A Book Store Is Not a Library (This Is Not the Rant You May think It Is)

For an inordinate proportion of my adult life, I have worked as a book store clerk, and I have learned something that may upset book lovers: you sell more books when books are an impulse buy.

If this is upsetting, it's because most readers think of themselves as a cerebral bunch. They're particular about what they read, and they consider their choices carefully. I know this is true, because I've been watching browsers for decades. As they peruse bookstore shelves, they're both hunters and gatherers. But the hunting far exceeds the gathering, and this is for a good reason: book stores are designed to look like libraries. And if you want to sell more books, that's the worst way to do it.

But wait, you may cry, I like the process of digging in the stacks and finding the gems that are hidden there. I like to spend hours browsing. Why would you change a model that's so pleasing to your customers?

The simple answer is that while customers find some hidden gems, they don't find all of them. Not even close. So a lot of good books never sell, and they end up in a bargain bin or being returned to the publisher. The book stores, publishers, and authors lose those sales. Customers may like the fact that they got a good deal on that bargain book, but that model is not sustainable. If a book store is going to stay open, it needs to make more profit.

The store where I work is currently one of the most profitable I've ever seen, despite the fact that it's small. It has the added benefit of being attached to a museum, so we get more traffic, from a wider range of customers. We sell a variety non-book items, like dreamcatchers, small sandpaintings, cards, magnets, etc., and that also widens our appeal. But we have the same flaws that other bookstores do: shelves with most of our titles spined out, shelves that are below knee level, and shelves that are above head level. (The last two flaws also apply to spinners for cards and activity books.)

Spined books are harder to see and harder to sell. If I could re-design our store, I would build display-slot shelves that start at waist level and go up to face level (not over six feet). I would face titles out in these slots. (A lot of State and National Parks have shelves similar to these in their shops.)

Cookbooks and children's books especially benefit from being faced out. Children's illustration is some of the best art being produced today; a kid's book with a great cover stands a very good chance of being picked up by a customer. The same is true of cookbooks with delicious covers. If the dish on the cover makes you hungry, you're much more likely to buy that cookbook than you would be if you simply saw the title on the spine.

Books that are faced out require a lot of section maintenance, and they still need to be organized by title/author and subject. But this allows employees to stay familiar with the stock. And it gives clerks a chance to interact with customers who are looking for particular things. But what about the space above six feet and below waist level?

I think the lower shelves are the perfect place for overstock. If there is room to face things out down there, and you have enough stock, it will break up the monotony of rows of spined-out titles. And to make this stuff easier to see, those shelves should be slanted upward and graduated like steps, so people can see what's down there at a glance instead of having to bend knees that are often sore. Being able to see those books without kneeling or sitting also helps eliminate nincompoops who think it's okay to sit on the floor in front of a bookshelf and read. (Why these folks think no one is going to need to stand in that area to shop, or that no one can trip over them, is beyond me.)

The area above six feet can be used for displaying art, sample t-shirts, and that sort of thing – and in the case of the store where I work, it's a great place to put stuffed animals (a.k.a. plushies). Though we've had many folks inform us that we should have those toys on a level where children can grab them, that is a crummy idea. When kids can grab toys and stuffed animals, they beat them up while the adults who are supposed to be watching them are busy browsing those spined-out titles that are so hard to see. Nine times out of ten, those adults don't buy that item for the kids.

If you really want to sell stuffed animals and toys, place them on a level that the kids can't reach, but a level they can see. In other words, at Grandparent level. Parents practice saying No! All day long, but grandparents are the good cops. I've also had success selling stuffed animals that are displayed alongside children's books that are about that animal.

So diverging from the library model allows buyers for bookstores to think about what sorts of non-book items they can include in their mix. But it also encourages more communication between clerks and visitors who no longer feel constrained to be quiet (as we're all trained to be in libraries). The more you interact with your visitors, the more you get to learn about what appeals to them. You can charm people who are just passing through, and cultivate your regular customers.

Take a good, hard look at the idea of the bookshelf. When you peruse your shelf at home, do you always find the titles you're looking for? (I don't, even thought I try to keep my shelves organized.) Maybe it's time to break away from the library model for displaying books that you're trying to sell.

By the way, a book store is not a coffee shop, either – but that's a rant for another day.

Why We Got the Jerks We Deserved (and Now They're Loose!)

I'm going to warn you right off the bat, some of you will recognize yourselves in this post. If you do, I want to apologize – not because I've offended you by calling you out, but because I'm one of the ex-Borders employees who taught you to be an entitled jerk.

Most of you other readers are innocent of any of these shenanigans, but will recognize your own customers, regardless of what sort of store you work in, because the economy we've suffered for the past 15 years has bred a lot of desperate customer-service policies. But there are some issues that are peculiar to bookstores, mainly because someone got the bright idea that book stores should have a coffee shop attached to them.

I can just see the wheels turning the head of the jerk who thought that one up. What would I want in a book shop to make the experience relaxing and perfect? they asked themselves. A place to sit down, read a book, sip a latte . . .

Yeah, that's great, all right. And in the late 90s this worked out fairly well for Borders and Barnes & Noble. People trashed a lot of stuff in the cafes (spilling coffee on unpaid merchandise and getting goopy fingerprints all over it), but the economy was good enough that they also spent a lot of money in those superstores. They became social meeting places, and that must have seemed like a great way to get customers into the stores
.

In fact, it was a great way to get people into the stores. People are often not customers. And as the economy tanked, and people had a harder and harder time paying for even the basics, some were able to continue enjoying their books and lattes – because they didn't have to pay for the books. Or the magazines. Or the newspapers that they spread all over the place as if they had purchased them.

There was an unspoken agreement between the superstores and their clientele that if you were sitting in a chair and reading a book, it was because you were considering buying that book. It was (mostly) true at one time. But by the time Borders went bankrupt, it was usually not true. And as we employees watched families move in to the children's section to grab armloads of books and spread themselves out on the floor as if they were in their own living rooms, we could see which way the tide was turning. These folks became so bold, they brought bags of MacDonald's food in with them and put greasy fingerprints all over the books they left in untidy stacks on the floor.

And we did it to ourselves. We created the environment that made it possible for people to walk all over us. We should have been trying to adapt to the bad economy instead of pretending it was all a matter of good customer service. And now Borders is gone, and surviving book businesses are having to cope with customers who were raised in a barn. Many of these folks are now shopping for books they are considering buying online, but they want to review them first, turning local bookstores into the amazon.com showroom.

Yes, people are behaving pretty badly sometimes. And very few businesses have adapted to the situation. One of the few I can think of is Wired? Cafe in Taos, New Mexico. They have a handful of book titles that they sell, but most of the books on their shelves are used books donated by staff and customers, available to read for free. Primarily, they sell lattes and internet/computer time. Since they're located in a popular travel destination, this model works beautifully for them.

As for the rest of us, we're still suffering from the austerity policies that have wrecked economies all over the world (she said, without the least hint of political bias). Until things get better, the knee-jerk customer-service policies that companies think up to compensate for the fact that customers don't have any money will continue to create monsters among their clientele. Sooner or later, regardless of the economy in general, this is going to have to be sensibly addressed.

Photo by Em, drawings by the fabulous Ernest Hogan.    

Staff Recommendations

One very effective thing that Borders used to do was to encourage Staff Recommendations. This was back in the day when those recommendations were genuine, rather than thinly disguised hard-sell pitches that resulted from a debacle called Make Titles. For a while, Borders was so desperate to seem relevant to the publishers, they would choose titles to Promote With Extreme Prejudice. This is the way it worked: every customer who walked in the door had to be greeted (Walmart style). After the greeting, you were immediately supposed to offer assistance. In the training videos, the fake customers responded perfectly to that offer, allowing the bookseller to start making the sales pitch for the most current zombie book or “book club” title.

In real life, the customer (reeling from the onslaught of a bookseller who swooped like a predatory bird) firmly said “NO.” Records were kept of how many Make Titles each bookseller managed to sell, and reprimands (along with threats) were handed out when the numbers weren't high enough.

This antagonized everyone but the executives who made it up. Customers were used to REAL recommendations from Borders booksellers; our expertise was our greatest strength. So eventually the Make Titles program went away.

Websites don't really have an equivalent to staff recommendations, but the customer recommendations on Amazon are very helpful to people who are skittish about buying online. Amazon has cultivated those amateur reviewers, even allowing them to have their own page on the site (and yes, I am one of them). Barnes & Noble has lagged behind in cultivating a customer review atmosphere on their website, but they're actively working on it.

So what does this mean for surviving brick & mortar book stores? With so many of the bigbox book stores collapsing under their own weight, small book stores are discovering what it takes to stay in business and win customer loyalty. Not surprisingly, recommendations from a knowledgeable (non-swooping) staff are an important part of that strategy. Now that I'm working at Books And More at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, I can recommend a number of titles. If you live in Phoenix (or if you're passing through) stop by and give them a look – we're at Central and Encanto. Otherwise, visit your local store or your favorite website; these books are worth your time and moolah.

ARCHAEOLOGY/ANTHROPOLOGY

Archaeology Of Ancient Arizona, by Reid and Whittlesey

Arizona's Rock Art, by Robin Scott Biknell

American Indian Ghost Stories, by Antonio R. Garcez

HISTORY

Navajo Weapon, by Sally McClain

Guns, Germs, And Steel, by Jared Diamond

Appetite For America, by Stephen Fried

MYTHOLOGY/FOLKLORE

Sacred Oral Traditions Of The Havasupai, by Tikalsky, Euler, & Nagel

Navajo Taboos, by Ernie Bulow

BIOGRAPHY/AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Lazy B, by Sandra Day O'Connor

Seldom Disappointed, by Tony Hillerman

Talking Mysteries, by Hillerman and Bulow

ARIZONA TRAVEL, WILDLIFE, NATURAL SCIENCE

Sedona, Treasure Of The Southwest, by Kathleen Bryant

Birds Of Arizona, by Stan Tekiela

Roadside Geology Of Arizona, by Halka Chronic

Arizona Journey Guide, by Kramer & Martinez

Roadside History Of Arizona, by Marshall Trimble

Turquoise, by Lowry & Lowry

Frequently Asked Questions About The Saguaro, by Janice Emily Bowers

Forest Cats, by Jerry Kobalenko

Smithsonian Rock & Gem Guide

COOKBOOKS

The Arizona Cook Book, by Al & Mildred Fischer

Southwest Slow Cooker, by Biber & Howell

Tacos, by Mark Miller

Tamales, by Daniel Hoyer

Hope For The Book Store -- Sort Of

By the time Borders went bankrupt, I had pretty much given up on the concept of the brick & mortar book store. After all, look what they're up against: an expensive distribution system, the high costs of leases and utilities, a sluggish economy, and heavy competition from online book stores and/or e-books. When the Borders where I worked was placed on the STORE CLOSING list, my co-workers and I began to search frantically for new day jobs. I ended up briefly at a grocery store, as a cashier. But it was an extremely demanding job, and it paid $3 an hour less than I had previously earned.

Life was looking pretty grim. My husband Ernie had happily settled in a new job with the Phoenix Public Library, and I was very pleased to see him happy again. But I was losing sleep. And then he told me that a lady from the Phoenix Heard Museum book store had left her card at the Borders where he still worked in the evenings. I felt like I'd been struck by lightning. “That's my job!” I said.

And it was. Miraculously, even though several skilled people had applied before I did (I was actually the last interview) they hired me. I've worked there ever since, and I love it. But I'm amazed, because it's an old-fashioned book store, and I thought I would never see one of those again.

By old-fashioned, I don't just mean brick & mortar, and I'm not simply referring to the fact that the books are hard copies. I also mean that the store is small, it's managed by someone who is extremely knowledgeable about books, and it's staffed by people who love books. I thought I was never going to see something like that again.

So you may be thinking, Great! There's hope for the brick & mortar book store after all! But it's not that simple. The Heard Museum book store has a lot in common with the book shops you see at National and State Parks. It carries regionally themed books: books about Native American culture, art, jewelry, basket weaving, textiles, pottery, folk art, kachinas, religion, folklore, and history. We also have books about Southwest archaeology, anthropology, geology, biographies, travel, gardening, wildlife, photo-essay, history, cooking, and children's books. The book store used to be a small corner of the main gift shop, so we also carry tourist stuff like dreamcatchers, bead jewelry, postcards, magnets, cards, CDs (from Canyon Records), T-shirts, mugs, and few few items from the main gift shop, including rugs, pots, folk art, and kachinas.

In other words, the books aren't the only thing driving sales in our store (people love those dreamcatchers). And the existence of the museum is what brings people to the store in the first place. They come to see the museum – we're just the frosting on the cake. After looking at the exhibits, they want to learn more about what they've seen. Or they want a souvenir, or they're grandparents looking for gifts for the grandkids. Maybe they saw Jesse Monongye's gorgeous jewelry in the museum, pieces that go for $10,000. They can't afford to buy a necklace, but they can get his beautiful coffee-table book for $50. Or they love the kachinas, and they want a book about how to identify the different types. Or they have a Navajo rug at home, and want to learn more about it.

Like the National and State Park shops, our store gets the customers who came for the OTHER thing, the main thing that got them to get in their car (or hop on a plane). They couldn't do that online, they had to visit the place. And we're IN the place, so they may as well stop by and shop. We can talk to them and use our old-fashioned sales experience to interest them in the books we love. That's the advantage we have over the online sites.

But we get a few old-fashioned book lovers too. And for that reason, I think well-placed small book stores may actually do all right in the near future. Like us, they probably would order a lot of their books from regional publishers. If they're knowledgeable about the books, and they have a good feel for what their local customers want, they could succeed.

So if you live in Phoenix (or you're visiting us), stop by and a take a look at the Heard Museum book store (Books And More). We've even got a coffee cantina. Buy the Navajo Times from us, get a cup of iced coffee, and sit at a table out in our courtyard, next to the fountain. It's a beautiful place, peaceful and good for contemplation.

I love it.

Goof-Off Central

I've done some writing about a certain Big Box Bookstore, and the big mistakes the company has made in the eleven years I've worked for them. And I can't say that this article is going to diverge that much from my previous themes. But there's something about working for a Big Box Bookstore that rarely gets mentioned in blogs about What Went Wrong. It's something that is still, mostly, the fault of the Big Box Company, since it's an HR issue – a matter of how you supervise personnel and divide labor. It is simply the fact that when I began working for this Big Box Bookstore eleven years ago, it was Goof-Off Central.

By the way, I signed an agreement promising not to talk about the company (by name) while I'm working for them. Technically, I'm probably pushing it by writing these blogs, but I'm not just kvetching. I'm trying to cast some light on how/why this particular sort of business tends to fail.

So – back to Goof-Off Central. I'm not exaggerating when calling them this. When I started working for the company, it was actually possible for an employee to spend an entire day pretending to work. Here are some examples.

I worked in the music department. When I started, this department had a full-time supervisor, an assistant supervisor, a lead clerk, and four full-time employees. (By the time I left, there was just me.) We had enough people to scan in, unpack, sort, keeper, and shelve all the product that came in (three shipments a week). We could easily have had perfectly alphabetized shelves, properly stocked displays, well-stocked listening stations, properly stickered product (sale stickers), etc. Instead, the section was utter chaos. Stock backed up for weeks, the sections were poorly organized and lacked any alphabetical order, CDs often had two different sale stickers on them, and many listening stations stood empty.

Why? Because employees spent their time goofing off. And management didn't seem to know how to motivate them. I could have played along with this attitude and goofed off too, I would never have been criticized. Not as long as I showed up for work every day.

Employees ignored ringing phones. They ignored back-up calls to the register. They avoided customers on the floor, when they could. They shelved books wherever they would fit, rather than where they really belonged. They spent hours in the back room sorting books into bins and gossiping with each other. Those books never made it to the floor, and eventually got returned.

I decided early on to take some initiative. It wasn't that I expected to be rewarded – I was simply bored. So I started at one end of the music section and alphabetized the whole thing. It took about a month. No one realized I was doing it until I was halfway through. Once I had it well organized, I could shelve quickly and accurately. I was given responsibility for merchandising after that; then for setting up monthly listening-station programs. My GM appreciated my work, and I got regular raises and high marks on year-end performance evaluations. They didn't ignore my good work. But most of the time, the supervisors seemed to be focused on other stuff. In fact, I always got the feeling that the day-to-day operations of the store were a huge bother to them, almost beside the point.

I remember one incident when my husband and I arrived for work to find one employee at the register. She had a long line and was desperately calling for back-up. We hurried to the office, assuming no one was available to help her, so we'd better clock in fast and get up to the register. We entered the office and found eight supervisors sitting at their desks, laughing and gossiping with each other – and ignoring the back-up calls. They felt it wasn't their job to do the actual sales-clerk work in the store.

Eight supervisors. I'm amazed when I think there were that many of them in the store at one time. On some days, they outnumbered the sales clerks. I hated their attitude concerning grunt work, but in retrospect I realize it was right in line with upper management. We had a big conference room in our store where regular company meetings were held, and I briefly interacted with several executives over the years. I say briefly interacted because these people barely seemed to realize I existed. Their sole job in the company seemed to be to have lunch and attend meetings. They spent their days generating catch-phrases and spouting business philosophy at each other.

How could they get away with it? Because – for many years this Big Box Bookstore could sell just about anything. People were eager to go there, drink coffee, meet people, buy books and CDs. This was 1999, 2000, the first half of 2001. Back in the 90s, during the heyday of this particular chain, the money flowed like the Mississippi. It didn't start to tank until the 9/11 tragedy.

But it wasn't just 9/11 that did them in. It was a long list of bad business decisions and technology shifts, many of which are being discussed in online articles at PW and various other websites. But what is never discussed is the idea that big companies are inherently wasteful. They seem to be havens for friends, family, and cronies – people who get their jobs partly because of nepotism and partly because of the mistaken belief that executives are necessary to run a company.

They're not necessary. They are an artifact of the upper class. Executive-level jobs are a way for them to draw huge salaries and exercise power. They don't do this maliciously; they really believe they know better and do better than line employees. They can come up with numbers to prove it. Those numbers seem valid until the whole mess comes crashing down.

I'm not suggesting that we adopt communist values and build guillotines to rid ourselves of executives. I'm suggesting that we begin to exercise some common sense and stop creating situations were executives (and other employees) can work at Goof-Off Central. There wasn't one employee at Big Box Bookstore above the GM level who was necessary to run that particular company. Everything those overpaid executives did could have been done at the store level (except for Accounting, which could have been contracted out).

Line employees could have been paid better, with more merit raises for people who actually worked harder. Stores could have established closer relationships with vendors AND customers, ordering things that their local clientele actually wanted. Signs could have been printed by local printers, GMs could have had regular conference calls with each other to share winning strategies.

Yes, we all would have worked harder. But maybe we would have realized early on that we needed to develop a good website. For years, we line employees who actually gave a damn tried to tell our company what we thought needed to be done, based on our day-to-day experiences with customers. They blew us off, because we were line employees. If we had any smarts, we'd be executives, right?

So maybe we line employees would have failed too. After all, Amazon came along, and e-readers, and a crappy economy. Music, movie, and book vendors never realized their prices were too high – they never took steps to cut their own unnecessary costs.

But at least we wouldn't have been Goof-Off Central. In my opinion, that would have been a worthy accomplishment.

Tough Noogies

The brick & mortar business where I work has made me sign a document stating that if I talk about them online, I can be fired, so I won’t mention them by name. But I’m not mad at them for making me sign that paper. Because they’re up the creek without a paddle, and I can’t blame them for being freaked out about it. They’ve got a right to look after their reputation. God knows the retail giants aren’t doing anything else very well these days.

Unfortunately, the way most retail chains have reacted to the bad economy is to decide that they’ve got to start harassing the customer from the moment they set foot in the store and not let them go again until they have their name, phone number, e-mail address, and shopping preferences – and woe betide the customer who doesn’t also have a couple dozen frequent shopper cards. Furthermore, at my store I’ve been ordered to address you by name, no matter how much that may offend you. And you need to know my name too. If it’s any consolation, I’ll try to use your last name instead of your first, and I only mispronounce it about 35% of the time. I’ll try to mumble it so you won’t think I’m hitting on you.

But all of that “customer service” will do no good at all in the end, because I work at a book store, and within a few years, most book sales will be done online or with a phone app. Yes – I know everyone is saying that, and I also know there tends to be a gold-rush attitude about new formats and technologies that often turns out to be exaggerated. But in this case friends – it ain’t exaggerated. People are underestimating how big the change is going to be.

Forget all that stuff about how much you like paper books and how you don’t want to change. Because that’s just tough noogies. It’s not about what you want. It’s about what they’re going to give you, what they think they can do to turn a profit. Controlling costs is the only way big biz can squeeze the bottom line right now, and shipping around tons of paper is expensive. Zapping electronic bits in your general direction is way cheaper, and if you put it on a reader you like, you’ll get used to it pretty fast.

Don’t get me wrong, I love printed books. But I have to admit, I’ve been appalled at the waste I see in the book biz. We manufacture astounding amounts of trash every day at our location, just in terms of cardboard boxes and merchandising lists, just so we can build displays of things we want people to buy. But after all that effort, after all that paper and gasoline, most of the books that make it to our shelves get packed right back up eventually and shipped back again. It’s very Sisyphus-ian. Move that pile of sand over here, then move it back over there. On the small scale, no big deal. But we’re talking gigantic, and without easy credit to make it look like actual moolah is being made, the losses are apparent much more quickly than they used to be. So the electronic medium will sweep all that away. And how could that help brick & mortar stores?

Not one bit, actually. So they’re in complete denial about it. That’s why I’m wondering if you’d like a bag for your items, Mr. Smith. What was that phone number again?

The funny thing is, even if the brick & mortar chains crash, I don’t think amazon is going to be the only game in town. Google won’t either, even if they end up selling their own gigantic library of e-books. I think writers are going to control the e-book market, mostly because we’ll be able to set our own prices. We’ll tend to keep them really low, because we don’t have a gigantic overhead to pay for. Of course, we’ll be plagued by pirates and we’ll have to compete with millions of other sites for the attention of shoppers, but that won’t stop us. After all, we’ve been treated like dirt for decades, we’re used to trouble. We’re not easily discouraged, either. In fact, it’s scary how hard it is to get us to give up.


So here’s my advice to shoppers: don’t pay a lot of money for books, or movies, or music. Pay something, give writers and musicians a reason to keep making the stuff that entertains you, but don’t pay a high price for it unless you can’t live without it. If you think someone’s price for an e-book is too high, tell them so. They may lower it. Believe me, if you tell a book store clerk the same thing, they’ll just have to refer you to Customer Care. And there’s just one way a call like that can end.

“Thanks for shopping with us Mr. Smith. Have a nice day.”