Rocket Bomber - snark

The value of Amazon, like the value of Facebook, exists not in the website but in the user base. Would any 3rd-party sellers use Amazon’s Marketplace otherwise?

Amazon doesn’t market your items. It doesn’t help you invest in inventory, or develop new product lines — in most cases, it doesn’t warehouse the items for you, or help in fulfillment or shipping.

Amazon only makes your item available via a search, and for that privilege, takes up to 30% (or more?) of the sale. And the only value added is that it’s listed on Amazon, where the people are.

Amazon gained an advantage by getting *big* first. No one can catch up without massive investment and years of losses.

Please consider: it’s not so much that you use Amazon: Amazon is using you – and, on your behalf, is doing things you might not agree with

see also: Views inside & outside the Amazon-IPG dispute http://www.shelf-awareness.com/issue.html?issue=1675#m15160

I’ll save you ten minutes: In this post I vigorously defend the customer service commitment of corporate booksellers, mostly by pointing out just how hard of a job it is.

I might also have a few [mildly] insulting things to say about my customers, which is what readers will key in on, and will raise their umbrage to the point they’ll pack the comments to this post with scathing missives about how I shouldn’t be allowed to breathe, let alone be put into situations where I’m allowed to interact with other people.

Look deep into the mirror, and see if you actually are one of my “customers”. If you are, feel shame; if not, then please laugh and cry with me, for I have a thankless job and have abuse piled on to me besides.

##

The occasion of this post is three unrelated complaints that seem to all have dropped into my lap at the same time, this past Monday:

http://www.kindleboards.com/index.php?topic=96922.0

And these quips, which I saw via @nprbooks on twitter

These complaints, and the responses to them, and other similar barbs casually tossed at booksellers, (and a case of beer) all had me worked up into a fine fit. I had to respond, because someone on the internet was *wrong* [op. cit. http://xkcd.com/386/]

(I took a few days to cool off, but I’m still going forward with the [drunken] rant.)

I’m going to argue this five different ways. In fact, I have to argue it five different ways; you, the reading public, are conflating:

The big box bookstore vs Amazon

The big box vs Independents

The big box vs the Internet

The big box vs its own employees …and

The big box vs readers

##

The big box bookstore vs. Amazon.

So, let’s take that lovely KINDLE BOARD post and parse it:

First: it was posted to a kindle user board.

I know that when I have a customer complaint the first thing *I* do is immediately post on a fan-forum for users of a competitor’s device.

Setting that to one side, though:

- Amazon has no store fronts, so there is no way to visit one on Dec. 24th.
– Amazon does not offer opportunities for non-profits to earn donations through volunteer gift-wrapping in stores.
– Amazon would also not make change for a $5 bill. Indeed, Amazon doesn’t deal with cash at all.

I personally love how the second sentence in the post is, “I paid full cover price,” like this is equivalent to purchasing a First Class airline ticket, or somehow is pertinent to the rest of the events that follow.

Thank you for visiting a bookstore, Geemont, and thank you for buying books. (It’s what we do.) I’m sorry that the ‘full cover price’ is something so outside your regular experience that you felt it was worthy of note. Alas, the only way bookstores can stay open — indeed, to be open on the holiday of Christmas Eve — is to charge the actual price of a book, the one physically printed on the book itself.

Other than noting that your visit was precipitated by the need for a “last moment extra gift”, Geemont, you don’t make mention of the time. Was this in the last ten minutes before we closed the store, or during the mid-afternoon rush with a dozen customers behind you at the counter, or first thing in the morning when the store wasn’t really busy (yet)? December 24th was the second-busiest day of the year for my store, I can only assume it was the same for other bookstores: your incidental request for change while cashiers were busy attempting to ring up other customers during our highest volume of the year can seem trivial to you, but might in fact require a manager to step in.

Past complaining to the “district manager” on your way out [and how did you identify her as such? and why-slash-How did you skip over two layers of management before making the complaint?] — did you allow the bookseller to use established procedures to help you? Or were you just in too much of a hurry to wait an extra minute?

quote from the source:
“But here is the rub: Barnes & Noble is fighting for its life and one of its big advantages is their store fronts. Yet a petty (accounting?) policy of not making change made shopping there an unpleasant experience. In the long run, it isn’t the extra two bucks to charity, but the narrowed minded adherence to bureaucratic polices that ticked me off. What if I only had a twenty? Should I have just stiffed the wrappers? If Barnes & Noble wants remain in the book business they should do whatever to make their retail shops a place where customers want to buy books, especially at full cover price.”

I’ll note again:

- Amazon does not offer opportunities for non-profits to earn donations through volunteer gift-wrapping in stores.
– not least of which because: Amazon has no storefronts. Or booksellers. (would this be an example of Amazon’s ‘narrow-minded adherence to bureaucratic policies’?)
– and Amazon doesn’t make change for $5 either.

I personally would like to invite Geemont to escalate this as far as he can with Barnes & Noble: Rattle the rafters, make the chairman himself respond.

And then, sir, please do the same at Amazon, and demand that they open a nationwide chain of storefronts open at all hours and also up to the very last minute on holidays, so you can rely on them for last minute gifts and never have to shop at Barnes & Noble or other big-box booksellers ever again.

Especially at full cover price.

##

The big box bookstore vs Independents

“My local bakery is so much better than the bread I can buy at the supermarket”

And duh. Local & artisan is better than corporate & national: Which is why Sears and Wal-Mart both went out of business in the 70s when faced with competition on every geographical front by small, engaged local retailers.

Customers say a lot about their expectations and preferences, but they vote with their dollars.

…

As ‘the enemy’ (a big box bookseller) I get some heat from customers, and some perhaps-deserved insults from Righteous-Independent-Booksellers. Big-Box-Books doesn’t react, doesn’t respond, just isn’t as good as a good local.

Duh. Yes.

But I have to serve the larger community, not just you.

Someone is looking for the works of Spinoza or Gracian – these might not even be in a local branch library, but we have a copy for sale at big-box-books. Someone has to have reference guides on Ford V-8s, Benz Deisels, and Dodge Hemis – and your local library may have ‘em but mine doesn’t, and folks call the store daily. Someone has to stock books on history, ethnography, sociology, architecture, psychology, and how each and any of these might impact urban planning or business retail – and yet, not only is there nowhere else to find the books, no one else is willing to do the searches to find the books.

Your local indy is better at recommending fiction: they not only stock the Booker & Pulitzer Prize winners, they often anticipate them. Your Local is better – for what they do.

But I have know & be able to recommend it all, and then some. You tell me where your local excels, & I’ll come back with the basic knowledge I’ve had to acquire in five other categories that your local doesn’t even stock. There is a big difference between 40,000 books and 100,000 – and I’m being very generous in assuming your local indy stocks that many. Also, as a chain, the first follow-up question from any customer is, “Well, does one of your other locations have it?” — so in addition to my own inventory, I have to deal with what may-or-may-not be in stock at a dozen other locations – many duplicate titles but easily over 1 million books total.

One can maintain that local indie booksellers are better at customer service – & they might be – but smaller indies also enjoy a much lower volume of business & requests.

If I only had to entertain 100 customer inquires in store and 200 or so phone calls per day, I’d seem like an effing customer-service wizard, too. As it is, I’m busy, and frazzled, and there are two more people behind you in line.

##

The big box bookstore vs the Internets

Since you’re reading this on my blog, I can only assume you are at least passably acquainted with the internet. As such, my next point may in fact be lost on you.

No one looks up anything on the internet.

Oh sure, you do. YOU already know how the internet works. Does your mom know? Does your boss? Let’s say your parents are Nobel Laureates and you work for an internet search company — are you saying everyone you know is computer literate? How many of your friends pick up the phone to ask you a computer or tech question, because hey, you’re knowledgeable and you’re a friend and a phone call is easy, right? The answer is on Google, of course, a few clicks away: but that just isn’t the same as asking a friend.

At the bookstore, apparently, I’m everyone’s friend. No One Looks Up Anything on the Internet. If they did, my phone wouldn’t be ringing off the hook all day long. The calls start hours before we open and no doubt continue even after I go home at midnight. It’s not just stuff that a Google search would easily provide, or wikipedia, or say, an author’s or publisher’s website would have; sometimes it’s not even for a book —

My favorite was the call from a mother in New Jersey, who wanted me to recommend a local bakery so she could send her son a cake. In looking up a number to call in Atlanta, it never occurred to her to look up the number for a bakery – she called the bookstore so I could recommend a place. And then I got to use the yellow pages [the actual book] to look up bakeries and give this “customer”[sic] the information over the phone. There is another customer who, having established in her own mind that I was “the answer guy”, would call the bookstore, ask for me personally, and then proceed with whatever query happened to occur to her. Like, how to convert from Celsius to Fahrenheit. Or how to get out of a speeding ticket. Or the song title and artist based on a half-remembered lyric.

Folks walk into the store with truly excellent questions, too. One man wanted a book on ostrich farming. Amazingly, I happened to stock a book on ostrich farming (I was shocked too). I handed the rather slim volume to this customer, who turned it over, read the back, half-heartedly flipped through it, then asked, “But do you have any books on organic ostrich farming?”

More recently a customer asked me for a how-to guide on writing e-books. So I begin recommending several books on fiction writing, and a few on how to write book proposals for non-fiction titles, and a couple on writing memoirs—since I’m not sure what kind of book—and this guy says, “Well, these are OK I guess, but they’re all about writing books: I want a book on how to write e-books, you know?” I changed tracks, and started to recommend books on self-publishing, and mentioned a few websites I know that help authors get ebooks online and onto sales sites, and he says, “No, I don’t think you understand, I know how to get the ebooks online, I need a book on how to write an ebook, see?”

Sadly, I don’t; more disheartening is that this man could even formulate that thought.

##

As an internet-savvy, well-read bibliophile with at least average computer skills, it would never occur to you to call someone for answers. There is a gap, though: part educational, part generational — and a whole lot of folks not being able (or not wanting) to bother. I invite you to work for a bookstore, part-time, just for a couple of weeks, so you’ll know that even when the whole of human knowledge is made available to anyone on the internet, with very minimal effort required, there are still going to be folks who can’t be bothered to make that minimal effort — so long as there is someone they can annoy.

And many of these “customers” get pissy when I can’t seem to find a book that has “The Answer” in it. Or, when such a book improbably exists, they are shocked, *shocked*, that it isn’t in stock, for sale today. Because, after I’ve spent 10 minutes asking questions, guiding the search, resorting to all the resources at my disposal to find a book, “Well if you don’t have it I’ll just order it from Amazon.”

So sad, that customers can not use Google or Wikipedia on their own, but everyone knows how to use Amazon.

##

The big box bookstore vs it’s own employees

Man, I can’t believe I have to defend this crap online — it’s not like I enjoy working for a large corporate beast, But: I need to eat, and the employee discount on books is really much too fine to walk away from.

Let’s assume that a “neighborhood bookstore” exists as a platonic ideal separate from the business and social models that enable it. The bookstore would then be there no matter who runs it.

While this is certainly nice to assume, there is no imperative that insists a bookstore has to exist. Outside of corporate influence and engagement, bookstores are rare and endangered things. Even those of us who love books & bookstores, and who give up other employent opportunities to work at bookstores, and give our all while on the job – no matter how much we sacrifice we cannot maintain the status quo or guarantee bookstores will stay open — as has recently been proven by the Borders bankruptcy.

Corporate bookstores often cut costs by hiring part-time staff. Some of these ‘booksellers’ work for less than 3 months. You can certainly complain about the ‘booksellers’ you have to deal with over the holidays (if that is the only time of year you engage us) as we’re just hiring kids to make do. Even our “permanent” staff consists of folks who, on average, have been with the company less than 3 years. Some are college students, working nights & over the breaks — they were accepted to college so presumably aren’t stupid (…you can argue the point, but this isn’t the essay for that). I have retirees on payroll, and teachers; former librarians and folks who have worked for publishers; staff with graduate degrees, staff currently working on their doctoral theses; writers and artists and creatives of all stripes.

For many, the bookstore is just a stepping stone and a paycheck, an experience that will one day be a source of funny anecdotes for cocktail parties, college lectures, or corporate presentations. Corporate does not pay enough to retain talent. You could argue that Corporate doesn’t pay them enough to care.

Minimum wage does not buy one a whole lot of “buy in”.

It is a rare beast indeed that loves books, loves knowledge and trivia, is willing to work for less money than her skills might otherwise demand, is good with customers, is totally conversant with the rapid changes in the industry, and who can put up with corporate bullshit for more than a couple of years.

Instead, you get me. I’m undiagnosed Asperger’s/autism-spectrum and not only am I bad with people, I drink too much and respond to what-some-call-reasonable-objections to bookstore customer service with drunken invective and wounded pride. I take this personally. I have a passion for the job.

And the next time you need change for a five, you better hope I’m the bitter, pissed-off, overworked bookseller on a register because I am the manager and I am empowered by bullshit-corporate to make the life-or-death-decision to reopen the cash till, and I’ll get you your pesky change, without comment and likely without even making eye contact.

##

The big box bookstore vs. Our Readers

I’m not sure where this perception of hostility comes from. We have opened hundreds of stores all across the country [with outposts in each of the 50 states] and we stock 100,000 titles minimum at each, with magazines, CDs, DVDs, greeting cards, stationary, calendars, journals, and stuffed animals. WE WANT YOUR MONEY. We’ve made the stores as inviting as possible, and don’t even require you to buy anything, a loophole many many people take advantage of daily. We’re somehow a replacement for the library [an assumption that does a disservice to your local libraries] as well as a community center and learning annex.

We Try So Very Hard. …and often succeed — and still get push back from our customers, most often on price. If YOU, OUR CUSTOMERS want to push us out of the business, we’re going to go out of business — but all that “free” that you enjoy does not pay for itself.

“…there is no imperative that insists a bookstore has to exist. Outside of corporate influence and engagement, bookstores are rare and endangered things.”

Treasure what you have. If all you have is a corporate chain outpost – it is your choice whether that bookstore is your “local” or just another soon-to-be-empty storefront. And maybe you could buy something from us once a year – or twice a year, if your ‘once’ is only Dec. 24th

##

Summing up:

At the bookstore, our customers’ expectations are set too high; it would be like having a master chef or food scientist on staff at the grocery store, or top designers and fashion magazine columnists at Wal-Mart, or geologists and civil engineers to sell you fill dirt and gravel. Books are a commodity good (as is perhaps best proven by the price sensitivity of customers) but books are the only commodity that requires expertise & a high level of personal knowledge to sell — and sadly, there are only so many Jeopardy champions to go around.

There are at least six million books out there, in stock at somebody’s warehouse and available to sell. That is out of perhaps nine to twelve million books total (considering books that are out of print but still available used) and maybe as many as 15 million different books, if we consider new e-books and available scans of older books — and that is just the commoditized bookspace and doesn’t include library collections or all the books ever printed, in all their varied formats. My world gets more complex by the day — and yet I have to navigate these uncharted waters every day, in a way that is both prompt and seemless to the customer.

…and on top of that I have to do it in a way that doesn’t make the customer look or feel stupid — especially when the customer is acting (or is actually) stupid.

That’s my 2 cents. I’ll have to owe you the other $4.98.

So.

Hm.

Let me start by saying I am an angry man. Bitter. Single, with very few close friends (and those from my college days – we have all moved on, some quite literally to other cities) and even with my close friends: we’re not that close.

I am far from a workaholic — in fact, I’ve settled [to an extent] in my career, in as much as I voluntarily work retail.

But I work retail because I love books, and a long-standing dream of mine has been to work in a bookstore, and eventually own one. I’m living the dream; the customers are a necessary evil to be endured.

It might be different if I were a “people person”, the gregarious sort who loves to talk and meet people and ask what they’ve read and what they’re reading, who has a beaming smile to great each and every customer.

I am an introvert, almost violently so, and while I don’t hate people, I much prefer to watch them than interact with them. I can spend hours (days) alone, in my apartment, with my books, and my comics, and cartoons on DVD.

And I’m happy.

It’s not that I need to get out and meet people. I don’t need to ‘try this single’s group, I think you might be surprised’ or ‘just go to a couple of these events, what can you lose’ or ‘just meet people’.

I am not unhappy because I’m alone — I wasn’t unhappy at all, but now I’m unhappy because I’m being forced out of my comfortable nest, I’m being forced to meet people, being forced to make small talk.

I hate small talk.

I’m not just unhappy, I’m annoyed. And I’m getting angrier.

##

How does an introvert and borderline hikikomori cope in a retail job, interacting with people for 8 or 9 hours at a time?

It’s an act. I’m faking it.

You know that one clerk at the bookstore, who always smiles and is polite, with just the right guiding questions, who seems to have read everything? The one you hope is working whenever you go into the store, the one you seek out because he always knows the book even when you can’t remember the title or author? He seems so interesting — if only you could get him to talk a bit more, he surely knows all sorts of things, and must have dozens of good recommendations…

Yeah. That might be me.

I’m polite, but I don’t mean it. Smiling makes my face hurt. And when I walk away after handing you the exactly right book it’s not just because I’m busy (…but I am busy) — I walk away because I don’t like people. Not You; not especially or particularly you, anyway: I don’t like everyone.

…and I know so much about books because I compulsively research everything — I crave data and information like some folks crave chocolate, I might even go so far as to say I need it. I love the internet, it’s chock full of information, it’s a godsend for people like me.

Between the undiagnosed Auspergers, an odd-but-nearly-photographic memory, and a lifetime spent reading: I am perfectly suited to answer stupid book questions; uniquely qualified, in fact. That’s part of the package deal: I’m an introvert, I’m a booklover, I collect and synthesize data as easily as breathing – while retaining enough social skills to be able to hold a job, and to deal with customers.

It doesn’t mean I like it, it just means I _can_.

It is exhausting to act for 9 hours straight. And to do it well enough that no one guesses you’re playing a role, that you’d much rather be at home, alone, reading and not the sunny smile and bright light who lives for customer service.

It doesn’t take much to get on my bad side at work, because I’m already way outside my comfort zone. And it certainly doesn’t help that I’m the manager, so after one of my booksellers makes an honest mistake, or just rubs a customer the wrong way, I’m the one who has to step in and ‘make things right’.

So after a long day at work I’m exhausted from Acting Like An Extrovert, and likely annoyed because of stupid questions, and occasionally grumpy because quite a few customers just suck and there’s no human way possible to make some people happy.

##

I’m not as smart as I wish I were, likely not even as smart as I think I am. (The internet can be humbling; there is always someone smarter than you on the ‘net.) I’m certainly not as witty a writer as I think I am, though I can’t help writing.

And while I don’t enjoy personal interaction, it seems I crave attention on the internet. Maybe it’s the fact that people are removed from the equation: you’re a handle, a nickname, an 100×100 pic and 140-character description. I see URLs and IP addresses in a hit log, not readers. So many hits per day, per month; Google Analytics even gives me graphs.

I did mention I love data. The internet is a game I can play, not a community to be engaged, not a relationship.

##

So here’s the problem:

I’m not a great wit for the ages; I might not even have much to contribute. But I want to play this game — and I can do it from my cave, alone, with beer: It’s Great!

But I have to wonder, even given my dim awareness of societal norms, if I’m doing it right.

I’m sure there are times I’ve just been annoying. Like a little kid wanting in on the grown up conversation, and with as much earnestness and enthusiasm, but also not knowing the rules.

That, and I’m an alcoholic — which is unrelated (even sober I’d still be an introvert) but which occasionally leads to bad judgement.

AND I’m angry. Work makes me angry, bitter, and tired — and being tired also occasionally leads to bad judgement.

I’m thinking it would be best to stop playing the ‘internet game’, at least when it comes to social media. Stick to writing, and data analysis, and my own little projects. Respond when asked questions directly, but give up my attempts to be followed, to be read, to be noticed. Because even on the internet, these new tools still represent personal relationships. Because especially on the internet, it’s far too easy to be a newb, or a troll, or a spammer, or just plain annoying.

In other words, on the ‘net I fear I’ve become much too much like the customers I hate in the store.

##

I will still be on twitter, as it is an excellent way to broadcast links to a self-selected audience, and maybe on Google+ [though Google+ seems too much like Facebook to be of use to me]. But I don’t know that I will ‘be on twitter’ quite as much. Not in the ‘having an online conversation’ sense.

It’s not that I don’t like you anymore, or that I’ve come down with a dread disease and can’t be online. I just don’t think it’s working for me, and it wastes a lot of time.

Even online, it seems, I am an introvert.

##

I don’t need feedback on this; I wasn’t looking for sympathy or asking to be argued out of this. I recognize behaviours I don’t like, and which I’d like to stop. I know some will see me withdrawing and will interpret that as something different, me saying I don’t like them.

For that: I’m sorry, it’s not your fault.

To those I’ve drunkenly tweeted at 1am: I’m sorry, that was my fault.

To those I’ve inadvertently spammed: I’m sorry, but that link/site/story/video seemed really funny at the time.

To those who followed me for the reviews, or analysis, or insightful essays, and who then had to follow me through drunken rants and long asides, and personal digressions: I’m not really sorry, as that is *me* and I’m a package deal, I can’t (or won’t) set up separate channels for everything.

I already have a separate site for reviews, booknom.net, which gets criminally ignored most weeks [I’m working on that] and I have one other site launching before the end of summer [something completely different] — but Rocket Bomber is _me_, with the lumps and the books and beer and the comics and the graphs all inclusive. I can’t figure out how to parse that, and won’t unless someone pays me to do so.

[if you would like to pay me to produce content you can specify whatever you’d like]

So, Summary:

I am an angry man, and a drunk, and I do far too much sharing on the internet.
I apologize for past transgressions, but not really, and can only provide the barest placative: that I know I’ve been annoying and am attempting to not — I can’t correct the behaviour, but I can stop.

And if you see less of me on twitter, now you know why.

My, it has been a long, *long* time since I posted poetry to a blog. ;P

And absolutely no one is going to believe me, but I wrote this in real time while posting last night to twitter – which means I can knock out a kids-book-parody in about 18 minutes.

[I kid, I kid: I know it’s hard work]

Anyway, the original tweets: 1 : 2 : 3 : 4 : 5 : 6 : 7 : 8 : 9 : 10 : 11

Time for all the lil’ evil geniuses to sleep

Good night giant robot, with laser eyes and arms that crush
Good night evil minions, whose kung-fu training leaves them bushed

Good night laser moon base, who keeps an eye on every soul
Good night hidden silos, whose missiles wait for special codes

Good night sleeper agents, sleep well, we don’t need you *yet*
Good night all my hackers, rule the night – and the ‘nets

Good night secret lair, in cold volcano’s once warm heart
Good night booby traps, and pits, and blades, and poison darts

Good night secret agent. you’ve been caught, you careless fool.
Good night, little Evil. Sleep and dream, of worlds to rule.

##

And just a friendly reminder that this, like all my posts to RocketBomber, is released to the vast internets under a Creative Commons license.

Good Night, Little Evil by Matt Blind is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.rocketbomber.com/contact.

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.

Call my take on it sour grapes if you must, but I didn’t leave a dozen properties and hundreds of thousands of fans hanging…

##

I don’t like Stu Levy.

I’ll admit that.

Kinda hate the smug bastard.

Sure, he’s had more good ideas about comics (especially manga) than I’ve likely had to date, and he certainly put his money where his mouth is, founding the company that became Tokyopop and merely by being a barb and foil to a staid industry that was otherwise going to putter on in obscurity [if we ignore Nintendo, Pokemon, Cartoon Network, and anime on Saturday Morning local broadcast TV] Stu Levy deserves some props for making the Manga Revolution a reality.

The guy is smart, sure. Or at least, he was in Japan at the right time, and had access to venture capital — which, back before the tech bubble popped in 2001, apparently any reasonable writer could obtain with the right keywords and ‘cool’ quotient, a fact many novelists missed as we were working on consumer fiction, while the real money was in corporate fictions.

Stu and Tokyopop lucked out. They got Sailor Moon – a manga property that was also showing on TV. Though I have to say, ultimately, that’s also a failure: until the recent announcement that Kodansha would re-release these volumes, there was no way to buy these books for years. Tokyopop got credit for printing books that were immensely popular but that no one could buy.

Tokyopop luck continued [also thanks to lax Kodansha licensing] with a number of CLAMP titles & Love Hina, and the Hakusensha title Fruits Basket.

All this is very early in Tokyopop history. From first blush and early success, Tokyopop…

Coasted? is that too strong a term to use?

Tokyopop also attempted to channel early fan enthusiasm into a “Global Manga” line: encouraging creators to sign up their comics to the T’Pop banner under, hm, less than favourable terms, and pushing licensed properties [and the Abhorrent Cine-Manga line, which included NBA ‘comics’ and Paris Hilton ‘comics’, and other TV-screen-shot-photo-montages which aren’t even comics, let alone manga, and which poisoned the brand back in 2005.]

In 2006, Tokyopop got a hard-to-earn second chance: They signed a deal with a major publisher, not just for distribution but for content.

And the HC/Tokyopop books would pay for themselves and then some; Erin Hunter’s Warriors series ran for 10 volumes in adaptation, all of the them still perennial bestsellers; Cabot’s Avalon High and Schreiber’s Vampire Kisses have also sold well, and are still selling.

This is the core of HarperCollins new comics imprint, in fact, should they choose to launch one. With Tokyopop out of the picture, maybe there is a token payment to be made to Levy [the bastard] for the step up, but eventually: The whole new edifice will stand on its own and Tokyopop was merely the sand beneath the foundation, or the Jimmy Hoffa buried in the concrete of Soldier Field.

##

Even with the distribution & support of a Big Six publisher, which all but guaranteed placement in bookstores, Tokyopop struggled. There were layoffs in 2008. There were layoffs right before the end.

Layoffs, I might point out, that took place while a movie was in production [considered by most to be a ‘lottery ticket’ and ‘gravy train’ but I guess the Hollywood Money never trickled down past one Mr. Levy]

Was the collapse of the manga market Stu’s fault? No… and the anime bubble that popped before that? No, not much any publisher of manga could do to affect the DVD market collapse.

but Tokyopop was already diversified, with many original properties [all but stolen from their creators] and licensed properties ranging from Disney to Star Trek to Blizzard, and better product placement and initial orders than most other comics publishers could hope for… DC and Marvel included.

Circumstances and a few shrewd business deals handed Stu Levy the sun and the moon and a vigorous manga imprint besides. Key employees were able to negotiate deals with Japanese publishers that were the envy of the [granted, small niche] market and right up to the bitter end: Tokyopop was releasing books the fans wanted, the critics enjoyed, and which were selling. Divested of the OEL experiments and licensing missteps [we ALL want to forget Cine-Manga] it seemed like a leaner, focused Tokyopop would help lead the manga industry into the next decade.

All that going for it…

except the CEO was making reality TV shows, musing publically over why he’d ‘wasted’ so much time with books, and generally pissing on his fan base and core customers.

Actions speak louder than words.

And while Stu [and others] might think his recent ‘philanthropic’ efforts in the wake of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan somehow ‘redeem’ this showboating bastard and make it all worth it, consider:

Many, many of us contributed to charities without posting about it to YouTube. Many of us will continue to support Japan, charitably and economically by buying anime and manga — without withdrawing out of the manga business — or filming a documentary in Japan over the next year:

A documentary I consider to be exploitive, more than anything else. Help Japan rebuild, yes. Yes, please, and thank you. But do it without pointing a camera in their face.

##

Stu, AKA DJ Milky [a dick-move I hated him for even before he ran a profitable and ongoing imprint into the ground], is the right guy to have, for one specific window of time, but he never should have been the CEO; I’d peg him as the marketing/licensing guy who managed to do good work in the field for a couple of years and then switched to a blog, analysing the market and complaining about how everyone was doing it wrong in intermittant web blasts that don’t always make much sense but have good sound bites —

— and hey, if he were just another industry blogger, he could still do his Japanese charity/penance, with just as much publicity, without leaving licenses in limbo and just closing up the shop when he could have, should have, SOLD THE COMPANY to a publisher who gives a damn about manga, and books.

No, really: WHY did Tokyopop close, when it could have just as easily been sold? I would like everyone who runs into Stu at any comics/book/anime/fandom related event to ask this very pertinent question: Stu, even if you were bored with books, why kill Tokyopop?

It’s a very simple question. I can only assume that Stu is so full of himself that he imagines that if *he* couldn’t manage it, no one else could make Tokyopop [an ongoing concern with popular licenses, a strong backlist, and title to original English-langugage comic properties still held in an iron grip] work as a publisher.

Hubris.

I Hate Stu Levy. His current ‘charitable’ efforts in Japan, no matter how necessary and admittably helpful in the ongoing crisis, smack of self-service and condescension. His abandonment of the business because it’s too much ‘work’ — even while honest work was producing books we all enjoyed — is lax at best and contemptuous at worst.

Also, Stu is closing Tokyopop while grimly hanging onto all rights to the OEL books that might be worth something — without putting any effort into realizing that potential — or releasing rights back to the original creators.

##

Stu: you suck. You bailed, when we need you most. You failed, in a niche of publishing you claimed to invent.

Prove me wrong: come back. Restart the Tokyopop publishing division. If you can’t: hell, give the licenses and Tokyopop name to me, and I’ll do it. You can even sell it to me: I’ll give you a dollar. (You can’t really demand more; you just threw it away) — Keep your damn movie division, and the weasel-rights to the OEL titles and all the rest.

Give me the Tokyopop name and the current title list. Give me a roster of your current freelancers, and the contact info for the folks you just fired. Give the manga back to the manga community, don’t let your ego kill a company with so much promise.

Suck the marrow from our bones, take the producer credit for the Priest movie, and credit as the founder for Tokyopop, and however many millions you’ve collected as salary for the past decade — but don’t take the company with you into obscurity.

If you don’t want to leave Tokyopop with me, sell it to someone.

Why, why, why close it all down? Even if you are bored with books & manga, Stu, the rest of us are not.

##
See also [an incomplete list]

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/book-news/comics/article/46397-stu-levy-and-the-rise-and-fall-of-tokyopop.html

http://www.comicsbeat.com/2011/04/15/end-of-an-era-tokyopop-shutting-down/

http://www.comicsbeat.com/2011/03/02/tokyopop-follow-up-is-stuart-levy-the-charlie-sheen-of-comics/

http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2011/03/tokyopop-lays-off-senior-editors/

Just this past week, I launched a new book-oriented blog, which leaves me to wonder a bit about what to do with the old book-oriented blog—

—this one.

##

BookNom.net is different – first up is focus: BookNom is just for reviews. Books are the only topic and I’m doing my best to make it look both inviting and professional. While the basic framework is a blog [in fact, it uses the same CMS as RocketBomber] the concept & eventual execution are much more ‘site’ than ‘blog’ – if that distinction means anything to you. RocketBomber is a platform for me to post drunken rants to the internet, while BookNom.net is… not.

I’ve already opened up the BookNom concept & platform to 3 other contributors – maybe 4 [Lissa is working hard on the art for me — IT'S FANTASTIC, TELL HER THAT — but we still haven’t talked about her writing anything for the site] so from the very beginning, BookNom is not just my project.

In fact: click, read, and consider – Submission Guidelines : Style Guide : Reviewer Resources : Call for Contributors

And BookNom is much more an idea than a website: way back in June the idea for BookNom grew organically out of… me posting drunken rants to the internet

In fact, hell, we could sign the whole thing up as an Amazon affiliate, let them worry about procurement & shipping & margin, and just take our cut from the internet sale. I don’t need a warehouse and fulfillment protocols for millions of titles if I can get Amazon to do that for me — I’ll take the booksellers, thanks, the ones who know and love the product, and we’ll do just fine.

There is nothing stopping you from just taking this idea (and the links to handy resources I’ve already posted) and starting your own book-reviews-for-tips website. I Strongly Encourage You To Do So. Hell, if your version is better than mine, I’ll write for you and you can register the domain names and pay for hosting & web design & art and work part time as editor (I haven’t been an editor since college newspaper days, ah nostalgia, 17 years ago) and I’ll just take the points I get as an Amazon [and soon to be IndieBound!] affiliate and drink my beer and write my little missives to an uncaring internet.

##

I’m a Lazy Bastard.

No, it’s true. I spent 7 years (7½ – almost 8) at one of our nation’s finest educational institutions, treating a major research university like my own intellectual buffet. I changed my major almost annually; I studied physics, architecture, engineering; I took math classes as electives; I asked for (and got) permission to take graduate level courses as an undergrad. I squeezed Uni like a ripe fruit, and drank deep from the juice.

—and then spent five years in bars [as a consultant – getting paid, even; I’ve been spending decades in bars at this point] followed by my current employment as a bookseller. I like the bookstore, and working there gets me an employee discount.

Of Course I’m over qualified. That’s why they kept promoting me, year after year. But that wasn’t a bad thing: I’ve worked almost every job under the roof, and done every task you can think of: receiving, shelving, stock maintenance, and returns; stints in every specialty department – including music, DVDs, newstand, gift, bargain books, and most recently digital; the whole spectrum of retail management from hiring, training, evaluation, scheduling, Bookseller mentoring and development;

Not only have I spent the last ten years learning a bookstore up-down-and-sideways, I’ve spent my days off researching online book sales and publishing trends and drinking deep from the well, listening to Mimir’s murmurs and Delphic whispers.

Given my background, and education, I could be doing ‘important’ work. My thought at one point was to pursue a career in architectural acoustics, designing concert halls and other performance spaces. Instead, I ended up as a bookseller. My passions and inclinations weren’t amputated, however: As a bookseller, I’ve been analyzing the Big Box just as avidly as I tackled any academic subject while at university.

I’m a lazy bastard – I could have been an architect, or engineer, or physicist, or inventor. But that was work: I didn’t find my true calling until I was out of school for 4 years and took a part-time job as a bookseller.

##

BookNom.net is it’s own thing, and I hope that from humble origins it will grow into a modest site — I don’t need the payday from a sell-out, and the bigger deal it becomes the more work it will be. But a book-recommendation site that some thousands visit, enough to make the affiliate links pay out at least enough for beer money for the reviewers, a website that makes a top 1000 or top 100 list? That would be grand.

BookNom is the site I would have launched in 2004 (back in Jan. 2004 when I wrote my first blog post) if I had understood the internet at that point, or more to the point had understood what it was I could contribute.

RocketBomber is the site that I, as a 37-year-old blogger with the odd hobbies and a bookselling job and too much beer and a 7 year blogging history — well, this is site I ended up with. RocketBomber may take a decided turn to the personal – relieved of the burden of being my ‘professional’ blog, I can share more insights without caring who the audience is, or what the reception to my posts will be.

Yes, I’ll still post online rankings and analysis of industry numbers. I’ll still post columns like rethinking the box. I’ll still post the free-form thought pieces. (& I do not doubt some columns will grow organically from the book-review-mission-statement of BookNom.net as well)

But I think I’ll post more often to RocketBomber, now that the onus of posting for the ‘permanent record’ is off. No doubt, some of you will consider this to be an improvement; the rest will remove the link, unfollow the RSS feed, and set up a filter to automatically delete me.

From this point forward: I will post.