Rocket Bomber - retail

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)

Big Box Bookstores, RIP.

I. Origins

1962 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldenbooks
1966 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._Dalton

see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopping_mall
“The Rambunctious Revival of Books”, Time Magazine, 30 October 1978

Industrial Bookselling doesn’t have an exact date we can point to as an origin — though if I had to pick a year, it would be 1931 and the inception of the paperback — which then languished for a bit until business models caught up to technology. [I leave the direct comparison of paperbacks to ebooks as an exercise for the student; pull quote from wikipedia: “then-huge print runs of 20,000 copies to keep unit prices low”]

The lower price points caught on with a penny-conscious consumer (there was a recession on) and slowly the new format was fully embraced by readers — but even before consumption patterns (and resultant residual persistent demand) were apparent, whole new genres of books made possible by cheaper production costs and concommitant lower barriers of entry appeared [once again, I leave the direct comparison to ebooks as an exercise for the student; pull quote from wikipedia: “While the steam-powered printing press had been in widespread use for some time, enabling the boom in dime novels, prior to Munsey, no one had combined cheap printing, cheap paper and cheap authors in a package that provided affordable entertainment to working-class people.”]

Decades before the first nationwide chains, technology opened up publishing in both directions: both downward in price, and laterally — across publishers, genres, and markets. Books were available on racks at newsstands and drugstores; books became a popular entertainment, and not just the purview of the literati.

So — important point — prior to the chains, there was demand: massively increased demand fueled by the cheaper format and many new genres enabled by new technology. At the same time, larger societal changes [a century-long shift away from the general store, town square, and mail-order catalog toward shopping ‘malls’ and strip centers and other car-enabled options] were apparent in the ways we shopped for everything, not just books.

Seen in both the larger context of retail [regional shopping centres] and publishing [paperbacks enabling a new rennaisance] the emergence of nationwide book store chains in the 60s was a given. Obvious. Well, obvious to folks like me.

II. Explosions

1971 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnes_%26_Noble
1977 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_Books
1986 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suncoast_Video
1987 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnes_%26_Noble#History B. Dalton sold to Barnes & Noble
1992 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Play
1992 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borders_Group formation of the Borders Group, following purchases of both Walden Books and the original Borders Books by K-Mart

see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_box
“Book-battling looms as Bookstar invades competitive local market.”, Los Angeles Business Journal, 2 December 1991

(I’d link direct to a wikipedia entry for Bookstop/Bookstar, but for whatever reason the company has been de-wiki’d and re-directs to Barnes & Noble’s entry, with absolutely no mention of Bookstar — note: at one point a national chain, an Austin-based company with it’s own history and which contributed to the book-superstore-concept B&N leveraged to nationwide prominence. In fact, one could argue that before 1989, B&N was a college bookstore chain trying to figure out how to expand, and that Bookstar was the catalyst that differentiated B&N from, say, Follets — with multi-billion-dollar consequences. Guess that’s not ‘relevant’ enough for wikipedia.)

The shift from mall chains to “Big Box Books” is less obvious, but even more awesome to behold. I’m going to quote myself, from http://www.rocketbomber.com/2009/02/24/rethinking-the-box years ago

And starting 15 to 20 years ago, the independents (and Waldenbooks and B. Dalton, too) were about to discover what a major chain really is: while a number of firms (Crown, Powell’s, BookStop, even Barnes & Noble at the time) were opening up ‘discount’ bookstores — warehouse stores full of current bestsellers on sale, remainders, and other discounted titles — this isn’t necessarily what the public wanted; or rather, not everything we wanted. B&N took the downtown New York bookstore and cloned it, throwing up huge boxes in suburbs and smaller cities across the U.S., selling us books and coffee and CDs and most importantly: atmosphere. Other chains quickly followed suit, re-purposing old brand names and converting the discount store of the 80s into the Book SuperStore of today.

B&N wasn’t necessarily first: lucky urbanites have long had such superior bookstores as City Lights, the Strand, or Powell’s City of Books — and the best of the indies are arguably better than yet another cookie-cutter box out by the mall. The point isn’t that the BigBoxBookstore is better, the amazing thing is that they’re everywhere. (Well, almost everywhere; my apologies if you don’t live near one, or if your local is in danger of closing)

Collectively B&N, Borders, and Books-a-Million operate 1500 or so outlets that are touted as superstores, and if we add in another 100? or so large independent (often landmark) bookstores then there are more places to actually find and hold, even read, a book then ever before. Obscure titles, novels, reference, classics, even comics — hundreds of thousands of titles. It’s a great time to be a bookseller, and reader. It’s a great time to be alive.

III. Repercusions

2006 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans_World_Entertainment
2006 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borders_Group#Declining_profits
2009 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._Dalton#1980s_and_1990s

see also: http://www.newrules.org/retail/key-studies-walmart-and-bigbox-retail
Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption, isbn 9780226525914, University of Chicago Press, 2007
http://www.fonerbooks.com/booksale.htm
http://www.bigboxtoolkit.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=16&Itemid=52

In the 20th (let alone the 21st) century, it’s impossible to run a ‘local’ bookstore. There are at least six million books in print, and at least another 12 million books available used — and if you can’t quite wrap your brain around that: your local grocery store carries at most 60,000 SKUs — so a bookstore has to manage 200 to 300 times as many items as a supermarket, and no other retailer comes anywhere close to that number of items stocked. It’s not only ridiculous, it’s impossible.

Bookstore inventory management was only made possible by computers. In this one case, “industrial” practices were only enabled by information revolutions. Perhaps it is because book retail is removed twice from production: once, because demand must be communicated from customer to retailer (assuming the customer even knows they want something: there is no demand without knowledge) and twice, as publishers produced books in expectation of demand, without knowing for sure if this year’s slate was in fact what the reader wanted. The Major Leap made in the 70s [made by Borders, in fact] was to apply analysis to sales and tailor stock in local stores to fit.

Computerized inventory drove sales across all chains through the 80s and into the early 90s, when major players parlayed their success and segment knowledge into the New Big Box Bookstores. It seemed bulletproof: build upon years of sales data across authors, publishers, and book genres to stock shelves in new footprints two-to-five-times the size of existing bookstores, with expected increases in profits.

What the chains ignored (or perhaps, did not realise) is that their computerized models could be used to build computer-only bookstores. Amazon showed up in 1995 and proceeded to eat everyone’s lunch.

[It wasn’t guaranteed: Amazon didn’t report an annual profit until 2003 — they had 8 years of ‘free passes’ from investors and honestly, I don’t know why. Any other company, even a dot-com 2.0 start-up, would have been closed after 5 years of losses and sold for parts. 98% of Amazon’s success has to be attributed to ‘being in the right place at the right time’]

My complaints about Amazon aside: they show that advanced computerized inventory models can serve physical bookstores very well — but that computer models best serve web retailers even better.

Decades of bookselling, advances in inventory management, hand sales and impassioned bookselling, market expansion and careful curation of niche markets – all this just fed into Amazon, and the new [parasitic] model that was determined to put us out of business.

Amazon is a parasite. Sure, they prosper while the whole organism [Books, publishing, book retail, and impassioned handselling] prospers, but they provide nothing to enable the organism to grow. Amazon does everything I can do, but better — but also, only in a derivative, [dare I say, stolen] second-hand way. When both Borders and Barnes & Noble are gone — will Amazon really be able to fill the void?

IV. Fallout

http://www.avclub.com/articles/beyond-the-big-box-the-past-and-possible-future-of,52871/
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/04/26/100426fa_fact_auletta
http://www.technologyreview.com/infotech/14064/
http://articles.cnn.com/2009-09-04/tech/future.library.technology_1_metropolitan-library-librarians-books?_s=PM:TECH
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/feb/12/google-the-future-of-books/
http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the-future-of-books
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/15/future-books_n_849882.html
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/05/12/the-future-of-book-reviews-critics-versus-amazon-reviewers.html
http://craigmod.com/journal/post_artifact/
http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/02/future-of-the-book.html

The whole industry is in flux, no one knows exactly what is going on…
Well… unless they are students of history and looked at the last format change: the introduction of paperbacks in 1931.

The new format that threatened to overturn publishing was, in fact, thoroughly adopted – and subsequently expanded commercial publishing into new markets, new genres, and to new heights.

My bookstore may, in fact, die. [not looking forward to it] But ‘bookselling’ seems to be an activity independent of actual sales; if Amazon doesn’t recognize the skill or chooses to to ignore it, well, I have a Plan B.

…even when all of our locals are run by the same company.

So it wasn’t that long ago that I came to the internet with what I thought was a scoop: Tokyopop titles going on clearance at Barnes & Noble – from all company directives and certainly from what I saw in my store: this was the real deal.

Once Monday rolled around, though, I was hearing from my tweeps that they were getting pushback & incredulous stares when they followed my heartfelt advice and actually went into a bookstore as I recommended, and attempted to buy books.

[the moral of the story is I should never tell people to buy books. wait… that’s not quite right…]

Several folks shared their personal experience with me on twitter; together we tried to figure out what was going on. Without any definite word from my employer [and none coming, I assure you] we’ll have to take our best guesses and actual experience in store as the final say on this.

That is to say, some Tokyopop books are on sale, somewhere, but Your Mileage May Vary.

Twittertape Follows:

##

@MangaXanadu Lori Henderson
@ProfessorBlind I went to my local Barnes and Noble and they hadn’t heard of the 50% off Tokyopop books promotion.
5 hours ago

@ProfessorBlind Matt Blind
@MangaXanadu Tell them to go to “e-planner” and actually read the directions. “All Tokyopop trade titles will be part of the Sept Clearance”
2 hours ago

@ProfessorBlind Matt Blind
@MangaXanadu or they could take their fancy scanner (a “PDT”) & scan a barcode & listen to it beep for clearance.
2 hours ago

@ProfessorBlind Matt Blind
@MangaXanadu or we could be dealing with idiots. If you see T’pop on the shelves & not in clearance bins, grab ‘em anyway: they’re on sale
2 hours ago

@ProfessorBlind Matt Blind
You know, I actually feel kinda bad now sending you folks into B&N – our stores are not executing well on the clearance sale.
2 hours ago

@ProfessorBlind Matt Blind
Anyone else go to a B&N for the clearance and not find any Tokyopop titles yet?
2 hours ago

@JRbBrown J. R. Brown
@ProfessorBlind I tried to buy Happy Cafe 7 and was told it wasn’t on sale, only the volumes that had been put on the “clearance table”.
2 hours ago

@ProfessorBlind Matt Blind
@JRbBrown did they take it to the register or customer service desk to check? Sounds sloppy or lazy.
2 hours ago

@ProfessorBlind Matt Blind
@JRbBrown clearance lists are store-specific, but if a T’pop book was listed in their store inventory, it should have popped on their list
2 hours ago

@JRbBrown J. R. Brown
@ProfessorBlind Spoke to an isle staffer who said it should be on sale, took it to the register, they scanned it in and said no.
1 hour ago

@JRbBrown J. R. Brown
@ProfessorBlind Probably would have bought it anyway, but it was pretty banged up and I didn’t want to pay full price for a damaged copy.
1 hour ago

@JRbBrown J. R. Brown
@ProfessorBlind The store only had ~20 vols of TP books, 15 or so on clearance table & ~5 on shelf. Vol I tried to buy was on shelf.
1 hour ago

@jsyadao Jason S. Yadao
@ProfessorBlind It’s odd – only 80% of the TP books I bought @ 1 of my local stores rang up at sale price – those from a special display.
1 hour ago

@jsyadao Jason S. Yadao
@ProfessorBlind The rest were shelved with the rest of the manga – and were regular price. Would’ve argued, but it was 5 mins to closing.
1 hour ago

@ProfessorBlind Matt Blind
@jsyadao Monday morning I went to our manga section & rescanned every tokyopop book – the only 1 not on sale also showed 0 on hand.
1 hour ago

@ProfessorBlind Matt Blind
My only thought is that since Tpop changed distributors only TP titles from HarperCollins went on sale – TP/DBD titles are still returnable?
1 hour ago

@ProfessorBlind Matt Blind
Tpop made the Diamond Book Dist. announcement very close to their close, should only be the newest books – books my store never got
1 hour ago

@JRbBrown J. R. Brown
@ProfessorBlind That’s entirely possible. Happy Cafe 7 isn’t even on the B&N website; maybe it was a special order that wasn’t picked up?
1 hour ago

@lore13 lore
@ProfessorBlind – I am going to be bitter about not getting Happy Cafe 8 forever, for example #tokyopopfail
1 hour ago

@ProfessorBlind Matt Blind
@lore13 the TPop thing was not only crass & classless, it made no business sense. Why not wind it down? finish a few series only 1 vol away?
1 hour ago

@AnimeNewsdotbiz Humberto Saabedra
@ProfessorBlind I’m getting a lot of resistance in the Dallas and Ft. Worth locations from the younger staff about the TP clearance.
1 hour ago

@ProfessorBlind Matt Blind
@AnimeNewsdotbiz twitter consensus now is that seems the very newest titles, the last released, didn’t make the clearance list.
1 hour ago

@ProfessorBlind Matt Blind
@AnimeNewsdotbiz Something I did not know, as those titles never shipped to my store.
1 hour ago

@ProfessorBlind Matt Blind
@AnimeNewsdotbiz but all that .hack, Fruits Basket, Loveless, Kyo Kara Maoh that sat on shelves for a couple of years: on clearance.
1 hour ago

@AnimeNewsdotbiz Humberto Saabedra
@ProfessorBlind That’s interesting and it implies that B&N is trying to eke out the most profit possible on that last run.
1 hour ago

@ProfessorBlind Matt Blind
@AnimeNewsdotbiz I think it has more to do with distro: Tokyopop titles bought from Diamond are returnable? but HC is refusing returns.
1 hour ago

@AnimeNewsdotbiz Humberto Saabedra
@ProfessorBlind Diamond was the last point of purchase for TP books so that makes sense, but why consider returning them knowing the demand?
1 hour ago

@ProfessorBlind Matt Blind
@AnimeNewsdotbiz Yes, my company is run by greedy, selfish bastards who’d step over my still warm corpse for a $, so is more than possible
1 hour ago

@AnimeNewsdotbiz Humberto Saabedra
@ProfessorBlind Worked for GameStop and they operate under that same principle. At least B&N got me laid once. :)
1 hour ago

@MangaXanadu Lori Henderson
@ProfessorBlind I went to the reg & they rang up full price.
3 minutes ago

@MangaXanadu Lori Henderson
@ProfessorBlind nothing in the clearance bin, no special display.
1 minute ago

@ProfessorBlind Matt Blind
@MangaXanadu so it looks like I need to post a clarification [and an apology] to the ‘nets based on what we’ve figured out on twitter today
1 minutes ago

Rethinking the Box is my series of essays on new ideas in bookselling.

Previously:

Study your History. Recognise your Motives. Location, Location, Location. Know your Customer Base, and your Staff. Hire folks who love books. Find your Niche. Consider your Product Lines, Stock Your Shelves, Set your main-aisle displays, consider Alternative display strategies, take a second look at What the Customers Want and Why Even Annoying Customers are Important. Answer for yourself whether raw dollars or customer service is more important to your store, and its future. Stare again in dismay at the Profit Margins. Try calculating your upper-limit affordable rent and affordable salaries along with revenue from inventory (with a side of coffee) and compare your numbers to average industry per-storefront sales.

Unique Bookstore Experiences: Zero – Intro – 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5

Chronologically: 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 – 8 – 9 – 10 – 11 – 12 – 13 – 14 – 15 – 16 – 17 – 18 – 19 – 20 – 21 – 22 – 23 – 24 – 25 – 26 – 27 – 28 – 29 – 30 – 31 – 32

##

Buy a smaller cruise ship, used — c’mon, they’re building massive ships these days, i.e. The Allure of the Seas et al. — these new ones are huge — but we don’t need all that. Tear out the pool, the casino, the putting green, half the buffets, half the cabins, and all the other crap — and install book shelves.

Oh, keep a few restaurants. And a coffee shop. And at least one bar/pub. But otherwise?

Go wild — can we have a 150,000 sq.ft. bookstore, four times the size of even the flagship New York bookstores? — along with just enough cabins for booklovers who want to book reserve a cruise on the worlds only floating bookstore?

Can we go even bigger? I don’t know; just how big is a cruise ship anyway?

##

Ports of call:

Dublin, every Bloomsday.
London
Barcelona
Rome
Athens
Alexandria
Jiddah, the Red Sea port closest to Mecca
Abu Dhabi/Dubai/Qatar
Mumbai
Tuticorin
Singapore
Sydney
Wellington
Fiji
Hong Kong
Shanghai
Teipei
Osaka
Tokyo
Hawaii
San Diego [in time for Comic Con? Who knows…]
San Lucas
Acapulco
Costa Rica
Panama
…and however long it takes one to get out of the Caribbean ;)
Miami
Charleston
Anapolis
New York
Boston
and back across the Atlantic, to make port in Dublin on 16 June.

We pick up books wherever we can — though we take long draughts in London and the US ports-of-call.

We only charge passengers for the books they take home; any reading they do on the ship is free.

Especially in late winter and spring, when we’re frequenting American shores (North, Central, and Caribbean) invite authors aboard for workshops, and fan meet-and-greets, and perhaps even a symposia of my own invention: “I have the ship, we’re cruising sunny seas, c’mon down” (my marketing department will be able to dress that up)

So long as I’m supposing future bookstore models, something I’d never be able to open without major financial support — this is at least as realistic as at least half the bookstore ideas I’ve had to date.

Yesterday, the American Association of Publishers posted the lastest report on publishers’ sales revenue, for the month of April 2011

I’ve been tracking these numbers for a while. Obviously, the big headline is about the growth of the ebook format; here’s what the chart looks like with the latest

[image: ebook baseline]

I think we can all see a trend. It’s not quite exponential growth; that would be even more dramatic of an upward trend. In fact, I tried to graph it — messing around with numbers, seeing if there was a formula I could use to predict ebook sales. [a fool’s errand, but once I started playing with the math I was having too much fun to quite let the idea go.]

Eventually, it occurred to me to try looking for other mathematic models, beside 2^x or some other exponent in the formula. Eventually I remembered sigmoid functions and after playing around with a few of these I hit the operator that produced a best-fit curve. Thankfully, it was not only blessedly simple — tanh(x) — but also something that is supported by OpenOffice Calc.

[image: bestfitcurve]

The original data is messy, and this is an awfully small sample, but hey – I’m just playing with numbers. I ended up with

ebook(t)=k * (1 + tanh(t))

Where k is a constant one selects out of one’s ass (a surprising number of scientific constants work that way) and t is the time variable. t, in my graph above, is counted off in units of [roughly] π/60, and t=-π at some arbitrary point in the past —in this case, November of 2006: one year before the kindle came out.

After all the trial and error to squeeze the math into the data I had, it turns out these have some meaning: constant k is equal to sales at the inflection point of the curve, and as such is roughly 1/2 of ‘equilibrium’ sales, and by counting in units of π/60, we’re looking at the dynamic part of the graph [tanh(-π) to tanh(π)] over the course of 10 years [120 months]

So those were my assumptions – and the function used – and I like this graph.

Even using the same math — the exact same function — one can mess with the constant and time variable though, to make a very similar graph

[image: projection2]

that at first blush seems to be the same. In this case, instead of t=-π at Nov 2006, I pushed it forward to t=-π at Nov 2007 — in effect saying the growth in ebooks didn’t really start until a year later. To make the new graph fit the same numbers, I had to change my constant k.

That’s hard to see above, but let me project both graphs out to 2015.

[image: to 2015]

The red line, my first projection, shows ebook sales perhaps hitting $200 Million a month as early as January of 2013. At this point, ebook sales would constitute about half of all book sales (currently at an average of about $575 Million a month for trade books, at least over the past 5 years — a number that includes ebooks) and that soon after, the growth of ebooks would level off.

Using the same function but with different assumptions (the yellow line) you can see that ebook sales will continue to grow almost out of control, increasing by about $100 Million every sixth months through 2012 and 2013, and not really levelling off until 2016. At that point, ebook sales would be $750-$800 Million each month – about 50% bigger than the entire current trade book market, all by itself.

Please note I only included the second projection to show how the math can be manipulated, and that even the models that seem to fit the available data can also be made to fit someone’s assumptions and conclusions.

That said, I think the available data does in fact support a modelled sigmoid growth curve, which means ebook sales will eventually level off. When, and at what level, is the hard part to figure out.

To me this only makes sense, as there will be a natural saturation point — everyone who wants an ebook reader (or who already owns a smartphone or computer) will have one, and everyone who wants to read ebooks will be doing so. The market for ebooks can’t grow past a certain level, except of course as all markets naturally grow given inflation and growth of population.

At any rate, I think we’ll have enough data in one year’s time to be able to better model the ebook market. I’ll save this spreadsheet and break it out again when we have another six to eight months of sales data.

Remember, at RocketBomber.com, We Read Boring Corporate SEC Filings so you don’t have to! [sm]

In addition to this morning’s press release where all these lovely, lovely numbers were glossed, spun, and (barely) referenced, B&N also released the actual numbers. Because they have to. It’s an SEC regulation or something.

Look here: http://forinvestors.barnesandnobleinc.com/edgar.cfm
and then click the link – you can download the pdf or xls file too, if you’d like.

So, choice bits from Barnes & Noble’s recent SEC 8-K filing, top line —

Sales, 52 weeks ended 30 April 2011,
B&N retail: $4.364 Billion
B&N college: $1.776 Billion
bn.com: $ .858 Billion

Big numbers. Actually, it only adds up to $6,998,565,000, not quite the $7 billion in the press release, but we’ll give them a pass on that. Rounding, and all.

CEO William Lynch had additional comments in a conference call following the press release.

Our data indicates that for the sixth consecutive quarter we continued to gain significant market share in the fast emerging eBook and digital newsstand market — faster, in fact, than any other company over that period. Our internal figures corroborated by analyst estimates, indicate we grew our market share of eBooks another 1 to 2 points in Q4. It now represents approximately 26% to 27% of the overall US market for eBooks. … Our overall NOOK business across devices, accessories, and additional content grew to over $250 million in comparable sales across retail at BN.com in Q4. That delivered close to 300% growth versus last year. As mentioned, BN.com’s gross margin gross profit expanded quarter-to-quarter from 9.5% to 13.2%, illustrating the quickly scaling digital content business model. We now sell 3 times as many digital books as all formats of physical books combined on BN.com. [emphasis everyone’s – that last bit is the one quoted & tweeted all over the place, I just put the tags on it to post it in bold]

So, .com reported gross sales of $858 Million — and not all of that is books, but if it were, that is $214 Million for actual, physical books sold online, and $643 Millions-worth of e-books.

Woot. E-books FTW.

Except the retail stores scored $4.3 BILLION — and the college div. $1.7 BILLION — and not all of that is books, but if it were:

Barnes and Noble sells 9 books — actually, lovely physical books — for every e-book.

Yay! Go Team Books!

That’s just dollars, though, and I might as well be casting bones or reading goat entrails — there’s no way to go from these reported numbers to actual unit sales [esp. as some e-books ‘sell’ for nothing!] — but throw enough BILLIONS around and it all seems very impressive.

Some details shine through, though: look at the other statistic Lynch dropped: B&N has more than 25% of the e-book market, and e-book sales [for the year just past, & let’s do the math: $643 (?) Million / $6.999 Billion] is now (up to?) 9% of their business. From zero to hundreds of millions and perhaps 10% of the store, in just under 2 years.

And growing. Actually, as a bookseller this trend should worry me.

B&N reported a loss, attributed to the .com division (expenses of $280 Million offset by merely $75 Million in gross .com profits) (brand new digital devices don’t get pulled out of a hat) and that $205 million dollar shortfall in digital was enough to drag the whole balance sheet down, to the tune of $73 million for the year.

But I personally would call that a good loss, you know, investing in the business and all.

##

This is just from the Q4 Earnings Report, which included year-end numbers; I can’t wait for the actual Annual Report to see if B&N provides any more context or analysis.

DISCLAIMERS:

I’m a book lover, a believer in the intrinsic value of a good editor as it relates to the quality of the finished book products, a proponent of printing as both an art and a craft, and a collector of bound-paper-artefacts — and more-or-less neutral on ebooks, though my other positions make me (by default) a part time anti-e-book activist…

…who also happens to be employed as a retail wage slave by Barnes & Noble. This does not make me predisposed to parrot the company line or even be particularly kind to my employer [as is proven by at least one recent post] but they do sign my paychecks so I have to disclose that fact for the FCC or SEC or both.

I own a very small amount of B&N stock via an outdated 401(k) matching plan that was discontinued, like, 5 years ago; I get the proxy cards but honestly I couldn’t tell you how many shares I own. [I need to transfer whatever-the-amount-is to the same mutual funds as the rest of my 401(k) – thanks for reminding me]

Additionally – the previously-posted boilerplate disclaimer: “No statements made on this blog are meant to constitute, or even masquerade as, legitimate investment advice; any information is provided for entertainment and edification purposes only, and if that doesn’t cover my ass I invite you to claim whatever you like and I’ll be happy to show up in court drunk as a sailor on leave, for as many days in a row as it takes, to make a mockery of you, and your case, and the proceedings in general such that no judge or jury could even imagine that I’d be a credible source for my own name and birthday, let alone investment ‘guidance’. If pressed, I might even be able to produce receipts and character witnesses to prove I’ve been drunk more-or-less continuously since 1996. You do not want to call me on this.”

edit, 26 June: some portions of this essay, as originally posted, have been removed to comply generally with my employer’s media policy, and more specifically with our code of business conduct & ethics

Also, please note: all opinions expressed are my own and both should not and can not be interpreted as an official statement or position of my employer.

##

_Long_ boring post, with lots of digressions: I’ll get to the point and give you an escape hatch to the conclusion:

Bookstore customers kind of suck, they unfairly hold bookstores to an impossible standard — a standard of service they don’t even hold internet book retailers to — and I don’t know how to fix it. (This is a rant; what did you expect?)

[skip to the end]

##

So, you sell widgets. We’ll take this as a basic starting point.

You could make the widgets yourself, sell them direct to retailers — or to a distributor of widgets if such exists for your industry. You could sell these widgets on the internet, whether you make them yourself or buy them wholesale, with all the benefits internet sales provides: low start up costs, and minimal overhead past rent on warehouse space and (minimal) payroll and cost of widgets.

As either a manufacturer or ‘net retailer, your primary problem is finding your customers – there is no brand recognition and no visibility: no corner store they drive past every morning, no traffic or synergy generated by neighboring business, no seredipitous discovery by shoppers — not even a centuries-long tradition of Sales of Widgets in the Marketplace (if such exists for your widgets).

Still, internet retail works, and works spectacularly well for some: Ebay, Etsy, et al.

But some widgets can’t be easily or economically sold directly over the internet — cups of coffee, for instance. You can sell coffee by the pound [easily], make arrangements for fair trade coffee to ship direct from bean growers to small-scale craft roasters and then on to hipster caffeine-addicts – you can even sign this customer up for a subscription: so many pounds per month, pre-ground or whole bean, with professionally selected specialty blends that fit a given regional source, or preferred flavor profile.

But a cup of coffee on the way into work? Retail. And a very big retail market at that: not only is there room for a Big Nationwide Chain that I’m sure you’ve heard of, there are at least two smaller chain competitors, at least one local chain that operates just in your city, and room for many smaller independent coffeeshops besides — plus the cup that is available with breakfast at many hotels & restaurants, or to-go with your doughnut or greasy fast food, or from the convenience-store-slash-gas-station — or even ‘free’ at work depending on your office.

Coffee is everywhere. You can even buy it from Amazon. But not only do millions buy a cup from Starbucks every day, they pay a premium to do so.

But forget about coffee — I’ll pull it back in for the conclusion — but many would argue Starbucks and other “consumables” generally aren’t really “retail”, so I’ll circle around the question from a different direction.

##

You’ve considered your options, and decided to sell widgets retail. Maybe it’s too expensive to make them yourself, so you buy widgets wholesale and are trying to turn them around, make a profit. Maybe the internet market is too crowded, or has a single, major, insurmountable competitor in our chosen niche.

If your widgets are TV sets, you’re going to buy from just five or six manufacturers, and they’ll each have just two or three product lines — and a variety of screen sizes from 17” up to wall-sized home theaters, but just those few options within the brand-wide line. Let’s assume there are 8 manufacturers you’d consider, each with three product lines, and each product line comes in 40 sizes — out of 960 potential products, you’re going to select and stock what, 100? 200? 500?

Say I’m underselling the available options: Say there are three times as many TV sets. Or five times as many. You’d still only have to consider 5000 or so options, and you’d be able to eliminate whole classes quite easily: based on which manufacturers seem shoddy, or sets that are too small or too big. Even if there were 20,000 options, you’d have little trouble figuring out how to stock your store.

Of course, electronic stores don’t sell just TVs: it’s a department — for a big-box retailer, one of a dozen major departments? so you’d need to take a couple of weeks, or a month, going through catalogs, stocking imaginary shelves, shrinking the floorspace allocated to appliances to make room for more car stereos, or to add a Bose speaker ‘boutique’.

Even after all this work, after you’ve considered 200,000 or even 300,000 options, you still have to go through and do it again twice a year, as new models come out.

But that’s just electronics – big ticket items selling for hundreds or thousands of dollars. Oh, you carry smaller items, clock radios and blank CDs and maybe movies on Blu-ray — but these are afterthoughts, nice to have, but it’s the big screen TVs that pay the rent.

…

Consider instead the supermarket:

Not 1000 or even 5000 SKUs [“Stock Keeping Units”] that you have in-store, the options go from dozens to thousands [38,718 individual items on average] on shelves plus all the specialty departments: Produce, Bakery, Deli, Meat, maybe even a Pharmacy. Sure, you buy from a few Really Big companies: Kraft, P&G, Unilever, PepsiCo, Dole, General Mills — but you also have to source some goods from smaller firms, or direct from farmers, or from specialists (like dairies), or from a local company that just makes the one thing, whether that’s the world’s best barbeque sauce or your customers’ favorite cookies, or Coca-Cola. [hey, here in Atlanta: Coke is just a local brand ;) ]

Of course there’s still room for smaller shops — indivdual bakeries or butchers — and there are other options like the farmer’s market, or a really good corner deli — but most of us spend the vast majority of our food budget at the supermarket. Individual green grocers are all but extinct; the stand-alone drug store is following fast (or has already mutated into a convenience store, that just happens to have a pharmacist on staff)

If one is stocking a grocery store, you have to consider hundreds of thousands of items (verging on one million), attempting to stock 7-foot-high shelves on dozens of aisles on store footprints that can be as large as half a football field.

OK. OK? OK.

Now, consider the book store:

Yes, there are still smaller independents. There are specialists, and those that serve a niche. One might even consider a comic shop to be a small bookstore, which few customers do (and I might be able to count on my fingers the number of comic shop owners who realize they run bookstores).

But just like most folks shop at supermarkets, generally speaking, we spend the majority of our book budgets at major chain bookstores.

Now before someone tells me that I’m wrong, and Amazon is the largest bookseller, and e-books are taking over anyway, and there is no future in physical books — let me show you the numbers:

In 2010, Amazon sold just 15% of trade books. That’s up from 12.5% in 2009, so they’re doing quite well, but it’s only 15%.

Over the same time period, Borders went from selling 14% to 12% — so Amazon overtook Borders, but I might also point out that a company that managed to capture 14% of the trade book business also had to enter bankruptcy. Amazon is hardly the book “winner”, and their current market share does not guarantee they can run this very small portion of their business profitably.

15% of an estimated $11.6 Billion market is just $1.7 Billion. Out of Amazon’s total ‘media’ sales of $6.8 Billion (in North America) and total 2010 revenue of $34 Billion. Amazon is a bookstore? sure, but that’s not all they do and it’s a shrinking business (as a percentage) for them.

E-books? Growing, yes, but using numbers reported from publisher.org, the $432 Million publishers earned on ebooks in 2010 was all of 6% of their total revenue. Even if Amazon sold every ebook (they don’t) that $432 Million would only amount to *1.2 percent* of Amazon’s profits, and 6% of their North American media sales. Hundreds of millions are nothing to sneeze at, and Amazon is smart to persue this business — as are many others — but c’mon.

Back to the Bowker PubTrack numbers: Amazon is 15.1%, combined ‘bookstores’ (B&N, Borders, Books-a-Million, indies) add up to 42.3% — Wal-Mart, Target, and Costco score 11.7% — and 2% of folks pick up a book at the grocery store. Oddly, the PubTrack numbers (as reported) only add up to 70%.

Which means 30% of trade book sales — twice Amazon’s share — sell through some other outlet. How does Bowker classify an “Independent” bookstore anyway? Landmarks like Tattered Cover and Powell’s? Smaller chains like Hastings, Book Off, and Half Price Books? Mom & Pop stores? College bookstores?

[*ahem*]. “But just like most folks shop at supermarkets, generally speaking, we spend the majority of our book budgets at major chain bookstores.”

Maybe I should have said, the major chains sell 3 times as many books as Amazon, 8 times as many as Wal-Mart, and roughly 25 times as many books as sell off of the rack at grocery stores.

Borders isn’t going out of business because they sell books — Borders had $2.2 Billion in sales in 2010 — Borders is going out of business because they incurred too much debt expanding internationally, because on a store-by-store basis they took on higher rents for ‘landmark’ locations (and signed leases that obligated them for 10 years or more), and because the economy tanked.

A firm without the same debts, and which didn’t over-extend during the 90s, would still be operating. Borders also made a fatal mistake in 2001, turning their online business over to Amazon. It’s not even the loss of online sales which hurt, it was abandoning that portion of their relationship with customers that made the difference.

##

I didn’t mean to turn this into an analysis of the book trade, I was trying to make a point about running retail stores:

So, for a boutique — very niche, very local, very quaint, very twee — you might stock at most 1000 different SKUs, and maybe 4 or 5 of each. An inventory of $50,000 to $100,000. Maybe $200,000 if you’re a ‘name-label’ fashion boutique.

An electronics retailer would have 10,000 SKUs at vastly different price points, from $4.99 DVDs in a grab-and-go at the register to $14,000 high-end theater systems. Your inventory (in store) runs into the millions, but those are concentrated in a handful of SKUs (300 at most) and that 300 is your balwark against going out of business. [yes, I’m making a Miller reference here.] Managing this business is about managing and selling those 300 SKUs, because the price point is ridiculously high.

A grocery store has upwards of 40,000 SKUs and is harder to stock and manage, as some products will spoil before they can sell, and the price points are much lower, $.59 for a can of beans up to $29 for a prepackaged Filet Mignon, but nothing much higher. That’s why you’ll often see small appliances and cookware at the supermarket: a coffee maker or fry pan has a better margin and no expiration date.

A Super Target or Wal-Mart that combines groceries with a department store might have 100,000 SKUs, and overall inventory worth $8 Million or so — but each Wal-Mart storefront apparently clears at least $100 Million each — that’s $100 Million times 3700 or so stores. Walmart is as far from other retail, as retail is from the internet. Apples to oranges to baseballs.

All that said, and different retail models fully considered:

Your average Big Box Bookstore stocks at least 80,000 SKUs – 100,000 to 200,000 books, CDs, DVDs, and assorted crap [excuse me: stationary, greeting cards, board games, stuffed toys, bookmarks, reading lights, journals, scrap books, jigsaw puzzles, and other assorted crap]. At Least 80,000, and the average is higher: ballpark numbers? 140,000 separate SKUs of which at least 95% are books, and $2 Million or so in total inventory.

And to stock our shelves, we select 100,000 or so books out of at least 2 million available SKUs — there are between 2 and 6 million books in print, depending on how one treats vanity publishers and print-on-demand. If you expand your stock past “in print” to used books and all POD titles you’re looking at 12 Million different SKUs. It may be as many as 15 million. Aside from me bringing it up just now, no one else has thought to ask the question and there is no source I can link to.

In stocking a store for every type of retail but books: yes, there are hundreds of thousands of items to choose from but you can discard whole classes of items out of hand, as you just don’t sell those, it’s not your business and most if not all other goods are fungible: you don’t need to carry every clock radio or canned soup; just two or three brands at most, and customers will choose the one that best fits.

Books are not fungible, in that I can’t substitute one book for another — even if they are in the same genre or same general category, or in fact cover the exact same topic: someone looking for “Bookselling for Dummies” will only grudgingly accept “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Bookselling” – and more often will insist I order the Dummies Guide because that’s what they are familiar with, or what Oprah recommended, or what the internet said was best.

Each of those 12 million books needs to be considered and potentially stocked, if they’re available. 12 Million is _a lot_ — more than you can stock and shelve, more than you can think of, six times more than the books actually in print. No bookstore could actually keep up, but every book store—new or used—is expected to.

Most often, customers come in and demand this book and only this book because, well, because —

“What, why are you asking? Give me my book. I’m shocked and appalled that you’re not stocking it, or that it’s sold out — you didn’t order enough of this book that I hadn’t even heard of myself until this morning? — I’m fully aghast, and I plan to write a very irate letter of umbrage to your corporate office at my earliest opportunity!” [book lovers have a big vocabulary]

This is a phenomenon I’ve described in some detail as amazonification. It makes my job difficult. Despite the fact that there are many many good books, and I sell them, suddenly both my store and myself are worthless because we don’t stock one, specific title that may in fact be crap but neither you or I know that because the media/internet buzz hasn’t died down yet and there is no objective review available.

It’s not enough that I stock tens of thousands of individual books, more than one person could read in a lifetime. It’s not enough that we [and by “we” I mean publishers, librarians, and retailers] have classified and defined nearly all books (millions, to date) into thousands of categories and tens of thousands of specific sub-categories, in a process that started before Amazon showed up, and which Amazon adopted, and a system that will continue even if Amazon goes out of business (or abandons books for more profitable streaming online media and other goods). It’s not enough that I buy, stock, sort, shelve, and sell books: I have to do so at ever shrinking margins because “it should be on sale” and “it’s cheaper online.”

Let me put that thought, “it’s cheaper online” to one side as well, next to your cup of coffee, and go on one more digression before I get to my conclusions.

##

Insert yesterday’s rant about the damn telephone calls here – Key point: “No one calls Amazon — what, are you kidding? They’re online. No, even if I’m going to buy it from Amazon anyway the first thing you do, obviously, is call the bookstore.”

Let me see if I can state this a bit more clearly than I did yesterday:

There are advantages to having a physical storefront — primarily advantages for the customer as we are open all day, have items available to take home today, have associates you can talk to over the phone or ask for help if and when you do come into the store, but all of these *extras* also carry extra costs.

##

So. Conclusions:

First up, cups of coffee.

You can make a cup of coffee at home.

But when you’re out and about, perhaps you buy coffee from a shop: maybe it’s a better cuppa, maybe it’s just convenient. Maybe you plan your morning commute based on which coffee shop is on the way; maybe you even wake up earlier so you can be sure to get your fix.

You can shop for books from home, too. Many of my customers advise me of this reality several times a day.

But the bookstore is open – and just like the barista at Starbucks may in fact make a better cup of coffee than the preground-drip that you can make at home, perhaps the professionals who stock, know, and love books can ‘brew up’ a better book recommendation than an online book sales site.

Second point:

Books are not retail.

Yes, I sell books. Yes, the physical act of sales — exchanging goods or services for money — is colloquially called “retail” and defined as such in dictionaries and on Wikipedia.

But no retailer stocks a hundred thousand SKUs — or twice that, or even half that — because it’s plainly *nuts*. And no retailer provides the services we do at a bookstore, for free, and with no contract or cover charge or expectation of payment.

A bookstore is like a grocery store that runs a free cafeteria, because the customers demanded it:

“What, you sell food and I can’t try any? There’s no way I’d buy food to take home unless you serve it to me first – how do I know if it’s any good? And what do you mean I can’t come in everyday and try something new – you have so many options, *of course* I’m going to need to come in *at least* every weekend just to keep up. Can you bring that to my table? I’m plugged in with my laptop over next to the windows. OK? Thanks.”

Bookstores didn’t used to be this way. And customers weren’t always so… demanding. But in the 20 years since the ‘big boxes’ transformed your book options from a dozen bookcases of paperbacks in a mall store or a legacy-town-square-bookshop, to a multi-storied building downtown or vast big-box-book utopia [with free parking] out by the mall — expectations now easily exceed what can be done profitably, or even on a cost basis.

100 years ago, if you didn’t live in a city you’d count yourself lucky to be able to buy dime novels at the general store. 80 years ago you could join a book club and get new books in the mail; 70 years ago you’d have been able to pick up a cheap paperback version of many of the same books at the train station newsstand.

Paperbacks moved from news stands into spinner racks at the local drugstore or grocery. The popularity of the format (read: low price) also made it a staple of many of the small, independent booksellers — and 50 years ago the model became established: first a hardcover edition for the libraries, collectors, snooty book critics in New York, and the handful of capital-B Bookstores in the urban centres — and then if it proves popular, you go back to presses for a Book-of-the-Month Club edition, or auction off the paperback publishing rights to the highest bidder.

Oh, yeah… this was before media consolidation so as a publisher you likely wouldn’t have capabilities to do the paperback version yourself. There was something of a hedgerow between the “mass market” and any self-respecting literary publisher.

40 years ago the “chains” started moving into the then-new shopping malls (with such success that by 1978, as cited in the Time Magazine article, Waldenbooks was the nation’s largest bookseller) — offering much the same mix of product as the local storefront bookstores on main street but buying in bulk, and with nationwide sales data to pull from, able to find and invest in popular, bestselling titles.

And starting 15 to 20 years ago, the independents (and Waldenbooks and B. Dalton, too) were about to discover what a major chain really is: while a number of firms (Crown, Powell’s, BookStop, even Barnes & Noble at the time) were opening up ‘discount’ bookstores — warehouse stores full of current bestsellers on sale, remainders, and other discounted titles — this isn’t necessarily what the public wanted; or rather, not everything we wanted. B&N took the downtown New York bookstore and cloned it, throwing up huge boxes in suburbs and smaller cities across the U.S., selling us books and coffee and CDs and most importantly: atmosphere. Other chains quickly followed suit, re-purposing old brand names and converting the discount store of the 80s into the Book SuperStore of today.

[source]

Bookstores are evolving, the Books Themselves are evolving, and we’re well past a Main Street storefront or Mom and Pop shop.

I hesitate to call it a profession, like accounting, or dentistry, or the practice of law — and lawyers have it easy: they carry no inventory and get to apply logic to their job, and I can’t.

Bookselling is not retail. Bookselling has evolved into it’s own thing; if Amazon doesn’t kill off my chosen profession and libraries both in the next five years, I’d love to see how the industry continues to change and adapt.

Third point:

“Oh, but it’s cheaper online”.

So is your damn cup of coffee. You pay $4 for 50¢ of caffeine and dirty water because of the convenience, and atmosphere, and a place to sit, and free wifi, and everything else.

Everything is cheaper if you have it shipped. An internet retailer doesn’t pay rent on neighborhood storefronts, or stock items for sale in hundreds of these neighborhood storefronts, or manage inventory for thousands of items in hundreds of stores, and stay open for 14 or 15 hours a day so you can buy one of these items today.

Final point:

An internet retailer doesn’t have someone to answer the phone.

Or: it never occurs to you folks to abuse use Amazon’s phone line [they have one: 1.800.201.7575] but everyone calls the bookstore — even if it’s not about books, even if they are already looking at a book website, even if they are looking at Amazon’s website. In addition to paying rent, and the additional cost of stocking books in local stores all across the country, as a bookseller I also have to carry whatever Amazon’s costs should be to answer their customers’ questions. If Amazon actually had to staff a call center to answer every book question [and book-related questions, and non-book questions] that now comes into bookstores, they would not be cheaper. Even if they outsource it offshore.

Now, over the course of the past two weeks, writing this massive three-part rant, I have thought quite a bit about how to build a bookstore to partially address these issues, but nothing is a real solution.

(That post will follow, and it’s going to be a hell of a lot shorter.)

This is my job, and my job kinda sucks.

edit, 26 June: some portions of this essay, as originally posted, have been removed to comply generally with my employer’s media policy, and more specifically with our code of business conduct & ethics

Also, please note: all opinions expressed are my own and both should not and can not be interpreted as an official statement or position of my employer.

##

So, you sell widgets.

You even sell them retail. You advertise. Folks know your brand, and where your local stores are located. In fact, you’ve been in business — in this exact, niche business — for years.

You just keep the doors open, right? Through good times and lean times; some years you make more, some years less, and of course you’re working hard behind the scenes — but from the outside it looks like the business runs itself.

No retail business runs quite the way it seems from the outside, though; even with two nearly identical physical store fronts, no two retail businesses have the same model. It’s not just the physical space, or the web site [if you have one] — it’s the phone.

If you sold pizza, say, you’d expect the phone to ring continously — if the phone wasn’t ringing, you’d worry, because home delivery is your business. If you’re a plumber or electrician, every time the phone rings it means a new client, and a new job worth hundreds. You’d likely even pay someone to make sure every phone call gets answered. If you’re selling theatre tickets in any city but New York or London, you do the happy dance when the phone rings; if you’re any other type of retailer, even if folks are only asking your store hours, you rejoice with every call, as it means a new customer is looking for your store.

If your main business is mail order, heck, you live and die by the phone — in fact, you run a call center. You have multiple phone lines. You hire multiple operators. You stash your staff in a cubicle farm, and pay them to answer calls, be polite, and generate sales. Your overhead is the phone bill, payroll, and rent on an out-of-the-way office in some suburb (or Bangalore). Phone orders are a different business, whether we’re talking about LL Bean, Lands’ End, or other catalog-but-now-internet retailers: you do the majority of your business via direct sales whether the order originates from a catalog or web site.

Unless you run a bookstore.

[editorial comment: this frustrates me no end. I’m not currently on medication for high blood pressure, but when eventually I have to go on meds, I know exactly what caused it and it’s not my diet or lifestyle: it’s the customer base]

There is no other industry where customers routinely and as a matter of course find an item online and then immediately call a store looking for this exact item because of course they’ll stock it —

except for bookstores

There is no other industry where one is expected to stock not only every item in a category, but to stock them in quantity at a local distribution center, available for pick-up today, on less than 4 hours notice, no matter how obscure or marginal —

except for bookstores

There is no other industry where an entry level employee at a local, backwater sales outlet is expected to have expert knowledge of millions of individual items, to the point where they can make recommendations on which item is better than another in a particular category, or to identify items out of a catalog of millions based on incomplete and occasionally incorrect information —

except for bookstores

There is no other industry where you can pick up the phone, ask for the most obscure and out-of-date model of a particular product, and expect the poor associate who takes your call to not only be able to pull up the item in a database, but to describe it, point out what is the most recent model, and tell you which competitors’ products might not only have succeeded it but improved on the item you asked for —

except for bookstores

There is no other industry that has to stock hundreds of thousands of items out of available millions and be required to staff every outlet with associates able to describe and recommend each and every one, and to do so in hundreds of outlets across the country, and make every item available for you to try out, for free, for as long as you’d care to — while also providing a place to sit, free internet via wifi, and no fees or obligation to buy, ever —

except for bookstores.

Even if everyone knows books are online — even if everyone knows Amazon, and assumes Amazon is the market leader [they’re not] — even if everyone accepts Amazon as the largest internet retailer of books, and buys from them on a regular—even weekly—basis.

No one calls Amazon — what, are you kidding? They’re online. No, even if I’m going to buy it from Amazon *anyway* the first thing to do, obviously, is call the bookstore.

##

Since I work in a bookstore I have to run a retail store AND a call center, with the headaches of both.

Book customers are needy, needy, fickle bastards whose expectations are both unreasonable and non-negotiable. And they’re plugged into the internet, with the internet’s billions of options and sources, so nothing I can do or provide on a store level — given the limits of having to live and operate in the actual physical world — is quite good enough.

This doesn’t stop anyone from picking up the phone, however.

I have five phone lines in the store, and for at least a couple hours every afternoon for the past month, all five have been ringing, at once and who knows how many callers are getting a busy signal.

I get it: your kid just told you (the night before you leave for a 3-week vacation) that they need these 4 books for their summer reading assignments. Instead of treating this as a ‘teachable moment’ about personal responsibility, it’s much easier to yell at a bookseller. The fact that we had no advance warning from the school is our fault, and the fact that 480 other parents are all calling and asking for the same book is irrelevant; we’re the bookstore and we’re supposed to have this one particular book [one out of millions] to pick up tonight because your flight for Europe (or the Caribbean, or Australia) leaves in 6 hours. The fact that your kid waited until today to mention the summer reading is also, somehow, my fault.

THANK YOU, thank you so much for your business. I especially appreciate how you use Amazon all year long for the books we have in stock, in the store today and on sale, but whenever you have a “book emergency” that I can’t adequately fulfill, no matter how much you beg, suddenly you remember our phone number and forget that Amazon has a customer service line (1.800.201.7575) where you could also rail and rant and scream, and be informed that there is no physical way the book will show up in less than 36 hours even if you do pay for overnight express shipping. And Thank You So Much for calling our bookstore first, even though you’ve been rather determinedly attempting to put us out of business for the past three years. Our business is built on customers [that are completely un-]like you, after all — and we strive to be polite [even when treated otherwise ourselves] and we heartily appreciate your business [IF and WHEN you ever actually buy something from us].

##

I ♥love♥ bookstores. Heck, I even love working at a bookstore [despite the headaches] and have grown into the role handed to me — managing a bookstore — though in fact running a bookstore actually threatens my health: it’s not so much that I’ll collapse or have a heart attack (though that is possible), I think what’s going to happen is a customer is going to ask me a really stupid question on the wrong day and I’ll just, *pop*.

Goodness me.

I don’t mean to rant.

[*chuckle*] Oh, of course I meant to rant – this blog is my only outlet. It’s not like corporate or customers ever bother to consider the industry or the market or the second law of thermodynamics — nope, it’s all my fault and it’s all my fault all the damn time whether I’m capable of doing anything about it or not.

…

It feels like Christmas every day. I’m working so hard I hardly have time to spit, let alone blog. I have no idea what we’ll actually do when the holiday season itself rolls around.

I’m not saying that retail is “hard” in the way actual physical labor is hard — but I’m still physically walking 30-40 miles a week in the bookstore, and get to play ‘name that book’ more times a day than I can count — it’s like the world’s worst reality/game show, and there are no prizes for being right. It’s mentally and physically exhausting, even before a customer complains, or a bookseller misses a shift because of a schedule conflict, or all five phone lines ring at once with customers looking for books.

##

I run a bookstore.

That means we

• run a call center to answer questions, whether they are about books or not.
• run a concierge service, telling ‘patrons’ about other amenities in the neighborhood and providing directions over the phone
• provide the ‘internet access of last resort’ and device charging for all visitors, especially the sort who are just stopping in for this service and have absolutely no intention of spending money in the store
• provide the only public restroom in [apparently] an 85 mile radius.
• …don’t know if this is related, but we’re also the default Homeless Center [whether we want to be or not] and default Day Care, after school hours.
• we’re also the learning annex: not that anyone provides us with the actual reading lists or provides any advance warning, but we have to stock all the summer reading books, and we needed them yesterday. [honestly, a little advance warning would be rather handy]

We also manage to sell a few books on the side, but that’s hardly worth mentioning even though it’s the economic activity that supports the rest — our primary function but hardly the ‘mission’ that the general shopping public expects us to perform. Completely aside from selling books, we’re also

• the research library
• the study hall
• the only meeting nexus, despite the number of lounges in classroom buildings and dorms at every nearby school, to say nothing of the student center/student union or college libraries on campus — I guess they don’t sell frappaccinos. And:
• the only source for college text books, despite the fact that we’ve never stocked college textbooks and never will and flying in the face of the actual college bookstores that do practically nothing but stock text books — please stop calling already; we don’t have your textbooks

the bookstore is apparently also the “local library”. Let me correct this misconception right now: *NO*. Fuck no. — the bookstore & library are two separate things.

Among other salient details

• we don’t have a copy machine, and never will
• we Sell Books, and will always do so
• we resent folks who bring books back after two weeks. After we sell them to you, you’re supposed to keep them. FOR LIFE.
• we are not here to promote learning & literacy. In fact, if you are an illiterate bastard, we’ll happily support you in your ignorance so long as it makes us money.
• We sell coffee, and crap ‘lifestyle’ magazines, and trashy novels, and porn, and all kinds of dross that has little place in a library — and we’re quite pleased to do.
  …so as long as you keep buying.

Running a bookstore, and keeping up with the customers who walk in the door is bad enough; answering the phone on top of that is stressing our booksellers to the limit;

… add on the “old people” and “invalids” who call, and it’s the icing on the cake — wait, you’re homebound and unable to drive anywhere, but you still found our phone number? And you can’t order off of the internet why exactly?

If I were stealing credit card numbers, I’d use exactly these rationales and a fake “old” voice to badger retailers into setting aside their established protocols and sell me [and ship!] $100 gift cards over the phone, using an alzheimer’s account info.

I’ll be honest: I make these exceptions, but every time I do it leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.
And I mail issues of “Majesty” magazine to the same damn customer every month, paid for over the phone, because she ‘can’t come into the store’ — but I also hate her for it.

I don’t sell pizzas, I sell books — And pizza delivery guys get a tip; we get nothing extra when you abuse the bookstore business model to order over the phone — in fact, it costs us money — and just because you can badger a bookseller into doing what you want doesn’t make you ‘right’ – it just means you’re annoying, and we’ll do just about anything to get you off the line.

Say I manage to get an author in store, to sign copies of her latest hardcover release. It’s an event – book signings are a big deal, and great business besides — It’s a nice bonus we like to provide to our regular customers, and the community, and fine advertising for the store. Ideally, it will also pull other potential future patrons into the store, but more often than not it’s just an invitation to e-bay resellers to call the store and ask for signed first editions. Pro-tip: resellers don’t ask for a personalization, “to our sister Sarah” or whateves, but instead insist on just the author’s signature – “but please ask her to include today’s date”

[*VERY RUDE EXPLETIVE DELETED*] I don’t add extra booksellers to the schedule and and turn everything upside down to run an author event just for the out-of-state ebay associates who can plan far enough ahead to call a bookstore prior to an event. And we’re onto you. Sure, you give us a CC number over the phone and all that, but you get the books the author signed last, without the date or any inscription, and odds are good we’ll ship it to you in an unpadded mailer. Let’s just see what UPS can do to that sucker on the 1000 mile trip, shall we?

If I ever do open up my own bookstore, I’ll be tempted to just rip the phone out of the wall. We don’t need it.

edit, 26 June: some portions of this essay, as originally posted, have been removed to comply generally with my employer’s media policy, and more specifically with our code of business conduct & ethics

Also, please note: all opinions expressed are my own and both should not and can not be interpreted as an official statement or position of my employer.

##

Two bookstores run by my competitor closed last month. This would normally be cause for rejoicing, right?

Except the closure of any bookstore leaves my community poorer, and (generally speaking) the current trend for my beloved employer is to open bookstores out in the suburbs—anchor tenant at the mall, particularly—not in-town locations.

Atlanta is a metropolitan area of five million or so, and a regional hub besides – but we’re hardly a beacon of culture, or a “Global City” (despite the presence of CNN, Georgia Tech, Emory, and the Centers for Disease Control). Many smaller cities, among them Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Nashville — even San Diego, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Baltimore, Portland, and Austin — are more vital to our culture, and nicer places to live besides. I don’t have time to do a bookstores-per-capita ranking at the moment, but I can guarantee Atlanta isn’t high up on that list.

We’re the city you have to fly through. The old joke is that if someone tells you to go to hell, you’ll have to take the connecting flight through Atlanta.

##

Here’s my new reality: inside of Atlanta City Limits, my store is now one of just three major bookstores. [There are a couple of college bookstores, and two rather nice—but very small—indies, but that’s it.]

In fact, for about a quarter million people

Suddenly, we’re the only game in town. For roughly twice that number (the half million that live in zip codes 30033, 30305, 30306, 30309, 30318, 30319, 30324, 30326, 30327, 30329, 30341, 30342, 30345, and 30363) we’re either their primary bookstore or one that is about as far to drive to as anything else — including other branches in my chain.

And right now, it seems like each and every one of the 173,553 households within 5 miles of my bookstore has at least one kid looking for summer reading books. This is a headache of the first order — not only to order in the books (for 2 large districts, 3 major private schools, and altogether about 60 schools in total) but because 90% of you people can’t remember to bring the list to the bookstore

Yes, [*sigh*], we do have your school reading lists.

I had to assign a bookseller to go on the internet, look up each school’s website, print the list — for each grade — and then assemble our reading list binder — the same thing we’ve done for the past 7 years and we’re happy to help but damn, people, when in the hell did this become the *bookstores'* responsibility? It’s your damn kid. We are in no way affiliated with any school, public or private, and we only go through this kabuki dance because we’re in it for the money.

Is THIS the lesson you want to teach your kid? That you can depend on corporations to cover the slack and to take up your responsibilities as students, citizens, adults, and thinking individuals because we can make a dollar off of your ignorant ass?

[It takes two days — one bookseller for 2 entire 8 hour shifts — to find, print, and collate all the damn reading lists for all the schools in our area. If one were a student at one of these fine institutions, and, oh, I don’t know – you were assigned these books, up to and including being handed a list of them at school it would take you all of five minutes, if that.]

[Yes, dammit, I’m bitter: This Is Not My Job. And I feel that I’m contributing to the stupification* of society by enabling you. *I Do Not Work In A Bookstore To Make Society Stupid* — actually, my motives are almost exactly the opposite. I want to scream at you people.]

##

Anyway,

Suddenly, I’m the only bookstore in town, and just as students book-up for summer reading besides.

Yes, this means sales are up.

No, even though the two closest bookstores closed and now I’m the only bookstore for miles around, my sales did not actually triple.

I can’t divulge actual sales numbers, as that is proprietary information and My Beloved Corporate Overlords frown on that sort of thing, but I can tell you that our sales are up by a fraction.

…

I will say, it’s nice to hit the arbitrary sales targets set by corporate. Even more cheering is beating last years’ numbers. What hurts [personally, physically] is doing these increased sales on fully half the payroll we were using 3 years ago.

Yes. There are only half as many booksellers today, as existed in 2008. *Not* including the store closings, but in the stores still open: half.

…

You know, I can only think that 15 or 20 years from now, a lot of folks in creative and inventive occupations will be able to reminisce about their time spent as a bookseller, a job that just doesn’t exist anymore. It’s not that the need for booksellers went away, it’s that some goober at corporate forgot which business he was in, and could no longer ‘justify’ the ‘expense’ of staff.

Someone help me.

##

I did not bring anger & contempt with me, when I took the job 10 years ago. It was not part of our corporate culture — and is not part of our corporate culture, to be fair. And while I occasionally am very tired at work, and can’t always scrounge up a smile, I am always professional and polite, and as helpful as you, the customer, will allow me to be.

I only talk about you behind your back — in the breakroom, or on this blog.

And my frustrations with customers are only partly your fault, though of course there are some customers (not you) (but you know exactly the type, I’m sure) who can ruin one’s whole day:

I’ve been yelled at.
I’ve been summoned to help with a snap of the fingers.
I’ve been accused of hiding the books.

I’ve seen people sit down and eat fried chicken, and beans right from the can, while sitting down in the middle of the floor between the bookcases.

I’ve had customers bring in dogs [pets, not service animals], and have had to clean the carpet afterward.

And the way some customers abuse the restroom facilities is apalling. You wouldn’t believe it, even if I told you.

But over the past three years, as the economy slowly drifted into a recession, our corporate culture has changed:

Once, I used to work a service job – the thought was, if we take care of the customer, then the sales would naturally follow — maybe not today, but eventualy. It was about building the relationship, investing in community goodwill, and making sure our stores were open, inviting, bright, and full of books.

As the bookselling industry changed, I got hit from both directions:

My customers still loved coming into the store but would also quite happily kick me in the balls and spit in my face to save a couple of bucks on a book. Few thought of it in those terms, as the most common expression of the sentiment was, “Oh, I’ll just order that from Amazon” – but it has the same impact. The fact that so many did it unthinkingly is just salt in the wound.

From the other side, corporate slowly squeezed the stores – first to make up for slower sales, then to find money to launch a digital business, and finally because nothing else seemed to be working. Only lip-service was paid to the old customer-service commitment, as my corporate overlords still kept a few of the mottos and slogans but gutted my ability to follow through, primarily by cutting staff. And suddenly everything had a reported percentage and a goal, most often a target I wasn’t reaching, “and what are you doing to meet these targets, hmm?” – I don’t know, maybe I could sell books? Please let me sell books?

The sorts of things that would have helped — that in fact have helped — had nothing to do with stores, and could not be addressed on an individual store level no matter what corporate expectations were. Sales didn’t see any sort of improvement until we had a solid digital product to offer (not true until November of last year, and even then it would have been better to launch with all the features, not just six months later with a software update) and the company finally remembered national advertising — how any retail chain expects to succeed without advertising is beyond me — and benefits from both of these could have been further enhanced with increased staffing in the stores.

Think back, to the Barnes & Noble or Borders you shopped at in 2005 — two years before Kindle, when both chains were still expanding, and helping customers find books was still our primary focus. Back before every table and chair was filled with a laptop owner mooching wifi, back before any available outlet found (no matter how out of the way, or what might be blocking it) invariably has someone sitting on the floor next to it, charging a phone or awkwardly balancing a netbook. Back when the store was twice as busy — but you could still find a place to sit.

Imagine the bookstore-of-2005 with the new devices, and accessories, and help from tech-saavy staff — plus the usual staff at an information desk, to help with the books.

And in addition that all of that: imagine a beaming, happy falstaffian figure, filled with genuine good cheer and seemingly always on the verge of chuckling, a man who obviously loves good stories, who is topped to the very brim with book facts and trivia in all sorts of topics, a veritable walking encyclopedia who is ready to step in and help any of his booksellers with the really tough questions, or to immediately come up with the title based on the very few details you have (without ever looking at a computer) — someone who seems to know and care for each book like a beloved child, and who obviously loves the fact that he works in a bookstore.

Instead, when you come in to the bookstore these days, what you get is a slightly out-of-breath, harried man who, while polite, still manages to convey a sense of bland irritation at your interruption. Of course he knows the book you’re looking for, but he has little time to do more than hand it to you before he hurries off to… something. It seems like he is everywhere: kids, music, running a register, explaining to yet another laptop owner how to connect to the wifi, troubleshooting an ereader, or patiently explaining what an ‘ebook’ is to a customer who doesn’t quite get it. He’s even answering questions and giving directions to three other customers in the few seconds it takes you follow him to the bookshelf where he finds your book.

He has dark circles under his eyes. Was that a barely audible sigh, right before he asked how he could help? And… is he running the whole store by himself? This place is huge, that can’t be right…

##

I did not bring anger & contempt with me, when I took the job 10 years ago.

But it has found me. It slowly crept up, and 2 years ago overtook me, and lodged itself next to the place where I keep my love of books. I can contain it, but the odd snarky comment leaks out once a week or so – typically on the blog. My sense of humor was once dry and witty, but is now darkly cynical.

I thought it would get better when the economy improved, that rising sales would save me and the bookstore. I’m starting to doubt that. And as the corporate focus has definitely shifted from Service to Sales, I have to wonder if I’ll ever get back to the job I used to do, and used to love.