A look inside the bookstore
While we no longer have an outlet for customers to browse, this is a busy place filled with staff and volunteers processing the books you donate.
Bruce is a longtime volunteer, who literally does the heavy lifting around here, moving your donations to the warehouse.
The books are sorted, with some put on carts to be added to the inventory and some boxed up to be given away. Any books we can’t use are recycled. Jo has been instrumental in sorting kids books for us to give to schools, food pantries, and other local organizations.
Listing books is a big job – it’s the process of pricing and adding books to our online inventory, so that you can purchase them and we can continue fund our mission. Lou does this twice a week as a volunteer, and employees Rajean and Toya spend several hours a week on this task.
Marnie processes CDs and DVDs that are donated. The money we make from this is given to The Gems Project in Uganda, supporting children with special needs who have been abandoned.
A panoramic view of a portion of our warehouse. We have about 50,000 books in our online inventory.
Eva and Abby are pulling orders from the warehouse, which is a bit like a scavenger hunt.
Books are ready to be wrapped and shipped out. In our lighter weeks, we ship around 300 books. In our average weeks, it’s more like 600 books. 🙂 During April 2020, when the pandemic was keeping everyone stuck at home, this little bookstore shipped over 1,200 books per week to brighten the boredom. Customers buying directly from our website would buy huge boxes filled with 30 or 40 or even 100 books. Crazy. 🙂
If you live in the area, you can utilize our curbside pickup. We typically process your order in 2-3 business days, then you can just drive up to the door and we’ll bring your books out to you!
Our little team gathers for chapel every Thursday.
