Rocket Bomber - article - retail - business - Rethinking the Box: Tables and Chairs

Oddly, the one thing a significant fraction (if not a majority) of customers remembers and likes about their favorite bookstore has absolutely nothing to do with the stocking of books. —what sticks in their mind (and sticks in my craw) are the number of available tables, and chairs.

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Rethinking the Box is a collection of ruminations on retail & bookselling, with an eye towards comics (as one goal of the exercise is to gauge the viability of a graphic novel superstore).

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 Why Even Annoying Customers are Important. 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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So. Let’s build a bookstore.

Remember this?

The 3” wide, five shelf, hypothetical bookcase, stocked and stacked and moved around on paper in a number of configurations, one of which was

96 bookcases on ~1000 sq.ft. of retail sales floor, complete with ADA compliant aisles between the stacks and enough room for 17,000+ hardcover books. (my math says 20,000+ manga volumes or similar trade paperback books, or 50,000+ “graphic novels” of the type DC, Marvel, and Image, Dark Horse, IDW, et al. release

— On just 1000 sq.ft.

A store doesn’t have to be big to be impressive.

But let’s move on to the next step: 16 of these 96-bookcase-blocks set up (with appropriate aisles) in a 25,000 sq.ft. big box retail space. If it literally is a box, 160ft. square, then I can easily throw up another 96 bookcases on two exterior walls, and we’ll shove the lot towards one corner to leave room for all the bookstore-stuff-that-isn’t-bookcases and voilà

[it’s only a model…]

Obviously, I’m not an architect (I’m about 90 credit hours and two degrees short) but the point isn’t to provide a set of building plans, instead we’re looking for a mathematical model so we can consider stock, and a mental image so we can talk about “the big box bookstore”.

Speaking of math, and still using that 3’ wide ‘umble bookcase, I’ve got 1632 of ‘em in the diagram above; 24,480 linear feet of shelving that will hold somewhere in the neighbourhood of 300,000 books (or 415,000 manga, or 880,000+ comic “trade paperbacks” at ¼ to ⅓ of an inch per.)

If one didn’t care about niceties like comfy chairs or a café, or shelves customers can shop without a ladder, you’d easily be able to stock a million GNs — excuse me [dr.evil] – One Million Comics! – [/dr.evil] — in the same space occupied by your typical Best Buy or Wal-Mart.

Note the model above also includes 7,000 sq.ft. of space [whitespace, to right & bottom] for things like offices, a café, stock room, receiving dock, registers, and the All Important Restrooms (I get so very tired of that question…) but like I said: this isn’t a floorplan, so you’ll just have to imagine how the different extra bits might be incorporated if this were an actual bookstore.

To give you a sense of scale: if all the bookcases are 3’ wide, then main aisles are 16 feet wide and that grey box at the intersection of the two is 14’ x 14’ — that’s bigger than my bedroom, and in terms of square feet is also bigger than my living room.

25,000 sq.ft. is half of a football field. It’s a big damn store.

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I’m sure most (if not all) of you have been to a branch of Big Box Books (whatever the local flavour is) and can easily picture in your mind what faces the consumer as soon as you walk in the door: big tables with stacks of books set up in the entryway, in the main aisle, on the cross aisle, in the front of the kids’ department and the music department, and even in front of the restrooms. In fact, you can’t shop (or even walk) the store without encountering at least a half dozen said tables on the way from the front door to the sci-fi section, or any other {point a} to {point b} you’d care to name.

Of course, this is intentional, and it’s retail. We expect special displays, and for bookstores that means tables.

Take a step back, and consider what each table costs:

Someone at the corporate office had to theme and set the display; figuring out which titles to feature and ordering the books in sufficient quantity. Said books had to be ordered, shipped, received, and staged prior to the display being set, and then some poor schmuck (at my store, his name is “Matt”) has to clear the old display, reshelve or return those books, track down the new titles, and then set the new display in an attractive and appealing manner.

All in all, say it takes one person a couple of hours. Tack on the corporate, warehouse, and in-store processing for another two payroll hours.

And multiply this by the dozen or so tables in the store, and the hundreds of stores of Big Box Books… whole years of human endeavor (as gauged by payroll) are spent in just one reset of a chain’s displays — even considering a single store (and the fact that we can only work our employees 8 hours a day, 40 hrs. a week) then if one person, we’ll call him Matt, is responsible for these displays in a given store, he’s going to spend about 15 weeks of each working year—3 and a half months—just setting tables and doing little else.

Is this the best way to employ your most experienced, most knowledgable booksellers?

If you’re paying this poor sap minimum wage (and only minimum wage, no benefits) then each table changeover costs you $350. times 12 (minimum) tables per store, times a new set each month, times hundreds of stores…

OK, back it off — Single store, no corporate involvement: It takes one employee 2 hours to reset a table. If you change displays once a month, you’re spending 24 payroll hours on each table — $175 (min.) a year. If you want to compete on the same level as Big Box Books — same number of displays, same frequency of updates, you’re looking at spending $2000-$3000 a year just in payroll costs, to say nothing of ordering books in quantity to stock these displays, or the cost to process the returns of unsold stock (or the more onerous cost of absorbing loses on non-returnable stock).

There are ways around this, but I’m going to make it as ugly as I can before we talk about mitigating factors:

A 3×6 table can hold at least 40 hardcovers or 50 trade paperback titles, and at just three copies of each that’s an investment (msrp) of $2000-$3000 for a single month’s worth of books, for a single table. (at these rates your payroll seems like a minimal expense)

[for the Super Comic Shop model, this same table will likely only hold 24 Graphic Novels — which are larger—in two dimensions, and the important two—than most bookstore trade hardcovers. Not that it matters, but I thought I’d add in what might be a relevant detail.]

Before one can look at the performance of display tables, just consider the annual costs: a single table, with monthly changeover, at the end of the year will have cost you $25,000 and up.

For one table.

This is one of the realities of retail.

Of course, these costs must be offset by sales, and while I’ve overstated the cost of books—since they are always bought at a discount (40%, in most cases)—if a table doesn’t generate $25,000 in sales per year, then you’re putting the wrong titles on it, and maybe you’ve got it in the wrong place to begin with.

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$2000 a month. To set up each display table, you’re looking at $2000, and you better hope the sales it generates will pay you back.

Each endcap or in-the-stacks display (5 to 15 titles) will cost you $300 to $700 each month, depending on how many titles you’d like to feature, and completely discounting the payroll costs of setting it up and taking it down.

Every display has a cost; tables hold the most books, so they’re the most expensive. The question you should ask yourself, is first) is it worth it? and second) would I have sold the books anyway, even if they weren’t featured?

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If one considers even just my odd bookstore model, as posted above; there are two main, wide aisles above that are going to be—in a standard store—jam-packed with tables, racks, towers, & corrugated displays; at the end of each stack of bookcases, you’ll have another display; everywhere a corporate drone can think to put in a display, there’s going to be a display.

For one segment of the customer base, let’s call them grazers, this is ideal: they love the effort put into displays because they can seldom be bothered to think about what to buy, and they love being spoon-fed selections via the many display tables and other promotions.

The problem I have with tables, as noted above, is their costs — in terms of both stock and payroll — for limited return …oh, don’t doubt it: the books sell well. But often, this is because the books are new and in demand; they would have sold anyway.

The Grazers are just window-shopping; if we didn’t have tables and other displays, they’d take their lattes into the stacks and they’d be just as happy grazing the shelves; they only shop the tables because that’s what’s presented foremost (you’d trip over the displays if you weren’t looking) and it’s easiest.

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And now, stop and consider what the bookstore would look like if we took out the (display) tables: instead of hawking dumps full of books on the main aisle, and endcap displays at the end of each stack, what would it look like if the aisle was clear and a comfy chair sat where each endcap used to be?

Dude, imagine: a 16’ wide concourse through a beautiful bookstore, otherwise clear except for a La-Z-Boy every three feet on either side of the main aisle.

Part of what makes the modern bookstore work is that we encourage customers to “just hang out”.

Can we make that function of the bookstore even more appealing?

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Why waste payroll on displays if we can instead expend it on keeping the stacks current, organized, and shoppable? Why waste floor space on displays if the same books can be presented equally well in a logical, systematic set of bookshelves — the same bookshelves you have to set up and maintain anyway, even if you do have a full slate of periodic displays?

What is the bookstore?

Is it the New Release Table? Is it the Bestseller List?

Or is it a collection of bookcases (and books), matched with comfy chairs (a fine place to read or take a nap), a place to plug in your laptop and geek out for 6 or 7 hours at a time, alongside a coffee shop that sells a decent menu of sandwiches and sweets?

— I need more outlets, free wifi, expensive coffee drinks — and a damn fine selection of sandwiches, acutally — more than I need “up to date” “competitive” book displays.

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unless the tables are of use to Internet Hobos, study groups, or even [shudder] the type of shopper who just pulls dozens of titles off the shelf to browse without buying anything […I hate you] I say: ditch the tables for clear sight lines, more comfy chairs, and easier navigation of the bookstore.

A table is a revenue generator, but is also a cost. And I’ve a suspicion the same revenue can be garnered, from the same customer base, even if the table isn’t there.