A (Very Exciting) Day in the Life: AK Press Does Inventory
In case any of you dear readers were under the impression that AK Press is any sort of glamorous place, check out what we’ve been up to this weekend! Those of you who have worked retail are no doubt familiar with the tedious yet essential task of doing physical inventory. Well, this weekend, your intrepid AK Press Collective (along with our trusty band of volunteers) has once again risen to the task!
I won’t get into the details, because contrary to the title of this post (I was lying to draw you in, see!), it’s really not that exciting. It’s basically three days of counting every copy of every item on every shelf by hand (and that’s, you know, several thousand items). The more acrobatically inclined among us spent a couple of days hopping around between raised pallet shelves, digging through cases of overstock. There was a lot of sneezing and a few minor injuries, but mostly it went pretty smoothly. Then Lorna entered all our counts and had a big beer to celebrate our success. At the end of it all, we are exhausted but we have a database (hopefully) full of nice, clean data. We love it!
One kind of fun(ny) thing about inventory is that we always seem to rediscover things in the warehouse that we’d all forgotten we had. So, keep an eye on our sale page, cause I bet some of this overstock turns up there soon. Inventory is also a pretty good chance for those of us who deal with these books all the time (and sometimes forget how much good stuff there is) to actually get up close and look at all the stuff we’re selling. There really is a lot of good shit in our warehouse, and I encourage those of you who are local to the bay area to come and poke around for yourselves. Better yet, come and start volunteering at AK… then you can help us with all the warehouse organization we’ve just been inspired to do, and next year you can do inventory like the cool kids!
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Zach counts pamphlets. |
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| Macio climbs the pallet shelves. |
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Lorna celebrates…and expresses herself. |