The Shy Little Girl by Phyllis Krasilovsky

I worked at Encore for six years, moving up to store manager and then spent 2 years on the road as a merchandiser setting up new stores. Fantasy, Sex and Violence was in the air. We had a lot of fun building up our Science Fiction, True Crime and Romance section. We could also order books to build up certain sections, but they had to be sections that were popular. Whatever subject you were interested in, we had something there. The other part of working in a store that impressed me was that our store was like a little library. Something about working 50+ hours a week will do that to you. And where it was! After a while, I also became versed in what we had, down to the exact shelf. I was amazed at how the staff knew every book that was in their store. It was intimidating at first, especially dealing with customers. Answer: “For now, yes, but there is an opportunity to work in lots of stores!” Who wanted that? I got the job, worked there for a month, and was transferred to the store in North Philly on … Welsh Road. I had lots of questions about the job, most of them revolved around whether this would be in the same store. The Management Trainee program sounded great, especially if it would help me on the Welsh front.

They also had a beautiful girl working behind the counter with a Welsh accent. They had a sign in the window for their Management Trainee Program. This was a beautiful split-level store in Center City. I went to the Encore Books store in Rittenhouse Square.

Armed with a History degree from Rutgers, I was living in Philadelphia and needed to get a GRE test book. It all seemed too intimidating.įlash forward to the late 80s. They had a robust selection of my favorites: Mad Magazine books, Beatles books, and Zander Hollander Baseball Annuals. Among the other stores in that mall was a little shop at the Sears end called, appropriately, The Book End. This was the place my friends and I would go to get the music we loved to hear on FM radio. Wee Three wasn’t a great store if you compare it to bigger brothers like Sound Odyssey and the epic Tower Records in Philly, but it was ours.

First with your parents, hoping you’d be able to spend time in YOUR stores, and then getting a little older, riding your bike across forbidden busy roads to get to … THE MALL. Going to the mall in those days was THE EVENT. The closest I ever got was a summer job at Kay-Bee Toys. Remember those? Specifically, the Wee Three Record store in the Moorestown Mall. Growing up in South Jersey, my dream was to work in a record store. Senior Director of Trade Sales for Children’s Books at Macmillan

The Shy Little Girl by Phyllis Krasilovsky