Hefziba is a family-owned store focused on used books, stationery, games, puzzles, school books, and other second-hand items. The work changed a lot across the year. Before the school year started, the pace was much heavier, the volume of customers went up sharply, and the store shifted hard toward school-book logistics.
I started there in 2019 in the school-books section, along with manual labor work around the store. That included emptying large recycling bags, often weighing more than 15kg, and helping with the kind of physical upkeep that keeps a crowded second-hand store functioning during its busiest periods.
Once the peak school preparation season passed, I moved into the used-books department. I worked across genres, but I was mainly responsible for the children’s-books area. At the time it did not have much real structure, so I had to build one that matched how customers actually searched: which books were requested most often, which authors or series needed to stay visible, which items were rarer, and what made the shelves easier to browse without constant staff help.
One of the larger organization projects I took on was improving the English science fiction and fantasy corner. I plan to add photos of that work later.
I took a break around June 2021 for roughly four months while trying to pursue a computer science degree, then came back after that path did not work out. Returning to the store meant stepping back into the same role with more context and more confidence in how to keep sections usable over time.
By that stage the work also included handling various day-to-day IT issues in the store, along with replacing keyboards for one of the laptops the business used.
What mattered in this job was not one dramatic project. It was learning how to maintain order in a high-turnover physical space, keep useful structure in place, and adjust that structure around real customer behavior rather than ideal assumptions.