I hate shopping. But I love bookstores! It’s the only form of shopping I do without stomping my feet and starting an embarrassing tantrum.
In the postage stamp that constitutes the downtown Oswego area, there is a library, a coffee shop with great pastries but almost no seating area untouched by a knick-knack, a bar, a barbershop featuring a barber with a great handlebar mustache, a gas station, an ice cream stand, a model train store (yep), a few antique stores, and a lot of knitting stores.
Seriously, if God decided to flood the world again and instructed a modern day Noah to build another ark with the stipulation that it had to be knit out of yarn, he’d instruct Noah to set up a base camp in Oswego, IL.
There is a comic book store I once walked into thinking that even though I don’t read comic books, I do have some geeky hipster tastes. I read “Watchman”. I like Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem. There is some common ground there. But two steps inside, I was greeted with a death-ray stare by a thirty-year–old man engaged in a tense Pokémon card duel with a ten-year-old. I got the message that my kind wasn’t welcome and I quickly turned heel.
But for one brief moment, maybe a year, maybe less (I don’t get out much), there was a small independent bookstore called Olde Town Book & Tea. The selection was small but eclectic, the owners were nice, and the tea was non-existent. I guess I could have asked the shop owner for a cup, but I am so conditioned by years of shunning pesky big box store employees that I rarely look any store employee in the eye. Even at the register I stare at my shoes while swiping my debit card. In my life, things get awkward.
So each time I walked in, I knew that I had an obligation as a booklover to walk out of the store with at least one purchase. Why did I feel this pressure? Because if I weren’t buying books at this little book store in my little town, then who would? Oswegians are a simple folk and they only have so much disposable income, and that disposable income is spent on yarn apparently.
But deep down I knew that no matter how many books I personally bought, this little underdog bookstore was doomed. And sure enough, the last time I walked by with an expectant hop in my step, the store was shuttered with a for sale sign in front. I wasn’t surprised.
The reason the store was doomed is that BOOKSTORES DO NOT SELL A LOT OF BOOKS.
I know this because I worked at a now- shuttered major chain bookstore, Crown Books in 2000 for about a year. I was at the register, I saw the orders, and I balanced the money at the end of the day. I saw what books people bought.
The chain was failing sure, but our store was in a major shopping area and had decent foot traffic. And sure this was a time before teen vampires sparkled, and sexy autistic cyber hackers fell desperately in love with coffee-fueled middle-aged Swedish journalists, but we were in the middle of the Harry Potter craze. And people did buy Harry Potter books.
But what else did people buy?
1. Books that were mentioned by Oprah that morning and not just on her book list. The number one question I got was, “Do you know the book that Oprah’s guest was talking about?” Me: “You mean this morning like an hour ago? No. I was right here. At work.”
2. Self Help/Weight Loss books.
3. Children’s books. With a special head nod to Captain Underpants.
4. Computer programming books. This was 2000 and people had websites to build and dotcoms to start.
5. Religious/spirituality books. Also by far the most shoplifted items.
6. Romance novels. Usually bought by older women in giant stacks at a time.
7. Book-like objects. These are items that look like books, rectangular, appear to have pages with print on them, but they aren’t books the way you usually think “The Great Gatsby” or the Bible is a book. Next time you find yourself in a bookstore checkout line and you can’t quite figure out what the person in front of you is buying, nine times out of ten, the person is purchasing a book-like object.
What don’t bookstores sell?
1. Fiction. To give an example, I remember when pallets arrived of the latest Tom Clancy brick. We sold one.
2. Okay we sold some crime fiction, usually a Mary Higgins Clark around Mother’s Day. We sold the occasional Sci-Fi Fantasy novel, like Robert Jordan. Nora Roberts and J.D. Robb (who is the same person) covered most of our fiction sales herself.
3. Literary fiction. The only (I mean only) exception is a high school student buying an assigned book with a sullen expression on their face.
So how do bookstores keep the lights on?
1. Ripping the covers off unsold (which means almost all) mass-market paperback books and magazines and mailing the covers back to the publisher for credit.
2. Selling gift certificates to people who think that SOMEONE ELSE might want to read a book.
3. Fancy accounting, creative banking loans, and hedge fund scams. I don’t pretend to understand economics that well, but I assume this accounts for all “profits” in all businesses.
A final note about gift certificates, when Crown filed Chapter 11 right after the first of the year, we were not allowed to redeem them since that money was already accounted for and the stock still needed to be sold. You haven’t been in customer service hell until you’ve been an employee tasked to tell someone that the gift certificate they just received for Christmas (and was bought only a week before) was worthless.
And what did the customers do with the worthless paper and book-like objects in their hands?
They threw them at my head.
“The Dunce Caps” progress to date: on page 154, 29,400 total, 850 words since last post.
