Roni K. Devlin, president of Literary Life Bookstore & More, Grand Rapids, Mich., whose store was burglarized last week (Shelf Awareness, November 13, 2008), offers several painfully earned lessons from the burglary, which consisted of "a solo thief [who] smashed through our front door window and foyer door window with a rock, jumped through the shattered windows, and snatched our store computer, some accessory computer fixtures, and an iPod."
She stated that the store still doesn't have a full system up running again and that "three things that are worth noting in retrospect:
"1) my computer system (an iMac with a 17" screen) was easily seen through the store windows, even at night. We'll be hiding the new system in the future, and we're putting up curtains, cameras, and lights in the store after-hours now;
"2) about a week before the break-in, we noticed two black ink marks on our front door window (the same window which was smashed during the robbery), vaguely in the shape of an 'x' or a 'y'. The ink marks were permanent, and we were unable to remove them with any of our cleaners in the store. Maybe coincidence, maybe we were marked. If you see any such ink on your windows, I'd think twice about what it might mean;
"3) we used the store computer for everything (cash register, inventory of over 7,000 items, advertising design, photo storage, etc.), and were not vigilant about regular back-up. We will never recover our store's history, and that loss is more devastating than either the windows or the hardware. I saved the rock that we found inside the store after the robbery, and have named it the Back-Up Rock--it sits on our shelf as a reminder to save everything, as you never know what might happen in the dead of the night."