Bookstore employs extra help during rush

Brent Winterbottom, a freshman from Lewiston, Idaho, finds help buying books from bookstore employee, John Taylor. The bookstore has 14 additional employees to help regular employees through the rush of the first of the semester. EMILY WARR / Scroll

A middle-aged woman clad in a blue apron pulls a used book off the BYU-Idaho Bookstore shelf. She places the volume onto a stack of books she is balancing in a one hand. This woman’s work to gather textbooks and ring up students’ purchases will save several BYU-I students a long wait in line.

This woman, along with 13 others, is a temporary employee working at the bookstore. Without these employees, book buy-back waiting lines would be more of an inconvenience to students, Mardean Pope, BYU-Idaho Bookstore buyer, said.

“It has to be more than the hard work that they come for because they go home tired,” Pope said.

Pope employs these extra workers to help with textbook inventory for two weeks during the beginning and end of the semester. During the same period, nine additional temporary cashiers are brought in to help the usual four cashiers keep lines moving through the bookstore’s registers, Karen Ashcraft, BYU-Idaho Bookstore Cash Control Supervisor, said.

Over the years these temporary employees have helped the bookstore to keep lines down. They even have it down to a science.

Five years ago the longest wait in a bookstore line was 32 minutes. Today it is just eight minutes, Brett Cook, BYU-Idaho Bookstore operations manager, said.

Cook said he enjoys picking out students in line at random and wagering them a candy bar on the amount of time they will have to wait. Students usually agree while believing their wait will be longer than his estimation.

However, the average wait in a bookstore line is three-and-a-half minutes, and he usually wins. Win or lose he gives a candy bar to the student anyway as compensation for timing their wait, Cook said.

The bookstore’s level of efficiency would be impossible without the temporary help, Pope and Ashcraft both said.

“No way. I won’t even come in to work [if they aren’t here]. They’re indispensable,” Pope said.

Twenty-three temporary employees have been coming back for years.

After a long day of work, Diana Larsen of Rexburg, a 14-year veteran of the temporary staff, is ready to go home, but it is the people that keep her coming back, she said.

“The people — I just thoroughly enjoy them,” Larsen said.

The temporary employees work 40 hours a week for the first two weeks.

During the first week they assist at the register, fill book reservations and place textbooks. They also fill in during Mothers’ Weekend and Education Week or as needed throughout the year.

“These ladies are willing to come in when it is a busy time in their lives too,” Pope said.

Most of the cashiers Ashcraft hired have had some previous experience in operating a register. They come to her seeking employment on referral by current temporary employees. Most of the workers say they found out about the job through word of mouth, Ashcraft said.

The friendship among the employees creates an extended family feel, Ashcraft said.

The temporary employees are even invited to the bookstore’s Christmas and summer socials, she said.

Students make the memories for these workers. Laurene Jackson of Rexburg, a temporary employee of the bookstore, said she enjoys observing students go out of their way to have integrity.

“There are so many stories of kids that come back and are honest,” Jackson said.

Another temporary employee, Susie Sutton of Archer, Idaho, is reminded of her own children as she works in the bookstore.

“You kind of feel like you have all of these kids,” Sutton said.