How To Give Birth to a Bookstore

• Take 1 person who spends way too much time living in hotels off of a corporate credit card with excellent time management skills, motivational skills ranging from cheerful enthusiasm to seriously frightening death threats and a more than healthy energy level. Drill skills and the ability to drink most folks under the table optional, but a plus. Wicked sense of humor required. Put this person in charge, call him or her an RC.
• Add 7 people (we'll call them trainers) with varying combustible personality types (who would make for a really interesting season of The Real World) whose one uniting characteristic is a strange need to work insane hours for little compensation just to be able to turn around and say "Look at what I made!" Take these 7 people completely out of their natural environment, force them into close proximity and then turn them loose on
• a fresh scrubbed, still wearing good-impression clothes staff.

The RC stands in the middle of the empty store and yells "Go!" Bribes in the form of candy are given freely. Small toys are also appreciated. By the end of three weeks, you will have the 7 trainers madly rushing about pulling off little yellow paper tags, the staff trying to remember how to run a cash register that they learned about a week ago and haven't touched since, and an RC who's trying to deal with a month's worth of back expense reports that someone else forgot to file. Oh yeah, and some stuff is on the shelves. You win.