Our Daily Bleg: How to Manage a Sales Floor?

A reader named Eric Eilberg writes with the following bleg:

My family has run Marlen Jewelers since 1914. Over the years a lot of things have changed, and the business has survived and prospered. We’re a freestanding building in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. We employ six full-time and one part-time sales associates. Dad is the third generation to run the store. He reads a lot of business books and applies them to his industry. Recently he asked for some books on managing a retail sales floor, and I went looking. A Google search turns up very few useful results, an Amazon search returns a dearth but with no gauge of how useful they are. Perhaps the Freakonomics readers could shed some light?

Good bleg. I am hoping some of you can give Eric some useful tips. Feel free to give advice that doesn’t come from books, and if you’re in academia, don’t ignore the literature in your discipline. Finally, feel free to send your own blegs here.