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“Mind the Gap: The Generation that Came of Age between 9 November 1989 and 11 September 2001. The Promise of Peace, Wealth, Cooperation, and Understanding that was Tossed Aside by Cold Warriors Desperate for a New War, the World the Old Generation Re-Made, and the Full Appreciation of What Our Nascent Global Community Lost in the Months Following 9-11.”
I don’t have time to write the book with that title now. But there was an excellent discussion at the bar this evening, when one patron came in having recently watched Argo, and attempted to explain/describe the historical setting to another patron whose father just so happened to emigrate from Iran to the United States in 1979. It was all friendly; we’re good souls down at the pub. But in attempting to integrate the feelings and opinions of my fellows at the bar, placing it in historical context, while simultaneously taking into full consideration how our perception of events in Iran in 1979-80 have been fully transformed by the recent shenanigans in Iraq and Afghanistan, it occurred to me that my own personal viewpoint was uniquely informed.
While I was in high school and at university, my worldview had to take in the end of the cold war and a cessation of hostilities: Peace — if not actual, than palpable and almost within out collective grasp.
I entered college with a sense of hope, an international mindset, an open mind and heart when it came to global entities, and a hunger to cash in on new global opportunities. We all learned a second language. The EU was proving that even Germany and France could get along in this new world, and the Russians were the biggest capitalists of them all. [Ayn Rand would have absolutely loved 21st century Russia]
And then some asshole had to go and ruin the new dream, before it could really gain traction. No, not the asshole you’re thinking of: one madman destroyed a couple of buildings in New York. A Crime, a Heinous Crime — and perhaps deserving of the end he met. No, instead that tragedy was used as an excuse to start a ill-conceived ‘war’ — a war, that as defined, will in fact be never-ending. Until all discontent on the planet is abolished, there will always be a “war on terror”, but every military effort taken to quell discontent only breeds more tragedy, more extremists, and more events like 9-11.
This is the perfect outcome for some: a war that cannot be ended with something as simple as the collapse of a superpower.
My Cohorts and I, who once glimpsed the promise of world peace, world cooperation, and global opportunity [capitalist opportunities!] in the 1990s will eventually grow and come to positions of power as older generations die off. I hope we will not be too jaded in our old age, or that we forget the promise of our youth (or willingly abandon it).
There was an asshole, backed by powerful corporate interests and at least one major political party, who took every positive thing that came with the end of the cold war, and wiped his ass with it
— to please his military-industrial base, to mask the continuing problems at home by getting everyone — domestic supporters and foreign allies alike — to “rally behind the flag” and basically making a shit-sandwich of world affairs and forcing everyone to take a big bite.
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The Promise was squandered. Reagan railed in Berlin, “Tear Down This Wall!”
Like everyone else, I have my favorite recipes & old standbys, and often can be found eating much the same thing week-to-week, until one gets sick of the treadmill and breaks out and suddenly buys a whole leg of lamb for $40 or something equally dire [from a ‘how do I cook this? standpoint]
Also, like everyone else, I do pizza and burgers and other casual dining much too often (bad for both my wallet and waistline) and while at work, I’m more likely to buy something than bring something for lunches/dinners/and-occasional-breakfasts.
So my actual cooking is limited; and since I learned to cook from Mom&Dad (cooking for a family of four) whenever I do cook, I cook too much (quantity-wise) and end up eating leftovers for a week. Actually, this isn’t so bad, so long as your go-to recipes freeze well – but it makes it a bit harder to experiment as—at best—you can try two new things a week. And you often have to eat your mistakes.
Nearly all of my recipes are in a state of flux; I’m always trying something new – substitutions, either by choice or necessity – different time constraints or techniques – shifting from soup to stew to roast-in-sauce to roasts-to-slice-for-sandwiches to hash-for-breakfast and back to soup again.
Anyway: One reason I’ve never contemplated a “Recipe Blog” in and of itself is: that’s not how I cook. I’m a seat-of-the-pants chef, always willing to try something new, always willing to ruin a dish if it seems like I’ll learn something from it.
“Ruin” is a relative term anyway: even a dish that comes out too salty [almost impossible to recover from] can usually be combined or served with plain white rice, potatoes [baked or mashed], served as pasta sauce, or diluted into a soup. One needs to be omnivorous to an extent as well, and embrace the inner scavenger. “So, I overcooked the roast. It’s dry, stringy, inedible – almost. I guess I’ll have to slice it across the grain as thin as I can, and then whip up a gravy. A lot of gravy. And egg noodles – that’ll be good.”
It takes some imagination and quite a bit of knowledge to make these pivots after you make a mistake. The payoff, though, is that some mistakes are serendipitous moments of discovery – when you mess up an out-of-the-box recipe and discover something new.
To date, I have just two go-to resources for cooking experimentation: First, Alton Brown. I own many of his cookbooks, but there are AMAZING resources available online as well. A google search will soon reveal recipes, transcripts, possibly illegal full-episode rips of Good Eats episodes available on YouTube, and other resources. Alton Rocks. Thank You Alton.
However, no matter how good the information presented, Alton only gets a half-hour to present a topic — and a little background knowledge will inform what you see on TV and also help when Alton glosses over issues that might have multiple interpretations, or when he’s plain wrong. [Yes. Good Eats rocks but it’s not a peer-reviewed journal, it’s popular entertainment]
One book you should own is On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee. This is not a cookbook, it’s a food book. McGee has built upon the first book and actually has a cookbook, released two years ago, but I heartily recommend the original book for those who want to know about their ingredients. It’s not a light read (at 900 pages) — OK, I’ll leave it at that.
It’s a textbook. The subject is food and cooking. [It says so on the tin.] You can just follow TV & magazine recipes – or you can read, learn, grow as a home chef, and know why a substitution will work, or why a tweak one way or the other helps the dish, or at least changes it.
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So I managed to sneak in a book recommendation and mini-review: mission accomplished.
[The folks who produce America’s Test Kitchen and Cook’s Illustrated magazine are releasing a similar fine-looking food-science book – but I don’t have a copy yet so I can’t review it here; they have an excellent track record and reputation though, so this is on my shopping list.]
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So after I posted the last recipe I got quite a bit a feedback (over twitter; no one in the know comments on blogs anymore, that’s so 2011) and one reader pointed out that slow cookers are *great* but nearly all slow cooker recipes are for 8 hours – with no allowance [for most of us who do in fact work full time jobs] for commute times or other delays.
The good news is: an extra hour or two will not affect the final dish. Some care must be taken with meats [which can quite easily be over-cooked] but many dishes either have enough liquid, or specify cuts of meat that are generally forgiving, such that a pot roast or stock not only won’t be ruined but might benefit from the extra time.
Also: the requisite cooking time can be extended by starting cold, or frozen: the defrosting time gets added to the cooking time and is a built-in buffer. If I’m cooking a pot roast, I might start from frozen and plan for a full 12 hours of cooking time in the crock pot.
Little did I know: this is an internet controversy, and my easy-going approach makes me an apostate.
Before we get too deep into the topic: the most important bit is the final temperature of the fully-cooked dish: if you start from 40°F [refridgerated] or stone-cold-frozen and the whole crock is 160°F or more for ‘sufficient’ time — it would seem that no one wants to commit to an exact time online, but I think if the whole mass is at 165°F, dude, we’re done — than no matter how long a dish might have rested in the ‘danger zone’ (40-140°F) – Hot Food is not going to make you sick.
The trick is to make sure the whole dish is fully cooked; “hot” food may not be Hot all the way through. A slow cooker is a nice insurance policy – given how it heats food and the length of time it takes it is going to be the very rare case where an odd cold or frozen bit survives the slow-but-steady-heat-onslaught.
The USDA has specific guidelines, but these folks also make restaurants put warnings about medium-rare burgers and sunny-side-up eggs on menus: Yes, their warnings are justified but I still eat my burgers rare. [eggs I prefer scrambled or ever-easy]
Please read for yourself; not just the links above but also:
Another important point to consider is the make-and-model of your slow cooker, and how it cooks. One thing I discovered in researching this article is that my own Crock Pot doesn’t have a heating element in the bottom: the actual heat is supplied from the sides. This means if I make a half-batch rather than filling the crock to the rim: heating will end up being uneven and cook times will take longer. [So I’m not really doing myself any favors by halving recipes: fill the sucker to the brim]
When the idea of ‘slightly longer’ cook times came up on twitter, I had to think: “just how far can we push it?” With my bean & bacon soup, the main ingredient was beans, and can we really overcook bacon fat? so when I made the second batch:
I cooked it in my slow cooker for three days.
Obviously I was using the low setting. Actually, I’d flip it from ‘low’ to ‘warm’ and back every 12 hours or so, but this was the long, long, Long slow-cooker recipe. Even stirring occasionally, there was some scorching on the sides, but the burnt, slightly smoky flavour was an excellent match for the bacon. The dish was never ruined.
So: bean soup. very hard to overcook.
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This success led me to think: “Well, is there any dish I’d intentionally overcook?”
Oh yeah, there is one: French Onion Soup.
French Onion Soup is all about caramelized bits and a long slow cooking time, and toasted crouton and melty gruyère and ramekins and broilers — and actually, quite a bit of fuss.
If my slow cooker is going to burn the soup anyway, why not burn some French Onion Soup?
IF your slow cooker has a heating element on the bottom, you’ll be able to use it much like a dutch oven. You *can* brown onions in the crock and make a decent French Onion Soup. My Crock Pot [which heats from the sides, not the bottom] will not make French Onion Soup — at least, not without help.
And this is the reason I don’t have a recipe to post this week: I built on last week’s recipe. I tried a few things. I went well past what I knew and tried something I thought would work and committed and followed through
and failed.
While this is obvious in science, it’s also a staple in cooking. Actually, most cooking is science: we just don’t think of it that way.
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Like everyone else, I have my favorite recipes & old standbys, and often can be found eating much the same thing week-to-week, until I get sick of the same-old-same-old and Try Something New.
And I’m not just talking about the way most corporate overlords treat their part-time hourly employees.
Let’s say you’re the store manager: salaried, bonus-eligible, supposedly given a great deal of responsibility. It should be easy, right? Or at least easier than grinding out a minimum wage shift at a register, standing on your feet for hours and hours and asking the same stupid three questions of a constant parade of customers who don’t care, and often can’t be bothered to stop talking on the phone long enough to acknowledge you as an actual person.
“If Only I were the boss,” our hypothetical employee says to herself, “then we could actual change things in the store, respond to our customers, make this a decent place to work and shop”
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Merely being the store manager is not being the boss. Corporate makes sure of that.
Corporate Question Number One: “So, what are you doing to increase sales?”
To respond to this question, a store manager is required to come up with some bullshit with the right-sounding phrases (whatever jargon is in vogue at corporate offices this year) and to come up with ‘action plans’ and ‘employee incentives’ and ‘store initiatives’ and all kinds of other crap that has the same net effect as shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic after the iceberg hits.
At the store level: we didn’t steer the ship into an iceberg. Expecting us to magically fix it at the store level is intentionally blind, callously negligent, or possibly both.
Retail locations are dependent on customer traffic. I can’t drive traffic into my store any more than I can make it rain. At the store level, the most I can do is keep the doors open, hire more staff to make the most of any traffic that does come in the door, train staff to be courteous and helpful and then also ensure we are scheduling enough people to work to keep up with sales volume.
Tired and harried staff can only do so much. Cutting back on payroll only limits your total potential sales. If you want to increase sales, let me add staff the store to increase employee interactions with customers. These conversations lead to a better understanding of what the customer needs, to personalized recommendations, and more sales.
Corporate Question Number Two: “Sales are down so we need to minimize our expenses; what are you doing to meet the new payroll target?”
I’m paraphrasing but this is fairly close to the actual weasel words used: They don’t tell me to fire people, or to cut a part-timer from 20hrs a week down to 12. They don’t tell me to make customers wait for 5 minutes instead of 2 minutes, or 10 minutes instead of 5. They don’t tell me to pull someone off of customer service for restocking or merchandising. They never ask me to pull the kids specialist out of her department to cover breaks at the register, leaving one of our stronger departments unstaffed for hours a day — when, once again, if there were an employee there to talk and listen to customers we just might see a sales bump that would justify adding one extra person to each shift.
“What are you doing to make your payroll number?” This thinking doesn’t even consider what the costs of cutting payroll are:
Sure, you save the $9.25 an hour you’d be paying someone — but your customers have to wait. Your employees are overworked, leading to more sick days, more grumbling, fewer smiles, and no matter how saint-like they are and how hard they try, will also lead to ever-so-slightly worse customer service.
Customers who have bad experiences or who just have to wait one extra minute also leave the store thinking to themselves, well, I’m never shopping there again.
Cutting back payroll means spending community goodwill. It’s not a savings, it’s a cost. And community goodwill is only earned slowly, over years. It’s not like you’re going to get it back even if corporate comes to its senses and lets store managers add staff.
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Sales are down. You can sit in your executive suite, stare at spreadsheets, lean on your COO, who leans on a SVP, who leans on a junior VP, who leans on regional staff, who send out emails to all the store managers, “So, what *are* you doing to increase sales?”
It’s like asking farmers in a drought to make it rain.
Here’s what can be done: Advertise nationally to drive traffic into stores. Spend years building up a reputation for knowledgeable, helpful service, quality products, and prices that are in-line with the quality and service offered. [One does not have to be the cheapest to be well thought of by our customers; ask Apple.] Build the brand to drive traffic into stores, and then make sure there are enough positive employee-customer interactions to convert that traffic into sales.
My experience is in book sales; our chosen retail niche has a unique service component not shared with other retailers — but some of this has to be universal.
The one thing that could be addressed at a store level, increasing staff, I’m not allowed to do.
The one thing that would actually drive more traffic into stores, national and consistent advertising in major media, is deemed by corporate to be too expensive.
Ask Coke how much they spend on ads. Or Budweiser. Or McDonalds.
Until someone at our corporate offices catches a clue, I guess I’ll go back to shuffling deck chairs and ignoring the iceberg.
Yes, this is a bit off-topic, at least for topics that have been previously established, but then again: this is a personal blog so I can post whatever I like. And those of you who follow me on twitter know how much I love to cook already.
One of my favorite appliances is my trusty slow cooker, and one of my fav applications for the slow cooker is soup. Now that it’s finally Fall [It’s still 80° out, but the first day of Fall was yesterday, 22 September] I say: it’s a perfect time to make some homemade soup.
This one is a two-parter, in that you need to plan a bit ahead. Actually you need to start the day before, but this step is easy: soak your beans overnight. For this batch I went with 1lb. of black-eyed peas and 1lb. of black beans – that sounds like a lot but don’t worry, we’re not cooking all of this today
I soaked the two beans in separate containers, as black beans will dye everything purple — which defeats the purpose of using two different types of visually-contrasting beans. I also heartily advocate that you use dried beans for soup, as canned beans taste canned and this is such a simple dish the bean flavor is the soup, really. Well, that and bacon.
What converts simple beans to fantastic soup? The secret is to not just soak beans overnight, but to soak them in brine (as opposed to plain water). For one pound of beans, I use 2 quarts water and a half cup of salt. (see note: a quarter cup for two quarts.)
Sunday Soup #1: Bean & Bacon
makes 3 batches
[one to cook, two to freeze]
prep time: 20 minutes, plus some pre-planning. cook time: 4 hours. 8 hours.
[edit 7 October: feedback from other cooks is that cook time is highly variable, depending on your slow cooker. Please allow 8 hours; it might be done before then, but it’s always easier to reheat, than to have underdone soup.]
Hardware:
Crockpot or other slow cooker, or a big enough soup pot.
Bowls or large storage containers [I have 13cup plastic storage containers] to soak the beans.
Quart-sized ziploc [or other brand] plastic bags.
Software:
2lbs. beans: after soaking that’s 12 cups
[edit 4 October: originally this recipe called for a cup of salt to a gallon of water for the brine. This is my standard brine for meats, but it failed me in this application: either bean cells like the salt more that meat muscle fibre, or the extended soak was too much, or — most likely — the fact that bacon & canned tomatoes carry their own sizable sodium payloads made the final product much saltier than expected. I didn’t notice as much in the first batch, but a later substitution of tomato juice for the water — recommended — made batches 2 & 3 too salty requiring some creative serving applications. ]
[ tl;dr as updated below, use 1/2 cup of salt, not a cup ]
brine: 1 gallon of water and a 1/2 cup of salt [table salt; if you only have kosher, adjust to 1 cup]
3 cups of chopped onion (one large onion chopped)
3 cloves garlic, or more, minced
6oz. of Bacon. mmmm, bacon.
6 stalks of celery
bay leaf [x3]
3 cans [14oz ea.] of diced tomatoes
water. Or tomato juice (as noted above, an excellent substitution)
Notes on ingredients:
As stated above, my personal preference is black beans & black eyed peas, as I like the visual contrast. Any beans will work, but when combining different types try to match them for size so they’ll cook evenly in the same amount of time.
Trader Joe’s sells bacon “ends” which are delicious, uneven, extra thick chunks of bacon — even thicker than thick cut — it’s kind of like a solid hockey puck made of bacon. This is highly recommended for this recipe, if you can find it. (It’s also a dollar cheaper than a regular pack of bacon)
The diced tomatoes I used today are packed with onions & garlic; other types have green chiles or basil, or nothing but tomatoes. Pick according to your tastes.
Methodology:
Soak the beans overnight in the brine. If you can’t plan that far ahead, wake up super-early and at least soak your beans for 8 hours.
Chop onions & garlic; you can dice the celery, too, but I include it primarily for flavor, so I leave the stalks mostly whole to make it easier to remove them.
Divide the recipe into thirds.
Each batch will be: 4 cups of beans, 1 cup of onions, 1 clove garlic, 2 celery stalks, a bay leaf, 2oz. of bacon — all of which will fit in a single quart-sized ziploc, handily enough:
Here you can see the next two batches of soup, everything prepped and ready to go, and about to go into the freezer.
The third batch goes into a slow cooker today. To your beans et. al add the whole can of diced tomatoes, juice included, and enough water to cover. You need a quart of water or so, and handily, you can use that empty can to measure it: two cans of water will be about a quart and will also make sure you get all the goodness out of the can.
Cook on low until the beans are done, the bacon is cooked, the celery is limp, and your whole house smells awesome.
To thicken the soup, you can add some roux, if you’re feeling fancy, or just take a potato masher & break up some of the beans to release more starch into the broth. [mash ‘em and cook uncovered for a half hour or so.]
Also, if you’re feeling fancy, you can add fresh chopped parsley or thin-sliced green onion to the dish. I like to serve mine with a dollop of sour cream; I’ve also made this a more substantial meal by serving it over rice.
Those freezer packs are even better (if that can be imagined) as you can go straight from frozen to soup: add the contents, frozen, to your crockpot with the diced tomatoes and a quart of water before you go to work, set to low and cook for 8 hours. When you come home, the soup will be done.
Yes, ebooks are a disruptive force in book retail and publishing.
Yes, ebooks represent a new distribution model with many new benefits and advantages.
Since then, another whole year of data is available, including both the holidays and the post holiday ebook binge associated with recipients filling newly-gifted gadgets with content.
Of course, this kind of analysis has certain limitations:
The only data available to me are ebook sales as reported by the Association of American Publishers: so these correspond only to US ebook sales from established publishing houses and does not include self-published ebooks.
Merely looking at a dollar sales figure (again, the only data available) glosses over the fact that ebooks are sold at lower price points: unit sales of books will be higher than the dollar figure might suggest
My projection is not the only interpretation – but I’ve tried some other models and ebooks sure look like they’re following a fairly common sigmoid growth curve
…however, if ebooks do not merely cannibalize sales of other formats but instead push books into new genres, new business models, new retail channels, and effectively blow up books as we know them: why sure, I guess there’s no upper limit & my projection is wrong. You can make any assumptions you like along those lines. My graph represents a fairly short future time frame (3-5 years out) and a relatively stable publishing industry. (Well, stable other than the disruption currently happening due to ebooks.)
Let’s look at the numbers anyway:
This graph is a little different from the one I posted last year, even though it looks similar. Growth is occuring more slowly than I assumed last year, so I had to “stretch” my graph a bit to fit. (Instead of a ten year overall time frame, this one is twelve years.) The other adjustment was more surprising: the estimate for where monthly ebook sales will eventually ‘top out’ and reach equilibrium went down by about $50 Million.
If the new projection is more accurate, we’ll see average monthly ebook sales of $250 Million rather than $300 Million – and we’ll hit the midpoint of the sigmoid curve before the end of the year.
This isn’t a tipping point in quite the way you think. Growth is still going to be quite dramatic through 2013 and 2014, and the data is messy enough that even as we approach equilibirum in mid-2015, it’s still going to look like growth.
Total Book Sales Are Steady. The Association of American Publishers reported that, even through the recession, their members’ sales were up from 2008-2010 [New Publishing Industry Survey Details Strong Three-Year Growth in Net Revenue, Units, 9 Aug 2011 – sadly, there isn’t a similar year-in-review post for 2011, as the AAP and the Book Industry Study Group are wrapping this data into a product called BookStats and hiding it behind a paywall. A $1000-a-year-or-so paywall. yep.]
If you’re an entrepreneurial sort with a small stack of cash and are looking to open a small business: Start a restaurant. Train as a plumber. Get a lawnmower and start going door to door. There are a lot of options, but service, skilled trades, or food are the better bet — anything and I mean damn near anything but retail. You are competing not just with other shops but with gigantic multinational corporations that will always beat you on price. You can compete on quality or service (especially when it comes to food) but if you sell shirts or toasters? That’s hard.
If you just run the numbers, attempting to make money at retail is an awful, soul-crushing thing to even contemplate, let alone attempt. And if you want to sell books? Online retail is so efficient there’s no need or little want for a bookstore, or even a non-Amazon online store: One site to rule them all, one site to find them, one site to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
Why fight it?
Well, part of it is that I love bookstores. I love them so much, if I win the lottery I’m opening my own [& also working very hard to do so anyway even without a jackpot] and I don’t plan to retire at all, ever. When I leave this world, you’re going to have to carry my rapidly cooling corpse feet first out the door of a bookstore.
I love books and live a life filled with books. If the last remaining big-box chain bookstores went out of business I guess I’d content myself with whatever option was available — after all, I grew up with mall bookshops that rarely topped 2000sq.ft. I also used to bike to my local library as a kid and teen twice a week (at minimum) and pretty much started at one end of the first shelf on the first bookcase & read damn near everything.
Still, when the really big bookstores opened (in my neck of the woods it was 1993, while I was in my second year of college) it was a revelation. Marvellous temples built for books, and built even out in the suburbs – not just the city center.
I think many of us either weren’t old enough or have since forgotten what the bookselling landscape was like before Borders & B&N. Yes, there were many fine bookstores but nowhere near the selection — and I don’t think anyone sold a cup of coffee. [This was the topic & source of inspiration for my very first “Rethinking the Box” column]
In 1993 the first major chain big-box outposts were opening. In 1993, the internet was also born — exact date debatable but the first graphical browser was in 1993 and that’s where a large chunk of the whole mess we now call “the internet” started. It’s not even that I’m going to pull the tired “born with the seeds of its own distruction” cliché — odds are good you first learned HTML or Java or C from a book you purchased at a chain bookstore. “DOS for Dummies” came out in 1991 — no way in hell you bought that from Amazon. The big-box bookstore, with it’s large computer book section and consistent, relatively quick ordering procedures is no doubt the way the first of us became the net-literate, and it would take some very creative restructuring of facts and timelines to argue otherwise.
[Oh, I suppose you could have learned it in college instead of teaching yourself from books. I did. Or at least, that’s where I learned the basics, back in ’92: But your college had all online materials and no bookstore? Really?]
It was at least six years (1994-2000) before we began to pare back the number of computer books stocked in our bookstore, and even then, it was more a matter of purging old volumes (& whole categories) to keep up with the sheer numbers of new books and accelerating growth in tech topics. I think 2002 was when we finally pulled back, stocking mostly general knowledge & major OS books for the mainstream reader, as opposed to all the technical books. It didn’t stop people from asking for the books, but as soon as they heard our prices they almost always ordered online at that point anyway.
I take some small pride in the fact that Amazon wouldn’t exist if their initial programmers hadn’t been able to learn from books bought at a bookstore — likely a local Seattle Borders, come to think of it. Sweet, bitter, bilesome irony.
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Most Wall Street analysis misses the point: bookselling is not retail. Yes, Amazon does “bookselling” “better”, but only because they are an internet-boosted mail order catalog, customers approach Amazon with a completely different set of expectations, and in no way should a website actually be equated with the poor retailers who have to make rent, payroll, insurance payments — and, if they are a nation-wide retailer: 100 or 200 or 800 sets of duplicate inventory and just as many public bathrooms that have to be cleaned on a daily basis.
The Physicality of bookstores is actually an advantage, not a liability — and I know you doubt that — but for right now let me just state that I see not just a place for bookstores in our future, but a genuine opportunity. I don’t need a red-power-tie-wearing eastern seaboard profit-sucker to tell me that my business model is wrong. I don’t need an open-color western seaboard new-media-type to tell me that old business models are broken. I don’t need a corporate suit telling me I’m ‘wasting’ payroll and we need to ‘right-size’ our inventory.
Screw ‘em. Screw ‘em all.
People come into my store every day. They hang out for hours. My phone is practically ringing off the hook. With a major competitor suddenly leaving the market last year, we’re busier than ever. Even if the first question every person asks when they walk in the door is, “Where is your bathroom?” and only 1 customer in 10 is buying anything: that is still more traffic than 80% of other retailers ever get and hell: My only problem is how to monetize that traffic. [That sounds oddly familiar for some reason.] And one in ten is a hell of a conversion rate — One in one hundred is a hell of a conversion rate.
Keep in mind my three threads from the top — Bookstore Tourism is up, Total Book Sales are steady, the bookstore is still a Gathering Place — and let me add two additional points.
The bookstore chains are too big.
…while the actual bookstores themselves are too small.
A nation-wide chain of 200-and-on-up-to-1000 bookstores, with at least one store in all of the top 200 markets and as many as 30 outposts apiece to cover each of the 10 biggest CMSAs seems like a worthy goal — indeed, the very definition of business ‘success’ — but only, I think, for traditional retail.
“Traditional” retail is getting harder to define though. It used to mean five-and-dimes, general stores, mom-and-pop town-square or main-street storefronts, with only a few department stores in major urban downtowns. Then it meant a mall-unit-sized storefront rented, well, out at a mall. Now, “traditional” retail means Target and Wal-Mart, while the even older models are “boutique” retail, or “specialty” shops. More often than not, traditional is used merely to differentiate physical shops from online retail.
Even considering just the major players in retail, there are a lot of different models: “Retail” by itself isn’t enough to define your business. IKEA seems to get by with just 38 US stores, but there are more than 3,000 Wal-Mart Supercenters. Several regional & national chains operate tens of thousands of supermarkets & grocery stores (of all sizes) and if we define a convenience store to include the type of snack-and-sundry shops attached to filling stations then there are at least 120,000 in the US, and likely many, many more. Retail is a box Wall Street types like to dump companies into (usually companies they want to ignore) because retail is not sexy, it’s not “growth” or “potential” or “e” or “net” or trendy.
It might be better to forget everything you think you know about retail & admit that not all ‘retail’ stores will fit in the same mould. [The number of executives brought in to run Borders that only had grocery/supermarket store experience is telling, and one of the things that contributed to its downfall]
Part of it is a matter of scale:
If you only had to stock 5000 or 15,000 or 40,000 SKUs [Stock Keeping Units, individual items with their own barcodes] you could afford to keep the exact same inventory at every location. Your largest supermarket, all those aisles of cans, boxes, bags, and packs (…and the produce codes — the sticker on your banana …and the generated codes for items from the deli, bakery, and butcher) — all those things at the nice big Supermarket add up to about 40,000 units. The weekly grocery shopping trip is an hour-long tour up and down every aisle, stopping, comparing, filling a huge cart, and then schlepping it all home. Supermarkets are huge and they stock 40,000 different items. Home Depot & similar warehouse-style home improvement centers also stock about 40,000 different items per store, it’s just that sheetrock & 2×12s take up more space then celery & cream of mushroom. Similar business, though it requires the larger footprint.
I’m belabouring the point because I’m trying to give you a sense of the scale of bookselling: most folks, when they think of the bookstore at all, it’s only for a magazine, the occasional bestseller, and the coffee — and in the view of the customer that’s just three items.
In a bookstore, out of about 12 to 15 millionSKUs [in the book biz we call ‘em ISBNs] we can only manage to stock up to 200,000 or so, on the same footprint as your larger supermarkets — about half a football field or so.
No matter how many books I manage to stock, I still get compared to that 15 million number: As a (national chain big box) bookseller it is assumed by nearly everyone that I stock *all* books. If your local bookstore only stocks 100,000 books, you likely think of them as chintzy and small. A bookstore that only stocks as many items as a Whole Foods gets written off as a “mom n’ pop” indy.
Did I mention that my (rough) estimate of 15 Million or more books likely under-estimates the number of self-published, print-on-demand, and e-books, and there are also an unknown number of out-of-print-but-still-available-used books — I haven’t seen an estimate for books-in-print that includes all these new and old categories so the total may be more than 15 Million. And I can only stock a fraction of those.
The closest analogy I can think of is trying to find one particular resident of Ohio or Michigan during the annual UM/OSU game — and 200,000 is twice the seating capacity of either stadium.
The enormity of the task is lost on my customers. Especially when my computer says there is a single copy of a book, “Your computer says you have it; Where is it?” [*impatient foottap*]
We’re trying to locate one fan out of 200,000 and he’s not in the seat listed on his ticket — hell, he may still be tailgating in the parking lot. What more can I do?
##
As stated, despite the glories of a Big-Box Bookstore [I’d have killed for one anywhere near my hometown in 1986] if we’re only stocking 100,000 books, the store is too small.
Back in July I wrote a column outlining a new bookstore model: A small sales floor with a warehouse attached, basically a book distributor hiding behind a retail store front.
Let’s do one better:
Consider your customer base, how they currently use your space, what they actually want, and then serve those interests while running your shop and investigating other income opportunities.
That statement is vague enough to be useless — so let me break it down.
What is the social purpose of bookstores? Why, *why* do people hang out in bookstores? Why do we get more foot traffic? Why do people kill time in bookstores? Why do some people come inside just to make a phone call on their mobile when in most other instances they would step outside to do the same?
We get used and abused — much moreso than any other retailer: do people take their shoes off and settle in on the floor in any other shop? Do you hang out for hours in a Best Buy? Do you bring a lunch and your textbook into the local deli? Do you ask your bartender where you can plug in your laptop? [actually, you do and I have – but if you’re not drinking & paying your freight: your bartender will tell you to move on.]
I don’t actually need to answer any of those questions: It’s enough that people do. I, as a bookseller, have more foot traffic than any other retailer: my aisles on a Saturday in July look like other stores in December.
Over time, a short dozen years or so, the [national chain big box] Bookstore has replaced a number of other social spaces: I hear kids under six refer to our store as ‘the library’ — only to be corrected by parents, “No, at this library we have to pay for books to take home” [I’ll give you a minute to let that sink in…] — and I have a feeling in another 3-4 years the youngest kids won’t even know there was a difference. Instead of meeting at an office, applicants meet employers at a bookstore. Instead of meeting at an individual’s home, book clubs come to the bookstore, knitting circles come to the book store, study groups come to the bookstore — instead of meeting at a bar or restaurant, friends meet at the bookstore, before the movie, before bar hopping, before the game — it’s where some blind dates start and where some former lovers meet to end it.
I didn’t ask for this. In fact, when I first applied for a job at the bookstore, silly me, I thought I’d be selling books. Instead I’ve become a concierge, a research fellow, an academic advisor, a business consultant; at times I have to be a referee or a cop. At bookstores that run a coffee shop, we’re also baristas & waitstaff. If occasionally I lament, on this blog or other platforms, that customers suck, mostly it’s because I have to run a frickin’ community center, for free – when all I really wanted to do was sell books.
I’ve expended a lot of mental effort, thought long and hard, on just what it is that makes bookselling so very ‘special’ and the only thing I’ve been able to come up with is seating. Tables & Chairs. Not a theater [chairs only] and not a restaurant [where you only keep a table while you’re running a tab] — at the bookstore we put in chairs, and as soon as we added the coffee shop, we also added a mess of tables.
Since it’s been this way since the big-box expansion of the mid-90s, customers now expect seating. They demand it from the bookstore, along with a ready electrical outlet. Even though, when we were opening stores 15 years ago there was no way to anticipate that customers would demand a way to recharge phones and run laptops, logic doesn’t play and we’re held in contempt because we didn’t install a service that didn’t even exist a decade ago.
And yes, while I can think of an easy response to your question, “Where can I plug in my laptop?” I’m not allowed to employ sarcasm at work.
Also, I’d be more than happy to point out that there is no where to sit because we sell books, not furniture, but again: I’m not allowed to employ sarcasm at work. (we have chairs; the fact that other sponges are hogging all the chairs is not my fault, and don’t come to the desk expecting me to immediately fix it.)
Suddenly, despite the existence of numerous very fine cafés, libraries, student unions, public parks, museums, churches, community centers, small theatres — and of course, all the bars, pubs, taverns, and restaurants — suddenly in 2012, we find the bookstore is the only public place people can hang out in.
It’s preposterous on its face, but that’s how our customers treat us. Instead of complaining about it and continuing to fight it, I say:
Accept it.
But we’re going to need a bigger bookstore.
Many places are “public” — parks, for example. Or museums. Or even government buildings, like the town hall or courthouse — but many public buildings have specific uses, and unless you have business there you never actually go, no matter how nice the lobby is. There are very few public spaces that are also social spaces: the library, obviously, and those few actual Community Centers that exist. But for whatever reason (are they too square? terminally unhip?) many of the citizens these facilities were set up to serve wouldn’t ever be caught dead going there. Social space is not the same as public space —
Doing a quick mental survey [from my past architecture studies] I find myself coming up with very few analogues that also provide social space, besides the bookstore: some “lounges” and pubs, hotel lobbies, casinos, country clubs, and the shopping mall.
The shopping mall food court is the best model: open seating [& seating in quantity] surrounded by retail and food. Oddly, even though food courts certainly get their fair share of use, they are not the ‘hang out’ that the bookstore is. (maybe it’s because we supply reading material.) Which is odd; I mean, a few of the local malls in my hometown have even added wifi. Maybe it’s because most food courts are designed to encourage turn-over on tables, just like a restaurant. Cheap-feeling chairs, wobbly tables, hard tile floors & echoing spaces: no one wants to hang out here. Compare that to a casino, for example: even the layout is vaguely similar (food service & small shops surrounding a central area) but the focus is different as the owners want you to sit down and never leave. It’s not about table turnover but stickiness: come and stay awhile. Can I bring you a drink?
Have you ever thought about hotel lobbies? I’m guessing no. But perhaps (given the assumed proclivities of my reader base) you have been to a sci-fi, comic book, or fan convention. While the very largest cons take place in convention centers (another social space, but the worst model I can think of) smaller cons are held in a single hotel. There are conference rooms, a few restaurants, a decent bar (if you’re lucky; though the drinks are still overpriced) but there is also something fairly unique to hotels: the public lobby. Hotel lobbies are just transitional spaces, like airport terminals or train stations — one is meant to pass through, the lobby is not the destination. But despite that, and because of their long experience in the business, the lobby is also a space to temporarily stop and rest. Most have chairs & sofas that put my bookstore chairs to shame, and often these are grouped into smaller, semi-private spaces where small groups can gather, rather like a living room.
The lobby has nothing to do with the economic activity of the hotel — but the restaurants & bars do. And when a hotel hosts a conference or fan convention, the lobby is the major public and social space.
What does any of this have to do with bookselling? Stick with me for a bit longer: IF the bookstore is a social space AND our sales depend, at least in part, on foot traffic in stores AND we have to put up with all you people anyway: why not go with it? Make the bookstore a destination — not an errand but a day-trip. Capitalize on what people are already doing, increase our site traffic, make a major impression on public consciousness — and then innovate to make the most of each customer, and each customer visit.
Sure, we currently run a café (can’t sell books without coffee these days) but the cafe shouldn’t be just a sideline — or more accurately, it won’t be the only sideline. Our coffee shop would stand to one side of the main seating area, now a spacious lobby: a nirvana of tables with outlets built into each column, a brace of comfy chairs on the inside wall, a row of patio tables just inside (and perhaps also just outside) the sunny windows, with a semi-detached space that just might be configured for an impromptu class or book group — and a separate 2nd floor lounge that would be even better for both. Set up the social space first, and put it in the center of your retail empire.
Immediately adjacent to the central seating [I could call it a ‘food court’ — ‘cause that’s what it is — but I hope the customers don’t dismiss it as such] in addition to the de rigueur coffee shop, we’d have a quick lunch counter, or maybe 2-3 concessionaires: Subway? Bagels? Ice cream? Starbucks or Dunkin’, even, instead of in-house coffee? (If I win the lottery, I’m setting aside a couple million to entice Tim Horton.) I’m proposing a monstrous bookstore with daily traffic that is going to exceed all-but-December-retail numbers, and our December is going to be absolutely nuts. As a landlord, I could make a nice chunk on rent.
Just off the central seating area, we’d have a full service restaurant & a first rate pub. These also directly support our ‘social space’ nexus: come in for a quick nosh and check your email while you wait for friends to get off of work, and then transition to the bar or to a table for dinner. Once again, we could run these ourselves or rent out the space; either works, and depends on how you want to collect your profits: guaranteed rent, or less reliable profits-from-food-service operations.
— I’ll understand if you’re not really comfortable with either. It’s a rare bookseller who has experience in facilities management AND hospitality & bar operations. Why, I think there may only be one person with this particular skill set. [*smirk*]
Keeping with the ‘mall food court’ model: once we’re past scone-throwing-distance from the coffee shop and our central seating area, well, that’s where the rest of our retail operation goes.
In this case, the rest of the retail operation is a big effing bookstore.
Now, let’s just assume for a moment that the commercial real estate market is so depressed that not only are a number of shopping malls all-but-closed, they’re even available for purchase — with no current tenants, falling into disrepair as we speak, and ripe for radical remodeling.
[I know: so unlikely, if it weren’t actually true. Once in a lifetime opportunity here]
We could buy a small regional mall — special bonus: the older and smaller malls are all closer to city centers, not further out in the suburbs — close down half of it to use as our warehouse/book distributor space, and reallocate the rest, building out from the food court, to sell books.
The wonderful thing (from the booksellers’ point of view) is that we could set up a window where 50% of our customers could just walk up and ask for, oh I don’t know, Organic Ostrich Farming, and then we go back into the stacks, find it, and hand it to them. We’ll set up this special order window with its own [small] seating space and register — yes, you can look at the book, but unless you buy it you’re not leaving this lounge. Make it comfortable. Special lighting, extra comfy chairs, an assigned cashier — maybe even a cash bar — and a really big bruiser of a bouncer. Thank you, we have exactly the expensive medical textbook you want, you can even browse it, but no way in hell are you stealing it. Most customers would never know: we have a book, we hand it to you, you buy it. But for an extra special subset of our customers: yes, we get it, we’re onto you and don’t come back.
Past this order window, we’d have the sales floor. Yes, I’m advocating that we separate “the stacks” from “the sales floor” — as 50% of our paying customers and 98% of the rest are either browsing bestsellers, browsing a specific genre [& we can accommodate that], or just hanging out for the free wifi and reading magazines. There is no need to make every shelf in every category available to the public. If the customers who already know the title and will buy it (if we have it in stock) can just walk up to the register closest to the main entrance and do so — that is a win-win-win. This call-ahead and pick-up may in fact be more than 50% of our business. We can stock as many titles as we can get our hands on, put them ‘in the back’ where they are immediately ready for sale, even if they aren’t necessarily ‘on the shelf’. We can take that part of the business and really streamline it.
What about the folks who don’t or won’t buy books? Well, we’ve already set aside quite a bit of dedicated space for social butterflies & campers — and this space will pay for itself with food service, I think.
And what about the grazers & browsers — who love to linger over tables & displays, and want to see what’s new – the readers, the book lovers — The other half of my book-buying customer base?
That’s the whole point of the bookstore. And now we look at how to really run a bookstore:
If I were in fact repurposing a shopping mall, then one “storefront” would be a newsstand with newspapers & magazines. Another might be a newsstand with comics. One storefront could easily be turned over to just the New York Times bestsellers & other mass market paperbacks — the direct equivalent of an airport bookstore. These could easily be the closest “stores” to our central-seating-area-slash-lobby-slash-food-court and there’s little thought or bookselling expertise required here, past keeping shelves full. We’re just meeting demand.
Just past the obvious though: If I can hire someone who loves romance novels, why not give her 3000sq.ft. and full reign to order in titles, stock shelves, merchandise tables, and above all sell books. We can keep the overstock in our warehouse [adjacent, on site] and face out a full “bookstore’s” worth of genre titles.
And do the same for mystery
And the same for sci-fi
And the same for history
And the same for biography [say, does A&E want to do a co-branded bookstore, with DVDs?]
And the same for design, or architecture, or gardening(from May-Sept), or cookbooks, or travel, or all of the above and more…
And most specifically, for kids: in the less-and-less-hypothetical case where I was taking over a shopping mall, put the kids shop [picture books, beginning reader, plush, games, et al.] in the last remaining ‘anchor’ location and put both Young Reader [10-12] and Teen Lit [12-16] in the two locations just outside – close enough that kids can wander away from parents but far enough so neither set has to shop the ‘kids’ dept. [*ack*, gag me]
[And even if it’s also in the teen section, there’s a chunk of ‘YA’ & ‘Teen’ lit that needs to be mixed in with the adult stuff – easy to hand, no judgements, cash at the register, thank you]
While I’ve used the shopping mall as my touchstone [as that is what I, as a child of the 80s, am familiar with] [and damn but the commercial real estate market is depressed: I’ve run numbers. I think I could actually buy a mall] this Concept would work even better with repurposed industrial or office space. I can only imagine what DC’s Old Post Office or an art space like Le Lieu Unique (in Nantes, France) would look like if they were turned over to books.
##
The future of retail depends on managing inventory, especially in the face of internet competition. Still, it is easy to open a huge bookstore that doubles as a distribution center; in fact, with a little advance planning you could open up a very small chain that covers hundreds of millions. […which I’ve already posted]
There are are at least two ways to flatten verticals in retail: Amazon figured out one – sell direct from a warehouse & ship it. You cut out two layers—distributors & retailers—and make it possible to sell direct to customers from a massive inventory.
IKEA has figured out a second path: sell direct from your warehouse to visiting customers. This also cuts out two layers — a distributor/warehouse (as the store is your warehouse) and shipping via post or parcel service. Amazon’s model is not the only way to lower costs. From point of manufacture to customer fulfillment: physical retail space is not the only or even obvious thing to cut.
At IKEA, customers go home today with fine, flatpacked Scandinavian designed furniture & housewares. IKEA does so well with this model that their web site, actually (and intentionally) kind of sucks – and more often than not sends you into the store to buy.
Let me go back to the “massive inventory available direct to customers” part – Chris Anderson called this The Long Tail and characterizes it as an internet phenomenon. However, the long tail is a change not in available books but in customer demand – this new demand is enabled by internet search but not restricted to internet retail. If I, as a retailer, can meet that demand today, then there is no need for a customer to order from the internet. So we need a bigger storefront. Or even a warehouse. This is a logistics problem, and one I can solve.
Of course, someone is going to come at me with ebooks. You know, I’ve already done that math, and ebooks are great but they’re going to top out at around 50% of the book industry and that still leaves a lot of Billions to be made in retail.
Let me start with one of my personal pet peeves: calendars. A calendar is so utilitarian and boring, it must be hard for you to imagine that anyone could possible harbor a deep-seated hatred of the damn things.
Allow me to educate you:
First, to make room for calendars, I have to take books off of the sales floor. Most often, the books removed will be those missed least, so as directed by my benevolent corporate overlords, I remove anywhere from a sixth to a third of my bargain department [&while the price points are lower, the margins are actually better] [and I’ll also note here that quite a lot of what my customers like to call ‘coffee table books’ are classed as bargain titles, at least that’s how things stand currently]
So right before my biggest sales season starts I have to remove somewhere in the neighborhood of $60,000 worth of merchandise just to make room for a seasonal product. The only reason the trade-off makes sense is that the price points are vaguely similar: about $15. The calendars are thinner, but they don’t stack nearly as well. Call it an even swap —
Though of course this neglects the payroll to remove the books, replace the fixtures, receive & display the calendars, and then go back and unwind the whole mess each February.
Add on to that the customers who do not & will not pay full price for a calendar, and habitually & perpetually wait not just for our annual clearance but for the very last days of our annual clearance so they can buy the calendar for just two bucks.
And that’s fair; everyone is entitled to save money. However, if you wait months after the calendars initially go out, you are not entitled to complain about our selection. We do not stock for the clearance; instead we’re optimizing our selection and merchandising for sales at full price. If you wait, well, you’re taking a chance. (But don’t tell me that ‘in the past’ I’ve had more to choose from – - you’re only pointing out that we used to lose a lot of money, and while as a customer you might want to ‘blame’ us for a perceived lack, we’re doing what we have to… to stay open, among other things.)
While I’m ranting, let me also point out that corporate has me putting out calendars starting in late July and I then have to keep up with the damn things for 7 months and then they go on clearance — and after all that, by the 3rd week of February I don’t particularly feel sympathetic when customers respond, “what, already?” when I tell them we’re sold out.
Calendars are just the tip of the iceberg; let me add onto that journals & blank books, booklights, bookplates, bookmarks, stationary, greeting cards, and “little gifts” — it’s all crap. When customers ask me for them, I personally feel a bit of resentment.
It’s not enough that I stock & sell books. Thousands of books. Hundreds of thousands of books. No.
“Excuse me, where are the cards?”
Oh, I don’t know, maybe a Hallmark store? Why do I have to carry them? Why do you assume I carry them?
OK, so, um books are printed on paper and so are calendars and greeting cards. Fine.
But what about board games? Or jigsaw puzzles? It’s not that I don’t have them, but when people ask, there is never a hint of doubt in their voice, it’s more of an accusation, and the unstated sentiment “I know you are stocking them, book-slave, where are you hiding them?”
Past cards, journals, and games: There are the magazines, the CDs, the DVDs.
The news agent [or newsstand, depending on which version of English one favours] used to be a free-standing, self supporting business. Now, the bookstore is expected to not only adopt this orphan, but to spend more money on the same business, to stock more magazines and more special issues and hang onto them longer and to let any and all customers just hang out and read them for free — because we are a bookstore and that’s what we do.
Record stores used to sell vinyl and tapes and CDs: yet another free-standing and self-supporting business. But now, with all chains and most indies closed, the bookstore is supposed to take up all that slack, and have listening stations in store to let our customers sample albums for free. Because, c’mon, why bother to stock the discs if customers can’t sample them. That’s basic.
The video stores [both sales and rental] used to be stand-alone, self-supporting businesses. Customers might lament that there are so few options left, but it doesn’t stop them from attempting to haggle on price: “$80 for an HBO box set! That’s Robbery!” – yeah, I get the sentiment: I’d love to own that series, too. But the prices are set by HBO, not here in the store, and nothing about “customer service” requires me to take a loss.
From thank you notes to electronic dictionaries to DVD box sets to portable CD players — there is nothing to tie these products [and product lines, and more] to the “bookstore” but that doesn’t stop my customers. “Where are your calendars?” – when asked of me in March – is enough to spike my blood pressure and shave another 2 minutes off of my life expectancy.
It doesn’t stop there. Customers ask me how much it costs just to rent the book. They ask, not if it just might be possible to make photocopies, but rather with every expectation “So where’s your copy machine?” or, one bridge too far, “I need you to notarize this.”
Really? I mean, Really?
##
One could say that this is ‘my’ fault [in that it is a continuation of trends begun by my corporate overlords long before I began working for them]. I present it to you as an object lesson, a cautionary parable: don’t adopt orphans.
An enthusiastic associate comes to you with a business idea: A new product line. The margins are good, the floorspace required is minimal, we might have to buy in bulk, and on non-returnable terms, but the items are ‘in demand’, ‘sure sellers’, ‘obvious extensions of our core business’
…and stop right there.
Our core business is books and should always be books. If we have space for new product it should always be used for more books and if we figure out how to shoe-horn another fixture onto our sales floor, dammit that had better be another damn bookcase that holds more books.
No one goes to the Strand in New York for the tote bags.
What might be next for bookstores, if the chains fail?
Let’s take a typical Metropolitan area – say, 4 Million people spread across multiple counties in mostly suburban densities and nothing like Atlanta, as this is a just a model & not specific to where I currently work. Say you have 12 big box stores spread across the region, but nothing too close to each other — you know, standard retail practice, at least 5 miles between outposts.
As stated, despite the glories of a Big-Box Bookstore [I’d have killed for one anywhere near my hometown in 1986] if we’re only stocking 100,000 books, the store is too small.
Thankfully, I work for a big bookstore chain and so, there are other locations. Sadly my customers also know this so the very first thing out of their mouths when I say ‘no’ is, “Well, does another one of your stores have it?”
[*sigh*]
With 12 stores across our sample metroplex, that’s 12 sets of all-but-duplicate inventory — and it’s great that we can treat our extended storefronts as a single ‘store’ and search the million-or-so books in town like it’s a single inventory. We want to sell you the book. But there are problems: 50% or more of the inventory store-to-store overlaps. Still, and as is most often the case when a customer has to have a book, sell-outs are temporary, and likely another store does have it. We call around, we find a copy, we pull it off the sales floor and hold it for you.
There is a disconnect & breakdown before we close the sale, though, and the deal-breaker [apparently] is the distance between stores. Out in the ‘burbs individual stores may be 15 or 20 miles from each other, but only 8-10 miles from the intown location — which also partially explains my increased call volume (for my theoretical bookstore located in the center of town, not where I currently work, blah blah yeah I’ll stop pretending)
After we’ve tied up booksellers at two stores, for however long the search took, and found your book or books — you don’t bother to pick it up. [stuff happens, we all know that, and I know 5 miles is so far and what book was I asking for again? I’ll just ask again later or order it online]
We’ve pulled a book off the shelf that might have sold to someone else, too – particularly if you heard about it on TV or the radio. Alltogther this is a major headache — and yet, it’s the obvious thing I have to do for every customer when the question is asked. In fact, I bring more pain upon myself by offering to search our entire chain for the one copy of your book without ever being prompted.
##
When I say current bookstores are too small, that’s exactly what I mean: We could easily stock 5 times our current inventory and still not quite meet current demand, even for books that ‘most’ stores would carry – as any one store cannot match the gestalt selection across the chain.
And when I say chains are too large, again, that’s exactly what I mean: why maintain duplicate inventories with only small differences [typically books we’ve sold & are out of today but would’ve had in stock] across a dozen stores when a single, landmark location could encompass all the stores, actually stock less dollar-wise, but stock more individual titles?
Don’t just rethink the box, rethink the chain. Instead of opening up a smaller, pale imitation of a New York 5th Avenue bookstore everywhere, open up just 50-80 landmark bookstores. That might mean just one each for many cities – or one in a nearby city for some. Why dilute your single best selling point: stacks packed from one end to the other and to the ceilings, chock full of books. Double down on that bet – forget the ‘standard big box retail’ model and think big.
Sure, right now I can special order books for customers from the warehouse. Takes about a week, down here where I’m currently located. (I’m sure it’s better up at corporate HQ, since they built the damn warehouse in the state next door — fine for you, sucks for 200 million of your potential customers.)
Let me turn it around though: If all the books are in the warehouse, why not throw in a coffee shop right there inside the distribution center and open it to the public?
##
I would aver that the bookstore chain is too big, too spread out, and also played out: our customers don’t care enough anymore to support neighborhood bookstores at that scale. We need to open a truly humongous bookstore. Much like amusement parks (Six Flags, Sea World, Disney, et al.) maybe each US Census MSA would only support one – or rarely two or three. While we all love a neighborhood bookstore [& there is a place for such; I personally could generate business plans for bookstores on a sliding scale from bistro to Strand] the real need of most communities is for a single Landmark bookstore like the Tattered Cover in Denver or Powell’s in Portland — or yes, the Strand in New York.
I’m looking beyond books, however.
The future of retail depends on managing inventory, especially in the face of internet competition. Let’s consider a new model, a truly humongous bookstore that doubles as a distribution center: with a little advance planning you could open up a very small chain that covers hundreds of millions.
Let me give you a list of zip codes — my book oases, or nirvanas — and show you 1-day UPS ground delivery times covered by each.
32816 Orlando
30305 Atlanta
27514 Reasearch Triangle Chapel Hill
19104 Philadelphia
02467 Boston
43201 Columbus, OH
60607 Chicago
92102 San Diego
94305 San Jose
97212 Portland
So. 10 stores — 10 Massive Stores, each equivalent to 3 or four football fields, or equivalent to a regional book distributor’s warehouse, or to the all the outposts of a chain bookstore in their own particular metros.
The 3 stores on the west coast are within 1-day UPS delivery of 48-50 Million people.
The 3 stores in the south east are within 1-day of 48-50 Million people.
Two stores in the midwest are sufficient for another 48-50 Million customers.
A single store in Philadelphia is within 1-day of about 35 Million, as is the single store in Boston.
Not everyone would be willing to drive to a bookstore just to pick up a book — even if that bookstore was 4 acres of bookshelves under a single roof (about the size of a large IKEA, for scale). But if you could pick up a phone and call [or use a website] and know the book you need is there, that might change your mind. If you could know they had 20 copies of the book, and you needed 20 copies for your employees or clients, you’d be sending some lackey driving the 2 hours before he could sit down at his desk in the morning.
If this huge bookstore had not just a coffee bar, but also a pub, sit-down restaurant, hot dog cart, and ice cream shop — you’d plan your weekend around a trip.
There would be other ways to maximize the investment and key into “bookstore tourists” — topics I hope to cover in other posts. My point here was to build on yesterday’s column and show that there is a future for bookstores past the Big Box chain model. Additionally, if you chose to compete with Amazon on the internet, your massive bookstores are also fulfillment centers.
You don’t have to compete nationwide. Pick a market, serve that market. A single store in the right place can be the best bookstore for 30 Million customers — in person or with guaranteed 1-day delivery (at UPS ground rates, or via the post). A small chain of just 3 stores could easily serve 50 Million.
The 10 stores outlined above are within a 1-day delivery zone for 220 Million people, and within 2 days of another 70 Million customers. Looking at the map, a nice store in Denver would certainly plug in most of the rest to your network.
So, you want a nationwide brand that makes the most of internet searchability, access to customers, and that also features truly amazing bookstores that have the potential to be not just storefronts, but destinations?
Do we need a chain of 500 stores or do we just need 50? Or do we just need 10?
If you were an independent observer in 2006 and took a look at the state of bookselling, you would be forgiven if you thought Big Boxes like Borders and Barnes & Noble were the pinnacle, the ultimate evolved form, of bookstores. They were everywhere — actively courted by landlords eager to increase traffic to their newly built ‘lifestyle’ centers (basically, open-air suburban malls) and their success seemed to point out the superiority of ‘category killer’ big-box retail over the old Main Street shop, or even the century-old department stores.
For over a decade (1994-2006) the chains advanced until there seemed to be no township or exurb that didn’t have a bookstore outpost with at least a half acre of bookshelves, cafe tables, magazine racks, and comfy chairs. [.5 acres is about 20,000sq.ft. – the largest ‘flagship’ stores are three times that size.] For those of us who were in high school & college during this period — and, you know, *read* — it was like discovering the whole world. Nothing was unavailable, it seemed, and a store with 100,000 books had everything we needed.
Of course, during that same period, internet access was expanding and accelerating at an even faster pace and the capabilities (the possibilities) of the web quickly blew past and blew through many industries. Bookselling — that unique galapagos of retail — was particularly susceptible to the pressures of the web.
It’s not that the bookstore has been replaced — It’s just that a glorified mail-order catalog run by a predatory genius who was given $55 Million and 5 years of free passes to run losses into the billions of dollars to build up his company is actively attempting to supplant bookstores with its own brand. With a mix of luck and near-perfect timing, Amazon pulled it off
— but then again, so did Borders and Barnes & Noble. Big Box Bookselling was working until the biggest economic downturn in 80 years.
Amazon now stands, at the beginning of the 21st century, in the same spot occupied by Sears, Roebuck, & Co. at the beginning of the 20th.
##
I’m not going to argue the relative merits of Amazon versus the “advantages” of the bookstore. [Not again, anyway.] Instead I’m going to ask a now-obvious question: Why the Big Box?
Is 25,000 or 35,000 or 60,000 sq.ft. the ideal size for a bookstore?
The major chains didn’t pick the size or the format — and there is a reason we call them boxes. These square monsters might as well be oversized mobile homes for all the architectural imagination that’s been put into them. More thought and more creativity is put into the car access and parking than to any detail of the actual box. Sure, some are brick, some grey, some adobe-colored (depending on the location & perhaps ‘theme’ of the shopping center) but otherwise: big, boring, box.
The bookstore chains moved into boxes because from the late-1980s on, this was practically the only new retail being built. Over-built, in fact, as the old regional shopping malls we’re soon ringed by a dozen or so big-boxes apiece, and the new “malls” built further out from city centers were nothing but strings of boxes from the start.
Concessions could be wrangled from landlords because of the oversupply and the customer traffic generated by a bookstore, so the chains had incentives to open in the suburbs rather than re-develop similarly sized spaces closer to downtown. Indeed, the bookstores didn’t think to own any of their retail footprints at all — of the 1400 retail and college bookstores currently operated by B&N, they own exactly one. The rest are leased. Borders leased all their locations; the inability of Borders to come to terms with its landlords was part of its unsustainable expense structure. The availability and subsidized cost meant the two major bookstore chains grew quickly. One might even call the 1990s a Bookstore Bubble — in Border’s case, a bubble that popped.
The Big Box is not a natural fit for bookstores anyway: If anything, given the mission of the Bookstore in the post-Amazon world, the Big Box is too *small* and there are way too many of them, each with quite a bit of duplicate inventory. 30,000 or so books are common to all Big Box bookstores, roughly a third of all titles stocked. [source pg. 9 B&N’s 10-K annual report filing with the SEC] — for Barnes & Noble, that’s 700 sets of duplicate inventory. Of the remaining two-thirds, how much is duplicated across half the chain? Or even across just 100 stores? I’d say 80% in the first case and more than 95% for the smaller subset, though that’s just my guess based on personal experience.
I can’t compete with Amazon on price, so the primary advantage of the physical storefront is convenience: a book, in-stock, down the street and available for pickup today. That’s why I say the bookstore (even the big box bookstore) is too small. 100,000 titles doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface, and for a customer base now accustomed to finding books on the internet, my 100,000 books might as well be 10,000. Every hour of every working day, we get a call from a customer asking for a book [a particular book, as this title was specifically blogged about or came up as the #1 result in a keyword search] that there is no way in hell I’d bother to stock. [*]
The customer who calls with an exact title, or ISBN, doesn’t need a bookstore; she could care less about the coffee or the comfy chair, all she wants is the damn book and a bare minimum of time spent in the car or in the store in the process of buying it. Today.
I think what this customer wants is a book distributor, a warehouse with a sales counter. The ‘big box’ was just a reasonable substitute so long as the economics worked out: A reasonably-large mini-distributor that could be easily duplicated in many communities — good enough for the 1990s, self-supporting at 1990s levels of consumer demand for books, and nice places to hang out in besides.
Obviously the landscape for book retail has changed, but despite what you hear from tech bloggers & clueless financial analysts the market for print books is *not* shrinking — it’s growing from a small core of bestsellers, genre fiction, & general interest titles into the long tail of millions of books published (a number growing each year, and accelerating in growth).
The mistake that many make is to call the Long Tail an internet phenomenon. The internet is a discovery tool, but the Long Tail is a change in customer Demand. Come, work the phones at my bookstore for a week: you can learn this first hand. My inability to meet this demand is because my bookstore-cum-distribution-center is too small, not because customer demand can ‘only’ be met by internet retail.
The very first question a customer asks when I say I don’t have a book is, “Well, does one of your other stores have it?” (You might even have asked this question of a bookseller yourself.) This tells me two things: first that the convenience of a book, available today, *now*, is more important than how far away the bookstore is — and second, that the unnecessary duplication of bookstores in every neighborhood is a burden on bookstore chains, not a desirable outcome.
A single, truly epic bookstore that stocked even more books would be able to serve a city-sized community better (and be a better investment) than 15 stores spread across a metroplex, each stocking more-or-less the same 50,000 books plus a truly random and pathetic sampling of everything else. [“Everything else” being the long tail of 8-16 Million Books that are currently available, somehow. I can’t be more exact, sorry, as that 8 Million number includes used books, PDFs, ebooks, Google scans, out-of-print-but-still-in-stock-somewhere titles, and of course: the combined stock of approximately 3,000 bookstores coast to coast. Not just 8 million books; more than that — 8 million titles (multiple copies of each) and who knows how many more. The Library of Congress has 26 Million volumes but of course some of those are unique, & the vast majority out of print.]
The Big Box retail spaces were built without bookstores in mind, and bookstores only filled them because they were ubiquitous and relatively cheap. The retail chain model adopted by bookstores wasn’t necessarily the best thing for books or customers but it worked for a time: until the commercial real estate market changed, and customer expectations exploded past any physical retailer’s ability to cope, at least using the 1986 Big Box model.
New challenges call for new solutions; I have a few ideas. I’m back on a writing schedule now, so hopefully I’ll be able to share some of my ideas with you soon.
Further reading & references (most of these were also linked to in the column):
footnote:
The list of books I’d never carry grows daily. Some from the smallest regional publishers or vanity presses aren’t worth the effort; self-published books, Print-on-Demand books, or books only available through Amazon’s CreateSpace service are technically available but a pain in the ass; books only available direct from the author’s website, or only available as e-books, can’t be had in a bookstore for love or money.
[edit: An Espresso Book Machine would partially plug this gap now, and might be a bridge to the future of book retail given time.]
Some of you would be impressed by the reaction customers have when I tell them that great novel a friend recommended is only available as an e-book. They really wanted the paperback. It’s sad, actually, but reaffirms my faith in books and bookstores: people still buy books, and they’d buy even more if we can make this new system work for them.
On June 1, 2015 (after 6 years and 11 months) I needed to relaunch/restart this blog, or at least rekindle my interest in maintaining and updating it.
Rather than delete and discard the whole thing, I instead moved the blog -- database, cms, files, archives, and all -- to this subdomain. When you encounter broken links (and you will encounter broken links) just change the URL in the address bar from www.rocketbomber.com to archive.rocketbomber.com.
I know this is inconvenient, and for that I apologise. In addition to breaking tens of thousands of links, this also adversely affects the blog visibility on search engines -- but that, I'm willing to live with. Between the Wayback Machine at Archive.org and my own half-hearted preservation efforts (which you are currently reading) I feel nothing has been lost, though you may have to dig a bit harder for it.
As always, thank you for reading. Writing version 1.0 of Rocket Bomber was a blast. For those that would like to follow me on the 2.0 - I'll see you back on the main site.
In my head, I sound like Yahtzee (quite a feat, given my inherited U.S.-flat-midwestern-accent.)
where I start my browsing day...
...and one source I trust for reviews, reports, and opinion on manga specifically. [disclaimer: I'm a contributor there]
attribution
RocketBomber is a publication of Matt Blind, some rights reserved: unless otherwise noted in the post, all articles are non-commercial CC licensed (please link back, and also allow others to use the same data where applicable).
