Rocket Bomber - article - retail - commentary - Rethinking the Box: Good Problems to Have.

I complain a lot about work. A Lot. Retail is a rough job, and we have to smile while doing it — in the face of some some of the worst customer behaviors and unreasonable (nigh impossible) expectations.

Dealing with the public Sucks. You Suck.
—but before you respond in the comments (again) to tell me how awful I am, as a retailer and as a human being (again) y’all need to read the whole article.

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Rethinking the Box is a collection of ruminations on retail: a unique combination of sober (and sobering) business analysis mixed with drunken, inflammatory personal invective.

Previously:
Study your History. Recognise your Motives. Location, Location, Location. Know your Customer Base, and your Staff. Find your Niche. Consider your Product Lines, Stock Your Shelves, Consider alternative display strategies, take a second look at What the Customers Want, and then stare again in dismay at the Profit Margins. Try calculating your upper-limit affordable rent and the revenue from inventory (with a side of coffee) and compare your numbers to average industry per-storefront sales.

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Gods, work sucks.

First, the phone rings off the hook — even on a slow day we’ll get 12 to 15 calls an hour — but around half of these are simple to deal with (Yeah, we’re located just 2 miles south of the mall, and we’ve been here in the same damn spot for 15 effing years already) or obvious (you just listened to a recording where I myself, being the only poor bastard who knows how the ancient PBX board works so I’m the only one who can record the greeting, just told you of both our address and normal store hours — give me a mo, I can even rattle off the script from memory, “We’re open Mondays thru Thurdays 9 AM to 10 PM, Fridays and Saturdays 9 AM to 11 PM, and on Sundays from 9 to 9. If you’d like to speak to a bookseller, please remain on the line.” Do you really need to talk to me in person to verify that yes, we’ll be open until 10pm?) or the people calling actually know the title&author of the book they want. The other half of phone calls? Pure Retail Hell.

We’re not freaking Information; we sell books. But over the past decade I’ve been asked to answer over the phone:

• artist & CD from half a lyric
• plot synopses, major characters, and critical review for a number of titles.
• sales figures for bestsellers, “Sure, it’s number 1. Say, just how many books is that?”
• address and operating hours of my competition, the other bookstore up the street. (not at the end of a conversation, when I couldn’t otherwise help a customer… no. this was the first damn question out of his mouth.)
• availability of a book in one of our branches 5 states and 1000 miles away.
• conversion from Celsius to Fahrenheit
• name and number for a local cake shop for a customer in New Jersey who wanted to send her son a birthday cake.
• “How do I get my book published?”
• related: detailed explanations on how the publishing industry works, how our distribution chain works, why the ‘services’ offered by so-called self-publishing companies aren’t quite the same as actually being published, and why I can’t order your book into the store.
• “I have a book, how do I schedule a book signing?”
• related: if your business model relies on getting an ‘event’ at one local bookstore where you might sell 5 copies of your self-published book — you’re doing it wrong and your model is broken. Sure, you hear about famous authors doing book signings all the time but correllation is not causation and those authors aren’t famous because of the signing — in fact the exact opposite is true: we only bother with the in-store event because the author is famous… or internet ‘famous’, or they were just on TV. [here’s your tip: instead of calling poor, overworked booksellers to get into the bookstore, you need to expend your energy calling producers and scheduling directors trying to get on TV — or take the whole thing onto the internet, post YouTube videos and to your own blog, build up an audience (and a conversation with that audience). But I can’t teach marketing over the telephone. The most I can do is say, “no. sorry”

You might have noticed, with that last pair of questions-and-comments, that there is a wide swath of the general public that has no idea how the book business works but still wants in and their only recourse is to contact the one part of the industry that they know about: the book store.

When they’re lucky, I’m the schlub who picks up the phone at their local, as I actually can explain a bit about how both book publishing and book retail works. [note: I don’t get paid any extra for this.] 99 times out of a 100 though, I’m not sure what kind of response these poor misguided souls get for their heart-felt inquires, as they only want to make a book — but apparently they can’t rub two brain cells together to use Google (and other internet resources) to find this crap out for themselves. (or, you know, come into the store to read the books I have on publishing, maybe even buy a few.) I am of course a bit wary of the actual ‘books’ that may be in the offing (if they have a completed work, and aren’t just looking for what they think is easy money in the book biz) but who knows? There may be a future Pulitzer Prize winner who is just a luddite and doesn’t know any better — but even if one hates and avoids the internet, 30 years ago the model was not, ‘call a book store’ — you sent the manuscript to publishers (or maybe an agent) and you did the leg work and you followed up. These days you’re better off getting an agent first, but I can guarantee top-flight agents are not going to be answering the phone at the bookstore.

To just call your local branch of Big Box Books and all-but-demand publication, fame, and fortune smacks not only of laziness but also of hubris. I’m not Barnum or Svengali or Pearlman or a Faustian devil — the fame-n-fortune contract is outside my purview — I sell books, it’s all I do, and by “sell” I mean ‘take money in exchange for merchandise’, if you need someone to market your books that’s a different skill set and it pays a lot more per hour than my current salary.

Anyway, that’s just the crap I deal with over the telephone.

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Customers in store are just as bad, if not occasionally worse.

They can’t remember a title, or author (or both). Sometimes what they do remember is just wrong. Sometimes all we have to go on is a subject, or a concept, or half a detail (“The author’s first name is Jim, or Jack, or Jan, or Johann — something like that.”) Of course, most shoppers who actually make it into the store have a better idea of what their looking for (since there is a big difference between picking up the phone and driving into town) but there are some who are just there to meet a friend, or who have an hour to kill before an appointment, or the kid needs a book for school and while the fam is in store maybe one of the ‘rents asks about the latest thriller or what was on Oprah or whatever.

When we can succeed at the searches, we feel like Bookstore Gods™ and it almost, almost makes up for the other 95% of stupid questions from the general book-store-going public.

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Here’s the thing:

The phone is ringing off the hook. During the rush, we not only have people walking up to our info desk, we have a line and we’re on the PA paging for backup to the desk, or the registers, or both.

These are great problems to have.

There is no such thing as too much traffic. Sure, if it continues like this day after day for more than a few hours, then we need to hire more staff and that’s also a great problem to have.

The things I complain about at work are the sorts of things other retailers would give their eye teeth for. (Or, they’d punch me in the face hard enough to dislodge dental work and they’d give my eye teeth for a tenth of that business.)

The phone keeps ringing not even because folks happen to have our business card or they’ve read our ads (we barely advertise, amazing for a multi-billion-dollar retail corporation), but because an internet search or the yellow pages or a call to 411 directory assistance gave them our number. When they think bookstore, they are already thinking Big Box Books and there is little we have to do (or can do, really) to either augment or mitigate this never ending stream of phone calls.

[aside: OK, so my store is listed first, so maybe we have to deal with more idiots potential customers than the other branches of Big Box Books in town, but still.]

Opening an independent store means giving this up. It’ll take decades to build up awareness in the community, and even then I’d still be competing against Big Box Books. Believe me, I still want to run my own shop — I’d love to own my own bookstore — but I’m not fooling myself into thinking I can match the sales of the majors, even if I have a larger, better store, because it just doesn’t work that way for a start-up.

If you’ve defined your niche and you can out-do the big boxes in your chosen category, then over time you will find your customers (rather, they’ll find you) and five years down the road you’ll be performing much better. So, what’s your plan to stay open for those 5 years? Or for 3 years? Or even until next year?

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Reputation, name-recognition, and community goodwill are all intangibles that can’t be bought. What can you do?

Be the Best There Is at What You Do.

• Be open, and inviting. This may mean: being open for business earlier and later than the competition, having more comfy chairs or tables (and outlets!), or being just plain prettier than the corporate cookie-cutter retailer out by the mall.
• Hire better staff, and pay them more.
• Sell coffee, and cake. Host book clubs. Sponsor literary events; if you can’t find any to sponsor, heck, invent a few, advertise ‘em, run ‘em out of your storefront. The idea is to pull people into the store.
• Keep the shelves stocked. Nothing sells books like more books. Build taller bookcases, cram bookcases into every available space, stock used books if you have to — just make it look like you have every available book in the universe (or at least, every book in your niche) and believe me, people will talk about it.
• Broadcast. Do whatever you can to get the word out: blogs, social media, print ads, radio ads, stunts, contests; a kick-ass, usable, and useful website; everything and anything you can think of right up to and including a bigger, brighter sign out front.

About the only thing you can’t do is try to compete with the major chains on price. Even Big Box Books is getting undercut by CostCo, Amazon, and Wal-Mart. So sell everything else: the experience, the ambience, the service — if you’re selling coffee and cake, make sure both are better; if you’re open all hours and have comfy chairs, don’t be stingy or grudging or condescending towards the customers who are going to take advantage of that.

[I’ve some work to do myself re: that last point]

I said intangibles can’t be bought; but they’re also not free. This is going to cost you, either in money or in time. If you have decades to scrape by and barely make ends meet until you are in fact a fixture in your community, then fine, you can likely earn your reputation on the cheap — but I don’t have that kind of time (and at least in Atlanta, I can’t buy out another bookstore that has been built up over decades). Invest in the storefront, invest in stock, invest in your staff (keep ‘em happy) and eventually you’ll see the results in your bottom line — just not in the first year.