Waterstones book shop are so sick of being treated like a library that they are issuing customers with a ‘three strikes and you’re out’ warning system.

From now on, any customers that are caught reading a book once without paying for it are given a green card and a £5 fine. Twice and they’re given a yellow card and a £10 fine. Three strikes and they are issued with a red card, given a year’s ban from the store and are forced to buy a One Direction calendar from the reduced counter.

Waterstones’ owners, Jack and Jill Bookworthy,  got so sick of being treated like mugs, that they hired expensive consultants to come up with a solution. They came up with the exact same (but immediately dismissed) solution that the staff had come up with three weeks earlier.

“Customers just come in and take the piss,” said Mr Waterstone, who doesn’t actually own Waterstones but probably got hired because of his amusingly appropriate name. “We had to act fast. Kindles had taken over and profits were down, and hippy beardy types were coming in and reading entire Robin Ince books without paying for them. They’d come in on their lunch breaks and dog ear the pages day after day until they’d finished the whole book but they never once bought them. Not even at Christmas.”

Annoyed customers in Liverpool are planning a boycott of their local store after footage of the following altercation between a staff member and an avid lunch time reader appeared online:

Manager: “Excuse me sir, could you please either buy that Greg Wallace autobiography, or leave the store. You’ve been sat here reading and eating your home made sandwiches for four days now.”

Customer: “Why do you fucking well provide tables and comfortable chairs and a frigging coffee shop, if I’m not allowed to sit here reading your books and eating my own food?” whined hippy beardy type Colin as he was handed his marching orders and One Direction calendar. “Fuck you, I’ll go to Dillons then… Oh, no wait…shit, they killed Dillons,” he sobbed as the security guard dragged his scrawny ass out of the shop. 

“Do The Works have couches?” he pondered to himself as he sat on the bus home trying to hide his One Direction booby prize from the pretty girl sat opposite him.

Unfortunately, thanks to Colin’s selfishness, The Sceptical Poet now have a ‘lovely’ new Wand Erection, erm, One Direction calendar hanging up in their office.

And they had to pay five pence for the privilege of a carrier bag to bring it home in.