miss my bookstore, there are a couple of other ones around, but they only stock the manga to match the current anime on tv which isn't what I watch or would want to read, or they haphazardly stock a bit of this or that in book 1-3, and if you want anymore of it you have to make a custom order that cost more than if I did it myself online at home.

Blah, even Half Price Books isn't safe. They've got a corner full of kid shit like toys and games. Love that store, but I fucking hate it when I have to wait half an hour to look at the paranormal books because someone's unsupervised toadler is going "vroom vroom" down that aisle with a toy car he opened without paying for it. The only bookstore I've ever been in that didn't have a miniature daycare and/or didn't have kids stampeding back and forth across is was Eljay's, which is on the South Side of Pittsburgh. No toys, no games, no bullshit. Just craploads of books.

Makes me wonder why they even make children's books these days. Do kids even read them (or have books read to them) anymore?

Addie Raine & Exile,
Your posts describe in detail the whole experience I used to love in bookstores. Books of many interests, the sensory satisfaction in carefully selecting a book with no flaws (rips, dents, etc.), the appreciation for certain fonts and weights of paper...the smell of the coffee brewing and freshly-baked scones...the quiet and calm environment in which one could actually concentrate in order to research books, read, and choose your selections, the interesting indie music playing in the background and the opportunity to discover new music, and the heaven of finding a nice place to sit down and select books you wanted and purchase the CD of what they're playing.

Thanks, breeders, for turning bookstores into indoor play gyms & babysitting services. And thank you, too, bookstores, for caving in to the almighty McBreederson Dollar.

I only shop online for books and music now.

I remember when bookshops were like graveyards. A place to be treated with respect and reverence. Now, breeders treat them the same - a place for deposit brats to play. Maybe we need a few bookcases falling onto toadlers?

Personally, I dislike cafés in bookshops. While I like the smell filling the shop, I've seen far too many books ruined because someone has spilt coffee on them. Good news though, some independent bookshops (yes, a few still exist) that have a café make it very clear that drinks don't leave the seating area.

Remember, all bookshops and libraries are linked by L-Space

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stillwaters

Every-goddamn-place is "for the kyds" now, and nobody else is allowed enjoyment or peace. .

A-fucking-men to that. Even libraries are not the quiet havens they once were. I just finished up a two year stint working at public library, and everything is catered to getting kyds in: obnoxious programming, sing-alongs, etc. Moos and Duhs have no respect for the space. They just let their toadlers run wild and do nothing to keep them quiet or keep them from pulling shit off the shelves and making a mess. It's fucking impossible for anyone to get any work done when there's a kyd's program going on in there because it's so goddamned loud!

Back in the early '90's, when Waldenbooks still existed, I remember being the only youngster in the store. I have been serious about reading my whole life, so I always walked out with a stack of books. There was none of the kid crap toys/coffee and food, and it was quiet! It was an actual BOOKstore.

Obviously those places don't survive and I'm afraid B&N, BAM, and others will be going down the tubes along with it. Which is probably why they are peddling shit-ton of crap to stay afloat.
Used bookstores will be OK for awhile thanks to the hipsters.

Since its more important for everyone to reproduce every year and worship the holy beh-beh, reading or having any kind of a life has gone out the window. I just don't remember this insanity going on 20 years ago.

There's just not enough free thinking child free people to tip the scales back to the way it was.

And this is why brick-and-mortar bookstores are disappearing. B&N is going to go the way of Border's soon enough. The prices are higher than what can be found online and they're ruining the ambience by pandering to breeders and filling their stores with kid shit.

I wish I had an endless trough of startup capital. I would create a childfree empire with adults-only restaurants, bookstore-café hybrids, hotels, etc. And I would create home communities and apartment complexes that while I cannot actively ban children, I can make them extremely not conducive to living with children.

With the inevitable press I would get and the lowing of the cows, I would just simply say that I was pushed to this by the parents of America. They decided that they didn't need to do the basic job of parenting and teach their children how to act in society. Instead they offered excuse after excuse and got hostile, even violent (I can even cite those recent cases of a Moo and another Duh who assaulted strangers for correcting their childrens' ill-behavior). I am simply offering adults, whether they have kids or not, havens where they can have a night out or do a little shopping or relax and have fun without it being ruined by "kids being kids" and their drooling parents just stand by and do nothing but want to fight when called out on it.

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"Why children take so long to grow? They eat and drink like pig and give nothing back. Must find way to accelerate process..."
- Dr. Yi Suchong, Bioshock

"Society does not need more children; but it does need more loved children. Quite literally, we cannot afford unloved children - but we pay heavily for them every day. There should not be the slightest communal concern when a woman elects to destroy the life of her thousandth-of-an-ounce embryo. But all society should rise up in alarm when it hears that a baby that is not wanted is about to be born."
- Garrett Hardin

"I feel like there's a message involved here somehow, but then I couldn't stop laughing at all the plotholes, like the part when North Korea has food."
- Youtube commentor referring to a North Korean cartoon.

"Reality is a bitch when it slowly crawls out of your vagina and shits in your lap."
- Reddit comment

"Bitch wants a baby, so we're gonna fuck now. #bareback"
- Cambion

Oh whatever. Abortion doctors are crimestoppers."
- Miss Hannigan

Paragon beat me to it...B&N is closing stores and struggling to stay afloat. They've been fighting to keep afloat for a while now, and their strategy seems to be "get people to come in the door and stay, don't worry about what they do while they're here". But marketplace pressures will take care of them soon enough.

I avoid B&N like the plague. At a previous job I got a B&N gift card from my boss, and I can't remember if I gave it away or just let it rot on top of my dresser. The card was enough to get me a couple paperbacks...free...and even that couldn't get me through their doors. The nearest B&N at that point had changed their floorplan to about 40 percent kids' books and toys. No thanks.

It's sad that this is what it's coming to. I never thought I would ever see the day when a place where the semi-intelligent could actually go and enjoy themselves has become a breeders playground. I would have thought they would have avoided places like this like the plague unless they were the wanna-be hipsters. But when we live in a world where 50 Shades of Crap is published and actually called "literature" I guess it just isn't our world anymore . I wish we could follow Paragon's idea but it wouldn't be long before the breeders started screaming discrimination.

I humbly agree with everything, I used to love bookstores and libraries. Now they're goddamn madhouses with shriekers and flappers, and stalking parents. Those who want to be validated by obviously smarter individuals for their stupidity. Nope, not gonna happen!

I am like exile, I would sit for hours surrounded by piles of books to read and compare. It was like chosing a fine wine, I loved the rustle of the pages, the smell and feel of old/new paper and the scent coffee from the nearby cafes. Now I don't dare, I'd get run over by toadlers and idiot tweenie tweens. And who are more interested in their phone and finding the latest Beiber Magazine than using their brains. If I want a book, I look at Amazon or my Kindle, but I really miss the book store experience. I do manage to find second hand stores with books occasion, but I live in a hippie-crunchy-weekender kinda town. Sooner or later it gets overrun with the fundy weekenders with the big azz strollers and I dont bother anymore. Its not worth twisting an ankle or my blood pressure.

I seriously weep for humanity, I hope we go extinct. Because I have steadily watched the intelligence rate decline at an astounding rate for the last decade!!! I'm literally smarter than half my breeder and wannabreed coworkers and I have to hide it. I've had them tell me to my face that they're more mature than I, when they can't even make ends meet. Its so freaking sad!!!

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demonkitten
Because I have steadily watched the intelligence rate decline at an astounding rate for the last decade!!!

There is some serious truth to this statement. What is going on to cause the intelligence rate to decline so quickly?

-:sbx Warning: controversial rant about baby boomers-

Freya posed a very interesting question, asking how the intelligence rate has dropped so sharply in the last decade. The funny thing is that this has occurred in some place in the western world, yet in other places it hasn't. Take for example Asian countries, the intelligence rates haven't really plummeted, but rather increased.

Some of the Nordic and other sporadic countries too haven't really decreased in intelligence, but remained static. However, western countries with decadent cultures have. It seems a strongly established and ages old cultural identity tends to prevent social decline to a point.

I do however believe that a vast majority of this drop of intelligence is the result of a generational change in society. It can't be a coincidence that prior to this, the main generation in charge, also maintained strong values of hard work, education and rebuilding a world for prosperity. However, the ones that are in charge now, are their children, who were generally anti-establishment, crunchy hippy types, who basically sold their integrity to get a bigger slice of the pie.

On top of that, throw in further ambivalent generations, massive automation, ease and availability of products/services and revolutionary access IT, and you've got a world filled with people whom are increasingly narcissistic, lazy, soft, pampered princes/princesses who couldn't care less about education.

It doesn't help that education standard too have dropped to an all time low, and it's no longer about teaching kids, but rather fluffing their self-esteem. Education has been dumbed down to a point where teachers are mandated to pass regardless of the gross stupidity of their students, for fear of reprisals and loss of jobs. I've personally experienced tertiary study including remedial maths and English skills, that should've been taught in primary/elementary school, and these students are Australian born, high school graduates.

How has this happened? Well, possibly the Baby Boomers, who are currently in charge, have changed the system radically to be more in line with their own beliefs. Remember boomers were renown for being anti-authoritarian, anti-conservative socialists and free-loving hippies - who became quite self-absorbed and hedonistic. It's no wonder, much of this has been integrated into current educational standards. Discipline is now taboo in education, which again is another demented hippy belief system. Is it any wonder why kids, have no discipline and are out of control crack howler monkeys. It's not all baby boomers, X's and Y's also contribute to this as well, however boomers are responsible for a large part of it.

On top of that, you got the influx of massive interactive digital information, which causes kids to unable to hold attention for more than a goldfish on a single topic. Throw in mass production of garbage foods, full of fats, sugar and salt, and increasingly sedentary lifestyles, where kids sit on their arses all day, become soft and lazy.

Finally, society promotes breeding and is increasingly baby pleasers, so you've got a massive population boom of kids born to parents who should've never been them in the first place. In some places, they even pay these numbnuts to breed (like Australia). What do they expect to get, when they get a whole host of Forrest Gump's breeding. Take a look at the movie Idiocracy for an idea of where we're headed. Scary stuff indeed.

(Funny thing is that if a hostile race would want to take over the western world, all they would have to do is wait a few decades for general retardedness to take over the general populace, and they could just walk on in without firing a single shot - is it any wonder most of them are now sitting back watching with a smirk)

I blame it on the anti-intellectualism which pervades American society. It isn't that common in other countries, although it is spreading through the west gradually. When the intelligent and educated are looked down upon, it's no surprise that many will be content with bread & circuses.

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stillwaters
I guess you could email b&n and complain, but it will probably not come to anything. .

I probably would email them. They might send you a gift card, although it would be better if they would enforce some rules on the breeders.

I was shopping last Saturday and as I was coming into the store, a she-brat maybe about 10 yrs old or so was dragging a big hula hoop with all these things dangling from it. She runs right into me with the damn hoola hoop. At least her mother had the decency to apologize. Then I hear the brat telling her mother to shut the fuck up. WTF?! If I had ever spoken to my mom like that, I would have received a good spank and then some.

Isn't it wonderful that because all these breeders can't bear to discipline their brats that we the public have to pay for it.

______________

- The human gene pool could use a little chlorine

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addiea raine
now the Breedersons have taken over every damn thing .

Hence this is why I prowl books and everything else I can on the Internet. No brats, no breeders, and you can cruise in your underpants. If I must go to a physical store I do it first thing in the flipping morning.

+++++++++++++

Passive Aggressive
Master Of Anti-brat
Excuses!

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worker-b

There's just not enough free thinking child free people to tip the scales back to the way it was.

That's not true. The bookworms have migrated to the Internet and ebooks. There are ebooks that can be had for free and books to pirate. There are also audio books aplenty.

+++++++++++++

Passive Aggressive
Master Of Anti-brat
Excuses!

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craftyzits

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worker-b

There's just not enough free thinking child free people to tip the scales back to the way it was.

That's not true. The bookworms have migrated to the Internet and ebooks. There are ebooks that can be had for free and books to pirate. There are also audio books aplenty.

my friends brother spends his 40min drive each morning and again each afternoon coming and going from work, with an audio book playing, I think its a good idea, though when im driving I have to concentrate on the road pretty strongly since im easily distracted.

honestly I just cannot get into reading books on my tablet, unless im researching a website, I cant get into the books in digital format, when I hold a book, my brain and body are focused and switched on, I can comfterbly read for 2hours before I realise I need to get up and move around, but on a computer/laptop/tablet, nope, 5-10 mins max before my attention wanders to what else I could be doing.

I just use my Kindle. For less than a hundred bucks I can buy and carry all the books I want.
As far as cafes, I miss going to them. As long as the food part is confined to the food part and the books to the books part along with kids being contained, controlled or removed them they are nice.

I feel like there is nowhere to go.

Places I used to like f.e. ZOOs, parks, bookstores etc. are full of speshial snauphlaques.
They do whatever they want to do and are never disciplined because they are soooooooo cuuuuuuuute.

I live in EU. Nearly every day, there is an article in newspapers that too few chyldren
are being born. That must be some pronatalist propaganda as I see them everywhere.

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mrs. chinaski




I live in EU. Nearly every day, there is an article in newspapers that too few chyldren
are being born. That must be some pronatalist propaganda as I see them everywhere.

Yeah, and while on the one hand the Powers that Be crank out pro natalist propaganda and things like the (USA) earned income tax credit, whereby breeders are "given back" money they never even earned in the first place, and if The Baby Boon is to be believed, a CF/CL person at just above the poverty level pays more in taxes* than a married couple with two kids and an income comfortably above the median and there's discounts and breaks galore for childed people/couples...

On the other hand, the Powers That Be tell us that 'global warming' is going to require massive tax hikes , a restriction on freedom of movement and freedom to use one's own property, and still more invasion of our privacy...

Even though we KNOW overpopulation is a huge contributing factor to AGW!!!

I am NOT one of those people who think AGW is just a scam or a hoax meant to destroy the last remaining scraps of western privacy and freedom and maybe install a permanent totalitarian global government, whether under the aegis of the UN or any other potential overlord...But I really, REALLY can't blame any more the folks who do. The science behind AGW has been understood since the 1870s or thereabouts for pity's sake**, but when it's used to justify a pending massive tax grab/power grab by the government, the same government which then encourages/cajoles/bribes/all but commands us to do the one thing that makes AGW exponentially worse-?!?!?

Is it hypocrisy, stupidity, or have the Powers That Be just decided, "Fuck it; the human race and maybe all life on the planet's doomed anyway,so let's just make sure our spawn, grandspawn,and maybe a generation or two after that have the fun of omnipotence beyond the dreams of pharaohs, emperors, renaissance popes, and 20th century dictators. At least the 99% will finally be what they SHOULD have been all along-livestock. That's what they deserve for the Magna Carta/the Declaration of Independence , the Constitution, and the 13th amendment/trade unionism/various UN declarations that the poors actually have rights(insert other outrage against the one percent's Godgiven right to enslave the rest of humanity HERE____".



*Can't recall if that's actually or proportionally.

** A British scientist in the 1870s or 1880s proclaimed that the additional carbon being released into the atmosphere would give the UK a Mediterranean climate , for all intents and purposes permanently (it being many millennia before a corrective ice age kicked in) . One can understand why the vision of the UK having Italy's climate would appeal,and the scientist was silent on what this would do to Italy's(or Africa's/South America's/ Southeast Asia's) climate...But then some killjoy French and German scientists "proved" that the additional carbon would just get soaked up into rocks and so forth, destroying the lovely vision of the UK as Nouveau Italia . And few worried about global warming until the 1970s, when climate data was revealed suggesting the French and German scientists' comforting faith in the omnipotence of the carbon cycle was misplaced, that the excess carbon released by human activities was indeed overriding earth's checks and balances systems-with potentially catastrophic effects on the future of humanity,and possibly on ALL life on this planet (especially if the methane trapped in the ocean were to be suddenly released, a la the Permian extinction event...).

I hate that just about any educational venue is ruined by these little bastards. Not too long ago I went to the American Museum of Natural History during the week because there's a lot of neat info about different cultures, the biodiversity hall, and the gemology exhibit. I tried to pick a day and a time when the place was least likely to be overrun by these little brats. The last time I went, there were these two little fuckers that were running around the gemology exhibit playing tag. Their breeder was nowhere to be found.

This last time I went, there was not one, but two sets of little kids on a field trip to the museum. These kids were yelling "Eww" at some of these exhibits, and they didn't seem to appreciate the experience, nor did they know what "indoor" voices are for. There was one handler that had to stop her kid from trying to climb over the admissions desk. What's worse is that, because of the acoustics, their voices reverberated throughout the museum. I couldn't wait to get the fuck out of there because they were ruining the whole experience. It frustrates me when I pay good money to see something and brats and their handlers just completely ruin it.

I like to go to the bookstore also. Hopefully I can have some piece and quiet so that I can peruse some books, have a coffee, and figure out which books that I want to buy I had to take a bathroom break and there was some Moo in there with her kid, who was making "happy noises" i.e. shrieking his goddamn head off. I think I went to the bathroom in record time just to get out of there. I am so sick and tired of feeling crowded out of public places just because the handlers can't control their kids. They are everywhere!

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herbalgeek
I am so sick and tired of feeling crowded out of public places just because the handlers can't control their kids. They are everywhere!

This is one of the reasons I never go out, except for going to the store and the YMCA. The grocery store sells cold and fresh items that I cannot get online, and I can't do aqua arobics (the only kind of exercise I can do because of medical shit) at home.

Even when I attend a specified class at the Y, there are shriekers in the shallow pool and in the locker room. To cope I must take dope aka very strong headache medication.

Occasionally, a cow will bring a shrieker into the Walcrap, but I go at the Gawd offal hour of 7:30 in the morning. I tell People Who Care, (nice old ladies but most are breeders,) I go so early because I must have a juiced up scooter to do my shopping. (Nerve & brain damage can cause my legs to go out from under me without notice.) I am very good at coming up with subtle brat avoidance. My many physical complaints give me a very nice hide.

Open talk of autism is no longer taboo, with so many brats 'having it' now. Migraines, (cows get 'em I am sure) are common fodder for conversation as well. Yes, what I am doing is manipulative but I don't fucking care.

+++++++++++++

Passive Aggressive
Master Of Anti-brat
Excuses!