Rocket Bomber - article - business - retail - Unique Bookstore Experiences: The Reference Desk [case study 3 of 5]

The old book retail model doesn’t quite work anymore, not in a world with online, discounted sales of physical books and instant downloads of e-books. But some of us (myself included) aren’t ready to let go of the ‘bookstore’ quite yet, and there should be some way to make a bookstore work even as book retail [as we used to know it] is significantly marginalized and in large chunks replaced by online analogues and substitutes.

One merely [merely, as if it’s that easy] has to “rethink the box” and come up with a new way to run a bookstore.

Previously:
Study your History. Recognise your Motives. Location, Location, Location. Know your Customer Base, and your Staff. Hire folks who love books. 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. Answer for yourself whether raw dollars or customer service is more important to your store, and its future. 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.

Unique Bookstore Experiences: Zero – Intro – 1 – 2 –

Chronologically: 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 – 8 – 9 – 10 – 11 – 12 – 13 – 14 – 15 – 16 – 17 – 18 – 19 – 20 – 21 – 22 – 23 – 24 – 25 – 26 – 27 – 28 – 29 –

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The New Model Bookstore

What we want is The Landmark, Destination Bookstore — like Powell’s City of Books, The Strand, or Shakespeare & Co. — but since that’s not enough anymore, we also need a “hook” — hopefully the hook also involves another revenue stream [20 years ago, adding a café was the “hook”; coffee was enough] but in a post-internet age you have to bring more than that: not just a Bookstore, but a Unique Experience.

criteria: multi-use space, multiple revenue streams, destination shopping, curated collections, weekly events and big-name, newsworthy Capital-Letter-E-Events — along with something extra

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Case Study #3: The Reference Desk

The typical North American will change careers at least three times during their career lifespan and will have an average of three to five different jobs within each career change. Depending on the size and scope of your ambitions it may take one to three jobs to reposition yourself. This is not as daunting as it may seem, since the average North American job only lasts 2-3 years. Thus, planning a career transition is an essential life-skill, and requires strategy and planning. [source: some blogger – additional note: “blogger” as a job/job title didn’t even exist 10 years ago]

So we will be (or should be) constantly learning throughout our lives, tooling up for the next job or retooling entirely for a new career – or just brushing up and picking up new skills to help ourselves in our current employment. Once upon a time one would waste invest four years in a decent college education, and that would be enough. Employment wasn’t guaranteed, but provided you actually finished a 4-year degree you could usually get in on the bottom rung of a management ladder and a comfortable middle class lifestyle seemed all but a promise, even a birthright.

I think successive bubbles and outsourcing and technological advancements and loss of manufacturing and what might be termed the New Reality have shown the old model to be a lie. It’s a shame high school guidance counsellors are still feeding this crap to impressionable 16 year olds — “Just go to college, dear, and everything will be allright.”

I call bullshit. For the record, I spent seven years in college — at a major, nationally recognized research university — and I work retail.

I may be grossly over-qualified, and I’m management, and I had my own reasons for wanting to work retail, specifically book retail, but that’s kinda beside the point. After 10 years in books, I’d have to go back to school if I wanted to do anything in any of the fields I studied at university. My education is, sadly, out of date.

The truth we should be telling high school juniors is that their first job out of college will be in a field that hasn’t even been invented yet. While at university, they should study problem solving, as much math as they can stand, a broad slate of other basic sciences (both hard science and social science), and the basics of business and entrepreneurship. Anything more specific than that is going to be on-the-job training anyway.

It’s fine to have a focus, admirable even. A concentrated study in anything is good for you, and looks good on an application. But one should endeavour to learn how to learn, and how to apply your knowledge base and skill set in creative ways to solve problems — that is what will help you best, moving forward. Commit to life-long-learning, never settle, never get too complacent — because even a white collar job that requires a college degree is no guarantee of lifelong employment.

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To that end, and to support it, I’d like to propose a new type of bookstore. I call it “The Reference Desk”.

It will likely look a lot like Powell’s Technical Books — you folks in Portland are so freakin’ lucky it almost makes me sick — but I might do things just a bit differently if I were setting up my own shop.

Concept: life-long learning, job re-education, computer books & test prep & all sorts of hard-to-find or seldom stocked technical books.
Related: Text books — but only to a point. This isn’t the college bookstore. If the nearby nursing college wants to use us as an alternate (or primary) bookstore, that’s great: but they need to give us title lists. This annoying habit of just cutting students loose with the advice that the books ‘are available’ from nearby bookstores needs to stop. Now.
Relevance: Did my long intro not spell out the relevance of a post-college-collegiate bookstore?

Here, Let me sell it to you:

From my personal experience: about 75% of the customer calls (and occasional in-store request) that end in a “no” or “I’m sorry we can’t order that” are directly related to text books. [Protip: kids, calling the local Big Box Books isn’t how you buy textbooks. We’re not a college bookstore; we stock novels and bios and history and astrology and kid’s picture books – if you want Intro to Polynesian Fertility Rites you’re going to have to buy it on campus, order it online, or plan ahead – because there ain’t no way in hell I’m going to have a copy on the shelf. —and an aside: you think we’re going to be cheaper? Man, I would laugh myself into unconsciousness if I hadn’t heard it a thousand times before. Sure, you need it for class tomorrow; but a lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part. Tough cookies, kid; and I hope this little exchange serves as a learning experience.]

However: A customer need that isn’t being filled by Big Box Books is an economic opportunity for the bookstore that can fulfill those needs.

It’s not just students, though: again, my rough estimate is that 75% of folks who come in looking for a computer book just can’t find it in the store — and there are folks looking for electrical & building codes, construction cost estimating, medical reference, project scheduling & management, guidance for setting up and running non-profits, and at least 90 other specialized fields that I haven’t even heard of yet. [except Organic Ostrich Farming – I’ve heard of that one; there is at least one customer looking for that book – if it exists. But I’m sure there are 89 other technical fields that are even further out there and that customer just hasn’t walked through my door yet.]

Alternate Profit Centers:

• Used books. Set up a system, say a set sale price (60% of list) with a set buy-back (30% of list) and just keep cycling books through the store. Since customers know that not only do they save 40% off the price of a new book but can expect to get 50% of their money back, dependent on how well they maintain the condition of the book – well, it might just earn our store quite a bit of repeat business. There would need to be very clear guidelines and expectations for customers, along with some real sticklers and hard-asses to work the buy-back desk, but this is something, unique, the sort of thing you just don’t find at other bookstores. As a bookstore owner, you’re looking at much larger initial outlay (you’ll need a separate budget for this, as it will take a while for the system to break even) and the stock will need to be periodically purged (annual clearance sales) but it’s something that could be made to work.
• Coffee, and food: I know folks are going to come in and camp out all day and study, or work their way through GMAT and GRE guides one question at a time (on scrap paper, not writing in the books – so they don’t have to buy them) and they’ll meet with friends and study partners and all the rest of that. Fine. I’m even willing to add extra tables & chairs (& outlets, for laptops and phones) and all that is not only not annoying, I’d love for you to come in for 16 hours a day. Even if you don’t buy my coffee or sandwiches, who do you think is earning money off of the vending machines? I could set one up that sold nothing but 20oz bottles of Mountain Dew for a dollar a pop and with this crowd, I’d likely be able to retire in ten years.

That Something Extra: Set up two ‘stores’ — out front, you have your coffee shop, free wifi, laptop friendly floorplan, all of last year’s books on convenient shelves, a Pocket Ref and Occupational Outlook Handbook on every table – multiple used books in the ‘reading room’ available to browse, or buy. But anything brand new, the most current edition, the latest version of the software, whatever is in demand — yeah, that’s going to be in the back. And by “in the back” I mean you’re going to have to pay for it in advance. But as stated: last year’s model is probably already sitting on a table in the reading room. Go ahead, read it. Steal it. You won’t be able to sell it back to me without one of our receipts, and it’s already out of date – still of some use, no doubt, but not something I’m as worried about. All the good books are “in the back”.

Killer App: 25,000 square feet of technical, educational, reference, and computer books — actually, let me make that 30,000 sq.ft., or more — with a place to plug in and plenty of interesting books to hand, and the one brand new computer guide you’re looking for in stock today

This wouldn’t be the easiest bookstore to set up and run, and it might do much better in some communities (Palo Alto, CA; Cambridge, MA) as opposed to others — but if your hometown is a college town, or a capital, or a major hub of whatever sort, especially if you have a strong entrepreneurial base — then I think you can not only make this work, after you’ve been open for a year folks will ask, “Now why didn’t *I* think of this?”