Thursday, July 26, 2007

What a dumbass. . .

From the pages of the local Dunn County News . . .

Several local Harry Potter fans got a head start perusing the highly-anticipated and highly-publicized final installment in the young wizard’s saga.

An undisclosed number of copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows were sold at Marketplace Foods in North Menomonie on Thursday before the book’s presence on the shelves was discovered.

“It accidentally got stuck out by the magazine company, so there was a couple that got sold,” said Marketplace Foods manager Steve Fenn on Friday morning.

Sales of the book were embargoed until 12:01 a.m. on Saturday, June 21.

The company responsible for the error is Valley News Company, based in Mankato, Minn. A call to manager Tom Leiferman on Friday afternoon was not returned.

Asked if there were going to be repercussions for the early sales, Fenn responded, “I don’t know. We yanked them as soon as we found out that they weren’t supposed to have been out there. When you’ve got a 65,000 square foot store, 120 employees and umpteen vendors, it’s a little hard to oversee absolutely every detail.”

Valley News provides Marketplace Foods with magazines and books. Fenn said has far as he knew, it was someone who alerted the store on Thursday about the mistake.

“I wasn’t here yesterday,” he said. “My assistant manager yanked it as soon as he got the call.”

According to Harriett Christy, owner of Bookends in downtown Menomonie, “All bookstores that expect to have the book in the store to sell are required to sign an affidavit. There are restrictions that it can’t be sold before 12:01. You can’t even open the box to look at it. Mine are under black cover in the back of the store. So at 12:00 we’ll open the boxes and at 12:01 we can sell.”

According to Harriett Christy, owner of Bookends in downtown Menomonie, “All bookstores that expect to have the book in the store to sell are required to sign an affidavit. There are restrictions that it can’t be sold before 12:01. You can’t even open the box to look at it. Mine are under black cover in the back of the store. So at 12:00 we’ll open the boxes and at 12:01 we can sell.”

Scholastic, Inc. is the U.S. publisher of J.K. Rowling’s popular Harry Potter series. According to its retailer’s agreement, stories that violate the restrictions will be liable for “any and all attorney’s fees and damages incurred as a result...”

The publisher is taking legal action against DeepDiscount. com and the site’s distributor, Levy Home Entertainment, after learning that beginning on Tuesday, June 17, approximately 1,200 customers had received their copies of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” in the mail.

As of Friday, at least one copy of the book was reported to have been sold on eBay. On her Web site, Rowling pleaded with Potter aficionados to “help preserve the secrecy of the plot for all those who are looking forward to reading the book at the same time on publication day. In a very short time, you will know EVERYTHING!”

Thanks to an oversight, that time was even shorter for a few local Harry Potter enthusiasts.


So. . . unless you were living under a bloody rock or have been in Darfur for the past year, I'm pretty sure the whole Western World knew that Harry Potter 7 came out last Saturday. So to the moron who put them out - I hope you get fired for being a dumbass. And I find it slightly amusing that Marketplace may get sued because any manager who can't keep track of 120 employees deserves to get bitch-slapped by J.K. Rowling's publisher. I used to work at Victoria's Secret and there were over 150 employees and the manager knew every person, all their schedules and even kept track of close friends and significant others.

Come to think of it, it was kind of scary.

2 comments:

Beth Jean said...

dumbass? No, no, no....So Cute!!!

Phenomonie said...

. . . says you.