Kinokuniya Bookstore - Santa Anita — Local services in Arcadia

The two women working here at opening today were chatting and talking while I tried to browse. The right side of the store was a complete mess, everything everywhere. Totally understandable because yesterday was Sunday - but whoever closed or whoever opened seemed to want to chat together instead of tidying - which would be fine except for how much stuff is there. So instead of each section having different pencil leads, the pencils are essentially everywhere. I knocked into so many items that were tilted and turned and hanging off the side of the shelves that I thought I’d politely inform the ladies that they may wanna organize for a moment so they can have a store that’s ready for customers and they simply made excuses for the chaos and claimed they “just clocked in” (over 25 minutes of chit chat after they opened.)

They also claimed they’re short staffed, the two of them. Two. At 10 with two customers.

If the manager needs to verify they’re welcome to DM me, I have spent thousands at Maido and never seen it in this state with the employees not at least chipping away at the chaos. They also yelled when I was leaving that I didn’t have to set things back in their place on my way out (and yes, I do, I own several retail businesses and worked in retail half my life, it’s not really an ignorable urge.) Instead of simply leaving me alone as I left.

I’ll sadly take my $200+ budget to somewhere else today....

The Kinokuniya Bookstore is a love letter to Japanese literature and media. For many years, I always visited its sister location in Little Tokyo but found this one tucked away inside a mall of which I've never been as well. This location seems to be a tad bit smaller than the one in Little Tokyo, but this store, in particular, really has everything extremely clean, organized, and filled to the brim with anything related to Japanese media like magazines, manga, books, stationary, and etc. For this visit, they were currently getting ready for the holidays and had a lot of construction going on along with a non working A/C, which wasn't an issue for me. My only complaint is that the Little Tokyo location tends to have staff notes on recommendations for books by the shelfs and new manga and light novel series from the current anime season airing in Japan, which this location does not. Besides that extremely small complaint, I highly recommend this location to check out, especially if you don't want to worry about paying for parking and dealing with the LA traffic and navigation...

The cute frog stickers got me through the doors.

Maido is a small cozy stationary shoppe tucked into the corner of the mall, but contains a whole variety of items. There's a display for everyday carry items like pocket knives, handkerchiefs, and card decks, a shelf of diy paper projects, frappe cups of cute socks, a load of notebooks and sketchbooks for every need, and pens galore! The staff were very nice and helped direct us to find what we wanted.

I was drawn in there by their selection of stickers, stamps, and pens. Granted some of the prices are drawn up for profit, some items are fair in comparison to online counterparts. I found the stickers for around $3.50 per sheet, which was the same price as online. However, I also found a pen sold for two times the original price. Definitely look around for what you like and...