Unique Bookstore Experiences: The Last Picture Show [case study 4 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 – 3 –
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 – 30 –
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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 #4: The Last Picture Show
Let me take it back a step – Last year around this time I was walking everyone through some simple guidelines for real-estate development, which sounds a lot fancier than what the actual posts entailed: figuring out a good place to locate a bookstore.
Among other rules of thumb, I told aspiring shopkeepers to pay close attention to their neighbors – being next to a restaurant or other retail was considered a bonus, being out in the middle of nowhere was not recommended (despite the cheaper rent). One advantageous adjacency that I don’t remember mentioning was movie theaters: being next to a movie theater is as close a guarantee of customer traffic as you’re likely to get in retail. Folks go out to the movies, and either just miss a showtime (and have to wait an hour or two) or the show they want is sold out so they choose another (and still have to wait 30-40 minutes) or rarely, they plan ahead but don’t encounter traffic or other delays, and so are early — typically they’d just sit in a theater watching the same 4 minutes of the movie screen equivalent of a screen saver (about 5 times over) but if there were an option many folks would much rather flip through magazines or take a look at the new releases. And maybe they come back after the show, for coffee and to talk about the movie, and just maybe to buy something that caught their eye.
If you can locate your bookstore along a restaurant-shop-theater axis, you’re golden: Given the difference between movie showtimes, the time to get seated and served at a restaurant, and other variables (John is running late, again, or Kristen called and she wants to bring her roommate so now they’re going to be another 10 minutes) there will almost always be an hour or so for customers to waste — and what better way than to spend some time than in a bookstore?
Someone who already has a coffeeshop in house will of course also be trying to get folks to eat (or at least snack) at the bookstore before they see the movie – instead of another restaurant. Indeed, a smart risk-taker might imagine putting a restaurant and bar inside the bookstore, to capture even more of that before-and-after-the-show business.
It takes a mad genius to make the next intuitive leap, though: heck, why not put the theater in the bookstore?
while I am a mad genius, I don’t get credit for this idea: my Music Department Manager, Brad, gets the nod here. At Big Box Books, we also sell DVDs (and an increasing amount of Blu-Ray) out of the music dept., and Brad has noticed several trends over the past couple of years – At least at our store, the disc-buying customer is much more cinema ‘literate’, and they tend to be collectors.
We can build on this [in fact, we have] and make it a point to reach out to this customer base. As a result, we sell more blu-ray, box sets, and Criterion than anyone else in the metro area – and maybe much further. Tapping into a collector’s market is great, as you see certain all-but-guaranteed sales in select categories with each new release. The Criterion & blu-ray markets are also nice for the higher price points: when list price is $40-50, even in a once-a-year 50% off sale ($20) you’re banking $10 a disc (and at those prices, the real collectors buy much more than just single discs.)
So extend that out just a bit. Open up a book & disc store with an art-house style theater inside.
Doesn’t have to be a huge, megaplex, stadium-style cavernous hall of a theater – something of a scale with your market and intended audience – indeed, a multi-use space better suited for live drama (though with enough room for a decent screen) would be a much better choice. Say 200-275 seats.
One way to envision this strange hybrid is to consider the local movie cinemaplex — that one with 10 screens and the football-field-sized parking lot out by the mall is a fine example. Their lobby is huge — really oversized and seldom used, even when folks are standing in line for Star Wars or what-have-you. Sure, there is the concession counter (also grossly oversized; I’ve seen a Starbucks do 5 times the business from a counter a fourth as big) and maybe some video games off to one side, but otherwise there is nothing but carpet, bare walls, and the occasional movie poster. Say we took that unused floor space and did something really simple: took 10 sq.ft. to add a small counter selling movie soundtracks. Folks just saw the film and some of them no doubt loved the soundtrack – why make them wait? Sell them the CD before they leave; they can listen to it in the car on the way home. Talk about a specific retail opportunity & exploiting an ideal market; you know, given the low investment cost (you’d need to stock, at most, like 10 different CDs – a far cry from the hundreds we have at the bookstore) and the similarly low payroll (a single person for like 10 minutes at a time as each show lets out) and the fact that the CDs could be locked in a display case—and you’re only handed a copy after the sale at the register— I am really quite surprised none of the cash-strapped theater chains hasn’t tried this already. Maybe as a one-time thing, or special promo (“buy 2 lg. drinks and a popcorn bucket for $22 and get a free CD!”) but so far as I know, it hasn’t happened.
Now, stretch it just a bit further: Showing Iron Man 2? Why *aren't* you selling the first Iron Man on DVD in the movie lobby? Allergic to money?
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The idea behind “The Last Picture Show” isn’t to save the movie theater; in fact, just taking one failing business (theaters) and combining it with another slowly-dying business (retail sales of CDs and DVDs) is far from a recipe for success.
But, the whole can be more than the sum of its parts: think small, and build up.
- Art House style theater? check. Make it a multi-use space, suitable for small music ensembles or even live drama.
- Concession Stand? Nope – Instead: the ubiquitous bookstore coffee shop (sure, we’re still charging $4 for a large drink, but for some reason people don’t blink when it’s a coffee-based-milkshake) with something better than just candy – a decent sandwhich, to start with, and maybe even a small sit-down restaurant.
- Bookstore? again, check – but focused: ‘literary’ fiction supplimented by bestsellers and select genre fiction; biographies, select history & non-fiction titles; ‘coffee table’ books on cinema & things like “The Art of” and “The Making of” specific films; and obviously if someone ever made it into a movie we’ll want to stock that book.
- CDs? well sure, soundtracks, natch, but also a larger selection of classical and jazz – even at the expense of other “popular” CDs. The kids will download stuff (legally or not) so we’ll want to focus on music that requires more, hm, experience to appreciate: the thoughtful customer, the one with more money and a willingness to spend some of that money at a place that stocks (and can recommend) music.
- And of course, we’ll want to have DVDs and Blu-Ray: imagine, say, 3 times the floorspace of a Big Box Books (5-10 times what a Walmart or Target allots) and instead of inefficient floor bins, try putting most of them (the long backlist) into something much more like bookcases — at least along exterior walls.
Oh, I know why there are these bins that only hold (at most) 300 discs each (on 5sq.ft. footprints) in wide open floorplans: it’s to open up sight lines, so we (retailers) can always see what’s going on, at least nominally to deter theft.
Hate to say it, but it’s not the kids who steal our stuff anymore. Some professionals still do it (though I have to wonder how much they make fencing the stuff? it almost seems like too much trouble to list it on ebay for what folks are willing to pay…). And there might be other ways to deter theft; just because we have always done it one way doesn’t mean we have to continue – or even that it works.
Anyway: an extensive catalogue of discs (music & video, and video in whatever format is currently selling) combined with a decent café, a curated selection of books, a lovely place to hang out in and kill time, and the theater:
Aside from “art-house” films one could do almost-first-run films (skip the brutal opening weekends and just pick up stuff on its way to the dollar cinema, or to DVD) on Saturday nights, or cartoons once a month on weekends if you plan to also have a kids department, or special programming (Marx Brothers or Three Stooges, John Ford Westerns or Ed Wood Shockers, Japanese cinema—or anime, for that matter— Rocky Horror if you don’t mind the clean up, complete filmographies of Woody Allen or Godard or Kurasawa or Bergman or Weimar-Era German Noir or whatever you can think to program (and can get your hands on). [Here’s one easy idea if you can sign up for it.]
And the kicker: setting up author events in-store? Wouldn’t it be great to have a theater for that?
One of the struggles of book retail is getting people to come into the store; that’s why we have the comfy chairs and free wifi and don’t yell at you for not buying that humongous stack of magazines you just read cover to cover and didn’t even put back — oh, we still hate you for it but we smile and ask “find eveything you need?” in a friendly tone [through gritted teeth] as we clean up after your cheap, lazy ass. We need the traffic, as it is difficult to sell anything to folks if they don’t come in at all.
One of the struggles of a theater is that they are really only used for about 20 hours a week — out of 168, approximately 100 of which the theater is technically “open” but not working at anything close to capacity — for much of each day, even a Saturday, the huge house sits all but empty; there are movies playing but only to small handfuls.
So, we combine the two, seeking out the ‘literary’ aspects of a theater and adding in some of the ‘fun hangout’ aspects of the bookstore. We recoup the criminally underused space of the theater lobby to run a cafe and bookstore, we leverage the movie screen to help us sell DVDs and blu-ray discs, we capture the half hour a typical theater-goer will waste waiting for the next showtime and use it to sell books, and maybe we even manage to get in on the dinner-half of profits from folks going out for “dinner and a movie”.
With enough square footage (and a few millions) this idea would scale up into something grand. A truly unique experience. Even in a slightly smaller store, though, it could still be something quite special.
Concept: A movie theater that is also a bookstore
Related: sales of movie soundtracks, DVDs, and other discs
Relevance: People still consume visual media; and some things need to be seen live, in person, “on the big screen” – even in a world with internet streaming and downloads, there is value in the experience. We’re just suggesting a way to combine several, potentially related experiences into that perfect chocolate-and-peanut combo.
Let me sell it to you: well, I tried. Read the rest of this post.
Killer App: Taking a large iced coffee and a hot sandwich into a movie. (Are you kidding me? We’ve been smuggling food in for ages; maybe that says something about the available food?) — also, the bookstore as an Event space, not just a time-killer or occasional shopping trip
Alternate Profit Centers: I don’t know; popcorn, maybe? :)
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“The Last Picture Show” is a 1971 film by Peter Bogdanovich, and a 1966 novel by Larry McMurtry — noted author & also, a bookseller. The name seemed perfect for this concept.
