Rethinking the Box: Sales vs Service
I’m going to start with a confession: I’m a greedy bastard.
There are a lot of things *I* need to buy, places to go, a world of beer and a pilgrimage (at least one) to Japan — and for the most part, I’m going to need your money to do all that. So in a perfect world where I was a slick huckster with few(er) morals and the gift of gab, I’d be quite happy to be a salesman and take as much of your money as I can talk you out of — sales is a skill, and I’m not knocking it, or the people who can practice it.
I can’t do sales. I can seldom even sell myself, being almost violently introverted and more willing to close the door and read then to force myself to ‘be social’.
And yet, I work retail. And I’m pretty good at it.
##
Rethinking the Box is a collection of ruminations on retail & bookselling, with an eye towards comics (as one goal of the exercise is to guage 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, Set your main-aisle displays, 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 affordable salaries along with revenue from inventory (with a side of coffee) and compare your numbers to average industry per-storefront sales.
Chronologically: 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 – 8 – 9 – 10 – 11 – 12 – 13 – 14 – 15 – 16 – 17 – 18 – 19 – 20 – 21 – 22
##
How, you might ask, does an introvert and borderline shut-in manage as a retail associate (and manager) in a high volume sales environment?
First, I sell books. I love books. I know a lot about books, and all sorts of books, and even quite a bit about books I haven’t even read. I’m also a trivia nut, a news hound, a history buff, a word freak, and on top of everything else I have an odd gift for remembering almost all of it — I have a very strong knowledge base.
Second, I’ve been able to cope by taking on defined roles and a number of ‘scripts’ that I can run through. So long as interactions can be made to fit one of my premeditated scripts, I have no problem with people. I’m a high-functioning introvert. I’m an actor. It doesn’t change the fact that the exercise exhausts me mentally (and occasionally physically, too, though that may be psychosomatic) but I can fake it for eight hours a day to collect my paycheck. It’s taken me 20 years to work out how to interact with the world this way, but I wasn’t given a choice.
I was actually quite lucky when I fell into bookselling 10 years ago, as it is a perfect fit for me tempermentally (…when I can actually sell the books; many, many customer interactions have nothing to do with books and that is where I occasionally get frustrated) and I bring to the store all the random bits and facts collected over decades, and it’s actually useful —
Some guy came in looking for a book with a quote “I have written you a long letter because I did not have time to write a short one”. My staff tossed it around for a minute and then immediately called me over — and just kind of stood mouth agape while I rattled off that it is often mis-attributed to Mark Twain, who did in fact use a variation on it, but it was in fact first written by Blaise Pascal.
This turkey had never heard of Pascal, I guess, since he insisted that Twain was the source (though he didn’t even know that until I told him) and took up the next half hour of my time that afternoon while I patiently tried a number of searches of our inventory system to find that we had nothing in the store, and then I had to turn the terminal screen around where he could see and get on the internet and type every variation on the quote this, customer could think of, in front of him, because he couldn’t be arsed to go home and do it for himself — and since Twain did not in fact write it—he was quoting Pascal—the phrase does not appear in any of those ‘wit and wisdom of Mark Twain’ books.
(and we ordered 3 Twain quotation books anyway, which I could have done at the start of the exercise without the Google excursion)
(and a week later when the books came in, this same customer tracked me down in the store so I could then use the books’ indices and speed-read pages looking for the non-existant quote while he looked over my shoulder. Honestly.)
The results of that interaction aside (and the inability of some people to take a straight ‘no’ even when no is in fact the correct answer) the thing is, a customer came up to the desk with the most obscure thing he could think of, and I had an answer. It’s like winning a game show every day.
[My suspicion is that also drives many comic book geeks to run comic book shops — Finally, finally a lifetime of collecting the most obscure of trivia can be put to use.]
##
Now, I’ve described a customer interaction that didn’t end in a sale, one that wasted an hour of my time and kind of killed my enthusiam for bookselling not one day but two.
But that’s what makes bookselling different: it is not a sales job.
It should be all about customer service. When someone calls up and asks for a book on organic ostrich farming or walks into the store with a half-remembered quote, or wants a recommendation — a bookseller gives suggestions, guides the search, relies on personal knowledge and past experience (and even the results of past customer interactions) to find answers.
Bookselling is retail, don’t doubt that. We love money
…but we love books more
So, at its core, bookselling is a service provided. Our employees provide knowledge, share enthusiasm, answer questions, solve problems and occasionally make magic happen. Handing someone the exactly right book, the sort of thing that changes lives, that’s magic.
This spirit is also what makes the bookstore different, and why we put up with the sorts of things no one would dare imagine doing in any other retail or even public context: if you sit down in the middle of the aisle, take off your shoes, and begin pulling goods off the shelf in a Grocery Store you’re going to be escorted from the premises and invited to not come back — but if it’s not happening on a daily basis at the bookstore then your business is slow (and you need to figure out how to get Ms. French Cheese Feet back into your store)
Many people come in at least once a week, mess up the store in their own small way (small, but multiplied by dozens, even hundreds of customers), hang out for hours, and don’t buy anything. And I’m cool with that. Eventually, something will show up on Oprah or the sunday news shows or Boing Boing or wherever one gets a ‘must buy’ recommendation, and the year-long bookstore habit eventually translates into a sale. Yes, we do need a certain number of book addicts to keep the lights on and the doors open — but the bookstore is huge, the inventory is already a sunk cost, we’ve a hundred thousand (or even multiple hundreds of thousands) of books — and the profit of one more book sold is pure gravy. (well, the margin is still only 40% of the cover price — but if you bought the book last year the other 60% is already accounted for; you own it and so you get the full $15-$25 — and of course, one more sale is one more sale.)
After you’ve paid your fixed costs and made the commitment to be open 10 to 16 hours each and every day, (at the risk of sounding banal) you just need to sell books. The doors are open. A non-paying customer walks in, walks out. The doors were open anyway. If a certain minimum amount of sales are made each day, the extra customers have no direct costs and very few indirect costs —
Well, they can steal our electricity, waste booksellers time and effort, make a mess that I have to pay someone to clean up, move and mis-shelve product so we can’t find it (our last copy, which might have sold to someone else, in fact), but the paying customers do the same things, and there’s no way to know which is which when they walk in the front door. What we can do, is sell coffee — which browsers, grazers, campers, non-book-customers, and the die-hard book addicts all seem to like, and coffee makes money — and provide the same high level of service to all patrons (customers or otherwise) because some significant fraction of these interactions result in sales.
I don’t know exactly what the fraction is, but I do know a larger number of potential customers in the store is directly proportional to a larger number of actual customers.
Even more than the books, though, the modern bookstore sells atmosphere. It only seems like they give it away: cups of coffee, the occasional newspaper or magazine, and eventually the larger purchase (even if only once or twice a year) pays for the comfy chairs, the music, the knowledgeable staff, and all that reading you sponges do for free while lounging in the aisles, or the inconsiderate louts who tie up all the tables (and outlets) in the cafe with their laptops and accoutrément, and even the people sleeping in the aforementioned comfy chairs.
[that, once again, was from my first Rethinking the Box column]
This idea of service, combined with the ‘bookstore atmosphere’, and the lack of hard-press sales (we’ll gently suggest other books as an add-on purchase, but that’s the upper limit) all combine to make the bookstore a Third Place, the sort of business that is also a neighbourhood hangout and inviting refuge from the rest of the world.
Service & Knowledge are key to the ‘bookstore’ — a smile and an answer, and usually a book-in-stock-and-in-your-hand.
Mind the bookstore, and the sales will take care of themselves.
##
Sadly, the focus on customer service and knowledgeable staff are getting lost in the current economic climate. Yes, as a business person you have to balance the books, but it would be better if one planned ahead for business cycles — save money during the boom years to keep the bookstore running when times are lean, or godawful. Sadly, they don’t teach the long-view in business schools. When you have a stack of cash: you expand, you buy out smaller competitors, you add product lines or experiment with new sales channels. It’s a shame that the biggest (and often, only) bookstore in most of our communities are run by the big corporate chains — who cut payroll, decrease stock, and turtle-up in hard times because the profits of the past have been wasted on unsubstainable expansion, reckless gambles, or corporate dividends.
I not just not a salesman, I’m no executive. I think I’d be able to run a business (and will do my damnedest to convince a bank of that at some point) but I lack the corporate mindset. I’m a bookseller, and I want the best damn bookstore I can start, run, and maintain for decades until I die of liver failure after a lifetime of selling books and drinking beer.
Yes, as I stated in the opening, I’m a greedy bastard. I want your money, and I’d like to take a portion of profits to spend on my own selfish pursuits. But my salary (however high) is just a cost of the business, accounted for and paid for as an ongoing expense, while the business profits go back into the business: more books, better coffee, comfy-er chairs, and better-paid happier employees — with a fund set aside to keep the doors open even when sales go down.
A drop in sales should not mean a drop in service: the customers don’t come in to spend money, they come in for answers, and for books.
I wish corporate HQ at Big Box Books weren’t so fixated on costs, that they sabotage our ability at a store level to provide excellent customer service.
image credits, top to bottom:
- composite image, “Almighty Dollar”, non-commercial CC licensed photo from EssG on flickr and “Bookshelves – Kona Stories – Big Island Book Talk”, non-commercial CC licensed photo from brewbooks on flickr. Kona Stories is an independent bookstore on the Big Island, Hawaii, founded 2006.
- “used books”, non-commercial CC licensed photo from babblingdweeb on flickr. The store isn’t identified, though the caption on the photo is the quote, “Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.” – Charles W. Eliot, The Happy Life, 1896
- “Federal Street Bookstore”, non-commercial CC licensed photo from Phil LaCombe on flickr. The Federal Street Bookstore is in Greenfield, MA.
- “Comics”, non-commercial CC licensed photo from Amerist on flickr. Pictured is the Comic Hunter comicshop, located in Prince Edward Island, Canada.
- untitled CC licensed photo from A.K. Photography on flickr. Captioned, “Probably my favorite corner of this book store because most of the books were super old. Ill definitely go back there often.”
- “sliding bookshelves in a convenience store” non-commercial CC licensed photo from katkimchee on flickr. The unnamed convenience store is in Korea; pictured are manhwa collections.
- “shelved”, CC licensed photo from D’Arcy Norman on flickr. This unnammed bookshop with drool-worthy manga shelves is apparently in Calgary, Canada.
- “Bookhenge”, non-commercial CC licensed photo from Kevin H. on flickr. Pictured is The Strand in New York.
I include images in this post as it’s been a long time since we took a look at the actual bookstores in all this discussion of business: This is what bookselling is, this is what I love, this is why I care enough to talk on this topic for 15 months.
