Driving home from the beach today, we stopped into a bookstore. The store is in a nice, affluent area near the water. It’s not a store that I work with, and they didn’t know me. Sometimes it’s fun to be anonymous in a bookstore, and to be treated like a “regular” customer instead of an employee of a very large publisher. From my exchange with the store owner, however, I don’t think I’m a typical customer.

My youngest has fallen in love with Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series, having read The Lightning Thief in a day, so we grabbed the other 4 books in the series, plus the first book in the Warriors series by Erin Hunter. My husband found The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross, an excellent look at history through the music of the 20th century. Ordinarily I would also buy something for my oldest daughter, but she has a stack of books out from the library and I want her to finish those first. And me, well, I have a lot to read. No need to buy anything today.

So we took our 6 books up to the cash register. There were two people working, a woman and a man. While the woman rang up my purchases, the man engaged my youngest, asking what she was reading, had she read The Lightning Thief yet, etc. And then came the following exchange:

Bookstore man: “Are you a member of our frequent buyer program?”
Me: “No, we don’t live around here.”
Bookstore man: “Oh. Well, would you like to move near here?”
Me: “Sure, if you’ll buy us a house.”
Bookstore man: “Hmmmm. How many books do you buy?”

I’m not sure that I’d recommend this marketing technique to any of my bookstore customers, even though the real estate market is down. Still, it made me laugh. And yes, I’ll go back, and buy more books, next time I’m in the area. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll even pick up the local real estate book….

image credit: striatic via Flickr