Rocket Bomber - commentary

An index of my previous columns can be found at http://www.rocketbomber.com/bookselling

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Why the Big Box Bookstore?

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.

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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):

Wikipedia: Big-box store
Wikipedia: Power center (retail)
Sears & Roebuck 1912 Catalog at archive.org
The Article titled Amazon at internet-story.com
The Great Leaders Series: Jeff Bezos, Founder of Amazon.com : Inc. Magazine, Oct 2009
The Wisdom of Jeff Bezos, Part 1 at ventureblog.com

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.

[I know it’s an inflammatory title. I mean it.]

Let’s say that in one last-ditch attempt to control costs, I unplugged the phone, bulldozed the information desk, fired all my employees except for the cashiers, and no longer hired or trained any booksellers to answer questions or help you find books. Instead, I make sure all the bookcases are well-marked, hire a couple of people part time (to work nights) to shelve the books that come in, and otherwise just sort of let the place go.

Magazines that customers take off the rack and leave on tables and in chairs would just stack up over 14 hours, until the night crew can get them. Books that customers browse and leave would also collect in situ. I can put up a sign for you, though, “Please return merchandise to the proper shelf. Thank you. If you cannot remember where you found a book, please leave it on this recovery table.”

People are smart and considerate. I predict no problems, and relatively little need for the table (an afterthought) — a small end table below the sign should suffice.

Customers with questions would be directed to the single kiosk where they can try and search for themselves, and pointedly told that employees are not allowed to leave the register to help.

Would you shop here?

Why not? The books are all still there — unless another customer moved them, and how is that the retailers fault, that people can’t clean up after themselves? Even patrons of McDonald’s can bus their own table, right? Every bookcase would still have a label, new books would still be stocked. In fact, all I’m changing is the staff levels: at the base it’s still the same store, right?

My point is that the booksellers who work constantly to maintain the bookstore and equally hard to answer your questions are the reason we all shop at bookstores — the books themselves are available from just about anywhere these days, including Wal-Mart and the supermarket.

Books can be sold anywhere, that’s not what the bookstore does. We provide a specialty service. We’re the only retailer set up to answer questions, and being good sports, we’ll accept just about any question folks care to bring in — and see if there’s a book for it. Bookselling is, in fact, a service industry (lightly masked as retail) and though we support ourselves through the sale of books, it is not all that we do, or always what we do.

Still, the unstaffed bookstore I described above would also have a certain appeal to the customer base, so long as we still sold coffee & provided free wifi. A glorified reading room — or a library but without the pesky librarian to shush you when you talk too loud with friends (or on your cellphone). If you can manage the haphazard organization, you might even prefer it — so long as you didn’t need a particular issue of any one specialized magazine (how do you people find out about the feature article in Vogue Hellas anyway?) (yes, we stock it).

Still, even if you just hang out with us all day eventually you will want or need a book, and then you’ll suddenly be looking for a bookseller.

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We have long since moved past the days when buying a particular book meant scrounging and searching dusty bookshops, or finding a accomodating bookseller with a copy of Bowker’s Books In Print (at the time an impressively large bound volume, like a huge phone book) and then waiting four to six weeks for the order to arrive.

There have always been other options: The Book of the Month Club and it’s competitors and genre-specific spinoffs were valid (and popular) options even into the late 80s — and indeed, the Book of the Month Club is still an ongoing operation, though smaller now in the internet age.

If one were interested in gardening, or astronomy, or model trains, the same catalog from which you ordered the tools of your hobby also offered books on the topic.

Prior to the shopping mall and the big box bookstore: your downtown department store had a book department (often on the first floor) [See sources: 1920, 1949] — while we almost always think of book shops as separate and an institution onto themselves, independent booksellers have, for a century and a half [and more: since the 1830s, starting in England and New York] been forced to operate alongside larger ‘corporate’ competition.

In doing research, I found complaints from booksellers lamenting the use of books as a loss leader to pull shoppers into department stores, from 1900: “Every Philadelphian who reads that offer might well get the idea that Lippincott’s and the booksellers are humbugs and frauds to want to charge $1.50 for a book which the philanthopic Mr. Wanamaker will give him for $1.10. It may be business but it is demoralizing. The discount question is one of the first that should be grappled with by the new American Publishers’ Association. If the publishers must sell to department stores, than let the books be published at net prices with closer discounts so that the department stores shall not get too much credit for cheap selling.” [Google Book Search is an amazing thing — and some problems are as old as retail.]

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While competition from down the street is not only unavoidable, but considered kind-of-the-point of capitalist economies, the new competition presented to booksellers is both old & new, and pernicious.

Amazon is not a bookstore, though they have always presented themselves a such, even going so far as to bake the words into the early .gif and .jpg logos. Despite their own propaganda, there is no store: Amazon is a mail-order catalog.

Before you say, “No, Amazon sells books; so they’re a bookseller, right? Obvious, really…” I’ll point out that Amazon does not maintain a shop or storefront and sends books to you via the post or parcel services. So: catalog, QED.

The internet is a fabulous invention and has simplified many, many aspects of the old mail-order catalog business — there is no need to check off boxes on an order form or laboriously write out, line by line, item numbers, prices, tax, shipping & handling, and then mail the physical object (with an envelope and stamps, actually licking them… how barbaric) to some far away city and waiting, patiently, for the goods to arrive. Even the improvements provided by toll free 1-800 numbers and telephone orders are eclipsed by the convenience of web sites. But the basic process—placing orders fulfilled by a remote distribution center—is the classic mail-order business model.

Amazon is a book catalog, sure, but don’t give them undeserved credit. In positioning itself as a “Bookstore” Amazon has set up a false equivalence in the minds of customers and presents your average bookseller with a series of competitions that we cannot win:

“Oh, you don’t have it? But it’s in stock at Amazon.” [1]
“Why can’t I return this? Returns are easier at Amazon.” [2]
“Why is this book $28? There’s a copy for only $1.49 on Amazon.” [3]
“Why will it take 4 days to get here? I mean, I can get it in just 2 days from Amazon.” [4]
“Amazon customer service is just so much better. I’m never shopping here again.” [5]

[1] “In Stock” at Amazon is the same as an item being in stock at a warehouse, or book wholesaler, or even at a publisher. Yes, the book exists. That doesn’t mean you can have a copy today. Once again, customer perceptions are against me as a bookseller: The customer equates the click of a ‘buy’ button with the actual sale (“Oh, I just bought that on the web”) but the goods take time to deliver. Even a pizza takes 30 minutes.

[2] As part of its customer service, Amazon does make returns ‘easy’ – but not unlimited, and only for items sold & fulfilled by Amazon itself, not (always) for 3rd party sellers in the marketplace, and not (always) refunding shipping, either to the customer or back to Amazon. Yes, I’ve read anecdotes of amazing customer service — full refunds, prompt replacements, even shipping a new item before getting the old one back — but these seem to be true exceptions and not the rule.

Also, no one shows up to Amazon’s doorstep (corporate HQ, I guess, since they don’t have stores) with a book, asking for a refund. No receipt, no proof that it was even bought at Amazon, “it was a gift”, but with every expectation that they not only provide a gift card or credit for the full retail price of the book, but that Amazon do so with a smile and a thank you. And yet I get this kind of request daily at the bookstore.

[3] One reason Amazon can sell books for less than retail is they do not need to employ a staff member to give their customers basic lessons in economics, clarification that used goods are not equivalent to new, a concise description of how Amazon’s Marketplace works, or polite explanations that after ‘shipping & handling’ is tacked on by the seller they’re going to end up paying $8 and waiting a week for a 10 year old book.

And that’s fine, a deal in fact. And used books are great, I love them. Just don’t throw that buck-fifty in my face when we’re talking about a brand new hardcover that’s only been out of the box for 2 days.

[4] …If you are an Amazon Prime member (paying $79 for the priviledge) I’d like to thank you for remembering us at the bookstore, for making the trip to come in, for shopping with us, and even for taking additional time to engage a bookseller — up to and including asking if we can order a book for you and how long it might take to arrive. But why ask me to defend why I, as a bookseller (making minimum wage for all you know) with no control over either warehouse procedures or the shipping companies we employ, can’t match a premium service you pay an annual fee for. It seems a bit much. Are you trolling the bookstore?

[5] Amazon’s much vaunted “customer service” consists of having a web site, shipping the correct item in a more or less timely manner, and handling the 1-in-1000 or so orders where there is some sort of issue — damaged in shipping, lost, wrong item, or ‘customer error’ of various sorts up to and including folks who just decide they don’t want it — which they do via email and their web site. It’s almost impossible to actually call Amazon, as they don’t publish their 1-800 number anywhere on the site (Google searches pull up 1.866.216.1072).

Oddly, it’s the same thing I do every day – in person. And yet, I get no credit.

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I’ll get to my point: Amazon is not only *not* a bookstore, they are a parasite on bookselling.

Amazon is soaking up all the easy sales: those where the customer already knows what they want and can clearly communicate that [to a computer in this case]. These are books that we have in store, often on front-of-store displays, including the bestseller lists and major new releases. In the event of unprecedented demand, due to breaking events or sudden popularity [50 Shades of Grey], Amazon will even sell you the book before they have it in stock. Under the guise of ‘preorders’ they get to sell at no risk, even before they themselves have to pay for the stock.

Amazon can manipulate this part of their business quite well; they delay payments to suppliers until weeks after they themselves have already banked the sale.

What about the hard sales? The customer searches? Yes, like any other search engine, a customer can use Amazon to find books — if the customer is willing to work at it. There isn’t anyone on hand to correct their spelling, or to point out that Instanbul, Constantinople, and Byzantium are all different names for the same city.

And as I point out above, no one picks up the phone to call Amazon. Have no doubt that people call the book store with the web browser window open and ask us questions until they can complete their Amazon order. If you’d care to find out just how many people call a bookstore, I’d like to invite you to my workplace for an afternoon. [We’re listed first in the phonebook, even ahead of all the other stores in our chain, in a metropolitan area with 4.5 million people — so yeah.]

Amazon doesn’t recommend books either, not like a bookseller can (and does). “People who bought this also bought” is a fine thought (and easy to code) but is it any surprise that folks who read Patterson have bought 5 of his other books? And the much vaunted [patented, even] customer reviews?

Randall Monroe has the most concise response to that:

After the holidays, every January I’m presented with dozens of gift returns — no few of which came from Amazon, no doubt — but I won’t belabor the point by mentioning it more than once twice.

In-store author events, browsing bookshelves, independent discovery, front of store displays as publisher marketing tools — all things the bookstore provides that you don’t get from Amazon, all of which promote reading and books (and book collecting, occasionally) as pursuits, and which also enrich your community. Amazon is slowly siphoning off sales that result from the efforts we make in-store, while giving nothing back to your community. They don’t even pay what should be their fair share of local taxes.

Amazon is a catalog, not a bookstore. Booksellers provide services to you that few appreciate, at least to the point of financially supporting us. Amazon also makes use of our services, in that we’re helping their customers, too; it’s our job to sell books even if we can’t bank the sale.

Imagine the bookstore with no sales staff, just cashiers. That’s the future we’re already heading towards as more bookstores are forced to hire fewer booksellers — or even to let a few go.

Imagine your hometown or neighborhood without a bookstore. Some of you don’t have to imagine, as one major chain has already closed.

There are solutions. One can even compete with Amazon. But the new bookstore will likely look a bit different than anyone is used to.

[I’ll write up my thoughts on a ‘new model’ bookstore in the next post]

For centuries before the steam-powered printing press, books were rare: to be scrounged for in small shops, bought used more often than not, each a treasure, and each treasured.

I don’t think most people [the ones who only buy one book a year] understand the bibliophile’s need for books, or the comfort of a personal library full of them.

Digital is fine. Ebooks can be exceptionally convenient. The ebook may eventually supplant certain types of cheap paperback; in fact is already doing so. I also hope the ease of ‘production’, ‘printing’, and distribution ushers in a new Age of Pulp.

(scifi is chugging along fine, but certain types of adventure & mystery stories could use a shot in the arm.)

However: there’s nothing like a book, a physical book in hand with some serious heft, to soothe one’s soul and decorate one’s house. And you can read them! Amazing things.

This is something basic I and many others understand. We were already buying books (much more than one a year) and after the general public’s fling with digital books: we’ll still be buying them. You can predict the death of the bookstore chains, and of the big publishers, and that’s fine. It may even be true. But even when the damn things were made by hand – there was an unquenchable demand for actual books that centuries of writing, printing, and constant reproduction of older titles did nothing to slake.

Books will be scrounged for in small shops, bought used more often than not: each a treasure, and each treasured.

PLEASE do me a favor: DON'T pick out any gifts for your loved ones. Don't buy the book you know they'll love, DON'T get that one gadget you know they've been droping hints about for the last six months, DON'T even bother with gift cards.

You’re going to pick wrong.

I absolutely guarantee you’re going to pick wrong — just like you did last year, just like you’ve done for many, many years. Everyone has just been too polite to say anything.

And then I have to spend days of my life, after the holidays, doing nothing but processing returns. At least once an hour I’ll be asked, “Can’t I just get cash back?”

And sadly, the answer is no.

So let’s all agree: The Perfect Gift Is an Envelope Full of Cash.

I’d love to get cash. Anyone aged 14-28 would definitely prefer cash. Do a gut check: what do you want? Sure, that surprise gift, the exact right thing is great when it comes from the one person in your life (spouse, partner, boyfriend, girlfriend) but for everyone else?

I say: If you’re not sleeping with them, they just get cash.

[If you are sleeping with them, this seems appropriate]

Imagine the time you’ll save. Imagine the lack of stress. If you think cash is too impersonal, put the cash envelope inside of a tin of home-made cookies. That would be fantastic because, c’mon, *cookies* AND *cash*! That would be a holiday gift I’d be talking about for decades. The folks in the retirement home will be sick of hearing about it.

[cash is even traditional in some cultures]

So do yourself a favor. Do your loved ones a favor. Most Importantly, take the pressure and the hassle away from the poor retail clerks who have to process all those damn returns for clothes and other crap gifts: Just give cash this holiday.

Thank you for you time and polite consideration. And I’ll be back in 2012 to repeat this message in RocketBomber’s next Holiday Gift Guide!

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image credits:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/beglen/157929769/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ashevillein/2421648773/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/10899777@N02/1250836095/

I can’t comment directly on any Barnes & Noble actions as I am not authorized to speak for my employer. Decisions on what to stock, or what kind of relationship to maintain with vendors is well above my pay grade, and so even when served up a juicy tidbit — like B&N supposedly not stocking certain bestselling & perennial DC graphic novels because of the Amazon Fire getting first dibs on DC content — even when this is obviously the sort of thing I started this blog to talk about,

Well, I can’t comment.

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Instead, let us talk about a completely unrelated bit of business — the many ways my employer any large retail chain can communicate projects and directives to employees.

1. There are company intranets — basically web pages that don’t connect to the web — which can be used to store oft-retrieved documents, to announce (to employees) upcoming thematic or strategic shifts in business, to broadcast to employees information that is also being made available to the media (and public) via official press releases, and to basically cheer-lead about how Great It Is to be Working For The Company. [Smiles]

Alas, today was a slow news day — there were no store alerts on the intranet. I couldn’t discuss anything that might have been broadcast on this particular channel anyway, but I feel fine in mentioning that today was relatively quiet: silence is not yet privileged insider information.

2. There are many different scheduling software packages, at least a few of which are employed by retailers — these allow projects to be set up, either as monthly recurring tasks or one-offs, and can include attachments like book merchandise lists, directions on where to place, store, or dispose of merchandise, or even links to outside resources. These projects can go out to the whole chain, or only to a select group of stores, based on the actual displays and merchandise mix.

There are even times when we have to quickly execute projects — say, a publisher is being sued and we have to pull all the books, or a kids toy is found to contain lethal levels of lead, or we have to immediately change a bar code so items ring correctly at the register (failure to do so results in a fine from the Federal Bureau of Weights and Measures).

So we are set up to quickly disseminate an ‘emergency’ project and respond within 24hrs, should someone at corporate want us to.

Why, just today, I used a scheduling software package to assist me in setting multiple displays within my store: display tables, endcaps, even some unusual things like window signage and counter displays. Yep, I was logging on and off of the electronic planner all day, right up until 7pm, doing my job — merchandising displays, checking in all day…

In fact, if there were a situation that needed a quick response, I’d bet a theoretical merchandiser at the corporate level could not only set it up as a project, they’d also be sure an alert went out over the company intranet. It would be quite hard to miss in this theoretical case.

3. If a company chose, why, they could have their IT staff set up email accounts (under the appropriate co. .coms) so both corporate staff at HQ, along with regional field management, could use an established communication protocol [email, duh] to communicate directly to management in stores. It’s a system that gets abused a bit, in theory (as I can’t comment on my own experience using such systems), as it is obviously much easier to just send out an email — either from a desk or a smart phone — than it would be to set up a specific project on the scheduling system, or to clear a company-wide broadcast to go out on the intranet. A lot of crap can be sent over the system, from official spreadsheets and full reports on down to pesky details (individual isbns, or order requests, or availability from publishers) and of course: notices that there are either important messages on the intranet or specific projects that need to be checked off on the scheduler.

There are 3 ways to let store managers know there is a issue that requires immediate attention. In fact, at B&N we’ve often done something similar in the past 2 years and used all 3: especially to comply with the CPSIA. Even a large chain like B&N can move quickly if the right person initiates the project for the right reasons. One’s name and fingerprints are all over it, though: as author of the email, and the post on the intranet, and as the user that initiated the project in the electronic planner.

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Say you didn’t want to take “credit” though, or you didn’t have the clearance for this sort of company-wide action (at least not without a token sign off from, say, the folks in a different division actually responsible for that department). Some things can be taken care of right away, I suppose. Let’s say I work for the digital, .com division. Why, I can probably go into the inventory system and change the class of a few hundred books in an afternoon – especially if there is already a code to specify ‘web-site only’ for, say, expensive text books or print-on-demand titles. Given the size of the database, I’d bet dozens of people have this kind of access. You wouldn’t even have to cross the corporate divide and clear it with the buyers in the book-and-mortar half of the business — and after it’s done, I doubt there is a way to know who reclassed a few hundred SKUs.

…as, of course, it could theoretically happen at ANY retailer, and while there is no way to know exactly how each inventory system works, I have to state unequivocally that I’m only discussing a theory of mine about stores with websites, and not a specific response to anything that might have happened either today or yesterday.

There is also the telephone. If I happen to know a guy in the right job— maybe then with a few phone calls I might even be able to get a few stores to do things in an adhoc, unofficial way. I mention to a field manager that “this is what we’re doing” “take care of it now; the official project is clearing channels as we speak”

Well, quite a bit could be done this way. It would even be possible to make some major merchandising changes in a short time, if you know the right people, without putting a single damning detail in writing. Not that I would be able to comment on that even if I happened to see it happen. But it exists as a possibility in any large organization where personal relationships make it easier to pick up a phone and ask, than it would be to go through official channels, particularly if there were separate divisions in your company with different and occasionally conflicting goals.

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I can’t comment on the DC/B&N spat because I’ve been busy just doing my normal monthly merchandising for the past five days without any emergencies or interruptions of any sort —

and if I lay it on any thicker even the fig leaf of ‘theoretics’ won’t cover it.

Like many young adults of my generation, I changed jobs often. Only working a couple of years at this or that, and moving on. Even before moving out into the workforce, I changed my major quite a lot — I stayed at Georgia Tech for more than seven years, and one joke that circulated among my friends is I had to be the only person to attempt to get a Liberal Arts degree from a tech school.

[A joke, of course, because at the time GT had nothing like that: Times have changed.]

So I’ve worked in facilities management, I’ve done independent consulting, I’ve been a bartender, and a security guard, and an unpaid intern. [and a half dozen more I don’t, or don’t want to, remember.] Then, a little over 10 years ago, I took a part-time job at a bookstore to help make ends meet while the independent-consulting-thing went down the tubes, and within months I was working at the bookstore full time. After a couple of years they gave me the first job with ‘manager’ in the title. I learned the whole store bit by bit, working shipping and receiving in the back room, shelving and merchandising, the music department (I managed the music department during our first big shift, adding DVDs to the mix), hiring & training other booksellers, the JOYS of dealing with difficult customers on a daily basis…

A job in a bookstore is an education.

When I first applied, and was hired, the book business was booming — both major chains were already in the hundreds, and opening dozens of stores each month. There was a definite career escalator apparent, so long as you worked at it. An investment on an employee’s part, committing to retail full time and being willing to work any and all of the ridiculous hours the store is open (7am to Midnight, daily) would be repaid with recognition and promotion.

I didn’t have to change jobs every couple of years; I was continually handed new roles, asked to do more, asked to take on more responsibility.

I can see now that major-chain, big box bookselling was in a bubble — but the bubble at the time was firmly supported by customer demand. Each new store was greeted by waves of local neighborhood customers — customers who stayed with us.

[insert Amazon, ebooks, and a recession here — oh, the customers are still with us. Some come in every day. They just stopped buying anything. Enjoy the free ride for as long as it lasts, folks.]

Now, as a bookstore manager, I’m still being asked to do more and more, but with less. Fewer employees, fewer payroll hours… even fewer books. I have to draw from my years of experience daily, as I have to go back and do the tasks I was trained to do years ago, things I used to be able to delegate.

When our music manager quit, corporate decided not to replace him. When one of our merchandise managers moved out to Arizona a couple of years ago, corporate decided not to replace her. We used to have three head cashiers — experienced booksellers trusted to handle customer returns and the cash office (bank deposits, end-of-day reporting and the like) — but now I have one, and she’s going to be taking a vacation in two weeks.

Since 2006, bookstores have moved away from hiring full time employees — you’re either a manager, really, or you’re not. The store used to have ‘lead’ booksellers, in charge of a whole category. Not every fit was perfect — the History lead, for example, might also have philosophy and religion under his purview, and the Fiction lead might not be as strong in sci-fi as she was in mysteries — but full-time booksellers were employed by the store, and part of their day-to-day job was to make their expertise available to our customers.

A decision was made to move away from this model — fewer full-time booksellers, fewer “leads”. Some specialty departments have to have a lead: the Kids department, primarily. Ideally you’d have two full time kids books specialists on staff. The newsstand also can’t be handled as a by-the-way assignment to a regular bookseller; even if corporate decides to do away with this position too, I’ll have to train & schedule a bookseller (or three part-timers) to fulfil the role, even without the job title or commensurate salary.

Part of scaling back full-time employees meant moving booksellers to new roles. Not everyone has proved to be as adaptable as I am, or as nimble in taking up new tasks.

Say you hired an older gentlemen 8 years ago because he liked books and was an avid gardener. After a couple of months, his affable nature and ease with customers — and open availability, including nights and weekends — makes it easy to promote him into a lead bookseller position. You hire him on full time & give him the Gardening section… plus cookbooks, and crafts, and art and interior design; not that he’s an expert in those subjects as well, but he learns. He starts making recommendations on what customers should buy, and also on what the store should order.

And then some bozo in corporate decides, well, this isn’t the best way to run a bookstore.

We can’t fire our Gardener just because of a ‘strategic’ move in human resources, though, so we start moving him around: Helping out in our back room over the holidays when more boxes are coming in, working on merchandise maintenance in the mornings (re-alphabetizing, pulling returns, and the like), putting him on the customer service desk—which is the best fit—but also being reminded by corporate [paraphrasing] “Customer service is not really a full time position. You’ll need to reclass and demote your Gardener, down to part time, or move him into one of the remaining full time positions”

aside: WHY THE HELL ISN'T CUSTOMER SERVICE CONSIDERED THE PROPER ROLE FOR FULL TIME BOOKSELLERS WITH YEARS OF EXPERIENCE?

Remaining full time positions? Can I move him to the music department then?

“No, there are no full time positions in Music either, as your store does not currently merit a department manager there, and we’re even moving away from having a ‘lead’ in that area”

aside: [!]

My bargain lead just quit. It’s not the best fit for our Gardener, as it requires a lot of stock rotation (he’s not as young as he used to be and some of those coffee table books are heavy) but maybe…

“No, we’re not replacing the Bargain Lead either. Your merchandise manager can assume those roles; you need to demote and reclass your Gardener.”

aside: The merchandise manager, a full-time 45-hour a week job, can of course assume all the responsibilities of what used to be another, full-time 40-hour a week job. Love you, corporate overlords: way to plan!

But — you know, one reason he was so willing to work full time is he needs the income to suppliment…

“No. Move him to one of our corporate-designated full-time roles, or cut his hours, or fire him”

##

About the only full-time positions left are head cashiers. This is a different skill-set, and someone who is a fabulous bookseller and very good with customers can’t automatically transition to a role where the primary needs are speed, absolute accuracy, politely saying “no” to customers [nearly every merchandise return has at least one “no” lurking in it, even when we do say yes], and above all: speed.

If a customer has to wait in line too long, often they just drop their books and go home.

So the head cashier job wasn’t the best fit for our Gardener. We had to laterally move him into that role, however, because it was the “only” [only in quotes because the corporate rules are arbitrary] full-time job we had available. After a few weeks, we knew, absolutely knew it wasn’t going to work out for the best.

Above my head, higher levels of management were building up a paper trail, practically licking their lips at the prospect of firing this man — a bookseller with nearly as much experience as I have and who in fact may be better than me at customer service — all because we are letting stupid rules of business get in the way of actually doing our jobs.

Fortunately this little anecdote has a happy though slightly bittersweet ending. This particular employee (not being stupid and so seeing the writing on the wall, and after some small changes in his personal finances) was finally able to accept a demotion, and went from “full-time” to “part-time”

The change is semantic (with a slightly lower hourly wage) as my store is still short-staffed and he ends up working close to full-time anyway, 30-35hrs a week. But it checks off a box, makes corporate HR happy, and moves the company closer to being a retailer that only hires minimum wage, part time staff for all positions.

##

My Gardener isn’t actually a gardener; his expertise was in other subjects. [some details changed and of course, name withheld]

But the story is true, and is being repeated with hundreds of people as my employer, a major retail chain, desperately tries to cut costs. Payroll is the easiest cost to cut.

But “Productivity Gains” are a paper illusion, and cuts in staffing save payroll dollars but also incur other costs. In retail, when you cut staff you negatively impact the customer experience. People leave because they don’t like waiting in line at the register. In a bookstore, customers wander and flop about and wait for a bookseller to engage them, and if no one walks up and asks, they’re more likely to leave than to go to the information desk and ask for help
[RocketBomber, 21 Jan 2011: “Hell of a way to run a railroad”]

…to say nothing of some other by-the-way-mentions: Our Music Dept. manager did in fact quit. (We’re being pressured right now to move the last remaining full-time music staffer down to part time.) The Bargain Dept. lead was first moved into a new Digital role (selling e-readers) but then also quit — the decision to not replace the Bargain Lead position came first, though, and she really was too good for us. I was hoping we’d be able to promote her to a manager role…

Well, that goes back two years, though, when we cut our Management Team from 9 to 8… and then to 7, when the Music Manager quit… and then to six, when an Assistant Store manager who happened to be a National Guardsman was called up right before the holidays and we [I say “we” but you know what I mean] made the decision not to replace him for payroll reasons and work November & December [in retail!] with only 6 managers — only 4 of whom have keys and codes to the building.

…all while we went from 3 head cashiers down to 2 — and while our parent corp. was moving into digital and introducing a whole new specialty department — and while shifts in product mix and space-allocation necessitated whole-scale moves of the actual books.

I’m at the point now, where for at least 4 hours every shift, I’m the only person in the building who can authorize a customer return, open the back door for shipping/receiving, troubleshoot tech problems on the e-readers (because of course customers call the store, not the 1-800 number), backup the registers OR customer service [gods forbid I have to do both at the same time], while also handling any escalated customer ‘concerns’, fielding phone calls from aspiring authors who just want to know “how to get my book stocked in your stores”, and…

…oh, I don’t know… maybe recommending a book or two.

Some of my complaints are store specific. For example, two weeks ago — after a manager was fired — another manager was taking time off to visit his cancer specialist out of state, our National Guardsman was still off on “training”, and suddenly for 4 days we had to run a multi-million dollar storefront with just 2 managers — just 2 people with keys and codes to open and close the building, a retail business open for 14 hours each day.

Corporate had no way of knowing that we were down to just two managers at that point. Unless, you know, they were actually paying attention. This was the result of years of, “oh, it’s just a small change – they’ll cope”

Until we can’t.

##

If I owned my own business I wouldn’t be nearly as frazzled. I’d be working more hours, sure — likely 60-70 hours a week, if not more — but I wouldn’t have to put up with the added help of our corporate office. I could assign staff according to their strengths, not arbitrary HR codes, and I could empower booksellers to handle the sorts of things that currently require a ‘manager’.

If I worked just about anywhere else that wasn’t retail, I’d have weekends off. I wouldn’t have to go into work at 7am unless I chose to [working flextime] and I could go home at 5pm. [or 3, if I came in at 7] — sure, a salary job means taking on special projects and working extra hours and maybe even weekends; a tech job wouldn’t be any better as far as hours. I might be asked to work nights and weekends. But I’d be asked, and not [necessarily] required. And if I were working Friday nights, I wouldn’t have to pick up the phone at 9pm to answer book availability questions, “Oh, and how late is your store open tonight?”

Booksellers get absolutely no respect. On the rare occasions that we point out that maybe, just maybe the shopping public is being a bit unreasonable — there is an immediate smack-down calling us entitled, condescending, elitist, “hipster”, and also personally responsible for the degradation of the stores that forced, forced our customers to shop online.

Please.

This past year is the hardest I’ve ever worked, and while I don’t want to get into an argument with folks who roll steel or repair roofs in August, I also don’t want to be scolded by folks who have a desk chair at work to suck it up, after all, it’s just retail.

##

For the first time in more than ten years, I’m faced with a career choice.

Sadly, for the first time I’m also faced with the prospect of giving up a job I love.

Yes, despite all my complaints — I love my job. In fact, I might say that my complaints are only the most obvious evidence that *I love my job*. If I did not care, I would not grumble, I would not strive to make it work, I would not have written hundreds of thousands of words on the topic, I would merely collect my paycheck until the time comes to move on, and then I’d move on.

I hope to be a bookseller for a long time to come; I’d love to retire from my corporate employer after decades of service, after which I’d only work part-time — say 20 hours a week — as a bookseller.

Bookselling has, for the last decade, been a constant challenge for me. I have embraced it. I’m going to miss it.

It is not my customers — no matter how frustrating they’ve become — that drives me to the point where I have to decide: it’s my employer. Corporate is flopping about, throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks, cutting all the costs they can [though to date it seems the only costs they’ve found are the payroll expenses] and generally, making my life impossible. Only through concentrated effort on the part of myself and my fellow booksellers have we managed to make the impossible merely difficult.

For ten years — before finding the bookstore — I wandered, Lost. For the past ten years, I’ve found a home. And now, with academic credentials 15 years old and a resume poisoned by the same corporate decisions that will force me into unemployment, I look at the worst job market in 50 years and shudder.

If I choose to stick with bookstores to the very bitter end, I hope you understand.

I don’t know what’s next. I no longer look forward to taking on a new job. And yet, I know I need a change.

##

Even in my hobbies [if you can call the blog a hobby] I’ve been static for way too long. Some changes have already taken place, other changes are in the works.

Unfortunately I have a suspicion that in 5 years, I will be homeless; laptop in tow, mooching electricity and wifi wherever one can, updating constantly, an idiot telling his tales full of sound and fury, etc etc.

Sadly, I’m prepared. I’ve been buying less and paring back on my personal possessions [over the past 3 moves into new apartments] and buying new laptops as required to optimize battery life, overall weight, and usability. My next [last?] laptop will likely be a chromebook, as I move the last physical bits online.

Between now and then…

Well.

Before the end of the year I’m going to launch one last website, where I start writing the long delayed fantasy novel in the only way I know how: as a blog.

And: I will go down with the ship. Assuming the pilot steering this craft can’t avoid the iceberg we’ve all seen coming and chart a new course, I’ll be there to lend a hand, to help you step over the rail and into your lifeboat, to bring a round of drinks to the band as they play the final set before the whole enterprise upends and sinks beneath the waves. I’ll be there to cry, since no one else will mourn.

And: I have one more really good idea about how to run a bookstore – a national chain, a competitor for both online and e-. No one listens, but I’ll make the best case I can.

And of course I buy a lottery ticket every week. So there is some hope.

(personally, I’m not sure which is the less-likely millions-to-one shot: bookstores, or the lottery)

If you are a radio DJ — or at least if you once were a radio DJ, these days I swear at least half the stations run tape instead of a live broadcast, and the other half run 50 stations all playing the same thing off of a satellite feed — anyway, if you were a radio DJ the only cardinal sin you could commit is to stop talking.

There were things that would get you fired, or fined by the FCC (Carlin’s 7 words, for example — but if that’s your schtick you have an engineer with fast reflexes to beep you). You HAD to play ads, so many each hour, and at designated times, ‘cause that kept the lights on and the broadcast tower humming, and of course, paid your paycheck. Depending on the format and on management, there are no doubt other rules — but only one sin: Dead Air.

If you stop broadcasting entirely, your listeners are going to change the channel. You can play music (In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida buys you 17 whole minutes) or turn an hour over to the interns, or get the janitor to tell knock-knock jokes — doesn’t matter so long as you’re still on the air.

As bloggers, some of us shy away from filler posts, or look a bit askance at blogs with too many image posts or embedded videos, especially if that’s all that’s on a blog (there’s a tumblr for that). I like to write longer essays, myself: gives me room to think and expand (and ramble and digress) and I feel posts like those are my best work for the blog, and one of my contributions to the internet, culture, and society.

But one can’t always muster up a long essay, on demand, week after week (at least, I can’t)

Only one sin: dead air. Keep writing — but more importantly, keep posting.

If one were to go to the most recently updated Manga Rankings [by clicking the HTML link in the left sidebar of the appropriate archive.org page] one might notice a subtle change to the usual headers.

Actually, you wouldn’t notice because hardly anyone actually goes to my carefully curated archived charts, having gleaned all the information you really wanted from the top 10 summaries I post to the blog. So I’m going to pull it out and rub your face in it explain to the masses just what changed:

Instead of my self-imposed data diet (trimming back to just the 3 main web sites — B&N, Borders, and Amazon — a necessary step I took back in May else I would never have caught up to date on these damn things) I’m now back up to 8 web sites — nine sources if you consider I count Amazon twice.

Each website works differently, and the subjective quality of the data I’m able to scrape from each means that I treat them all differently. But that’s part of what makes the hobby so interesting.

All current sources for the rankings, from 14 August and for the foreseeable future, are:

Barnes & Noble, Borders, Books-a-Million, Buy.com, Chapters, Hastings, Powells, Amazon’s Graphic Manga Category Listings & their Manga Hourly Bestsellers

Please note: these aren’t necessarily the best web sites for manga (I personally shop from an actual store, but when shopping online I often use RightStuf.com) but all have one thing in common: a manga category that can be sorted, data that can be mined & added to my massive steam-powered clockwork spreadsheets that spit out the weekly charts.

I still need to update the charts FAQ, but wanted to drop this to the main blog first.

Microsoft was founded by a college dropout — but to be fair, Harvard was the college and Gates was very smart going in.

Apple was founded by a college dropout – though, it should be granted, both Jobs & Woz did summer interships at HP [and other things – look at wikipedia].

Facebook was founded while Zuckerberg was still a student,

Google was founded by students,

Dell Computers was founded by a student,

Yahoo [which was big once, don’t knock it] was founded by students,

and — dare I pull in some old media for you? Len Riggio founded the company that would become bookseller chain Barnes & Noble while still a student at NYU, way back in 1965

So.

Tax breaks to millionaires do not create jobs. Tax breaks to millionaires do not create new companies, whole new industries, whole new product categories, and whole new ways of life.

If one were serious about creating jobs and not just scoring points with one’s political donors, instead of making sure the top marginal tax rates are now and always will be below 25% — one would invest in the brains that create jobs.

Gates dropped out of Harvard but had an excellent education up to that point — Yahoo and Google both were founded by graduate students — Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak had the advantage of being in right place at the right time, sure [hard to replicate 1976 Silicon Valley] but they also happened to be students in the Silicon Valley, Berkeley for Woz, Homestead High School in Cupertino itself for Jobs.

Instead of tax cuts for the rich that some claim are the job creators, how about we extend a helping hand to those that actually have a proven track record of inventing whole new American industries?

How about we invest in education, and provide a college education to *all* without the massive debt currently required.

How many Apples, Googles, Facebooks, and Dells would have been established if a smart college kid could borrow $100,000 to start up a new company right after she graduates, instead of being forced to borrow that $100K up front just to get through school?

So many missed opportunities. Sure, some companies founded by the smart young kids would fail — this is different how? — but it would be up to them whether or not they could make it work.

For such a small amount of money, we could make sure the kids get into university, and through grad school if they have the talent and the drive. AND THEN these best-and-brightest could assume hundreds of thousands in debt, *not* to pay for school but to create new companies, new industries, and new jobs.

I might suppose that the only reason we don’t provide a free college [and post graduate] education for worthy, qualifying students is because that would make us socialists — dirty, dirty socialists with more free-enterprise startups than we could manage, with more good-paying jobs for college graduates, and a way to enable a whole generation to create, invent, and prosper rather than loading them down with debt that forces them to make compromises and just make do for at least two decades — long enough to burn out their hopes, dreams, and entrepreneurial spirit.

And of course, we’d be able to do that not just for this generation, but the next and the next and the next one, you know, the one that cures cancer, colonizes Mars, and does fabulous things we haven’t even dreamed of yet. All that and a bag of chips, for the in-context-minimal cost of 4-to-6 years for a kid at a university.

It would be like the economic benefit of the 1950s GI Bill but available for all generations and snowballing into perpetuity.

Of course I’m bitter because I worked through school (and asked WAY too much of my parents) and didn’t have the benefit of this myself — but, economically speaking, why are college costs disproportionately borne by students when it costs so little for the government to provide this, and when it means so much to both our culture and our economy?