The backlash against homogenized, industrialized,
cookie-cutter retailing is in full swing.
You see it in the embrace of the local and sustainable; you sense it in
the glorification of retail authenticity, even and especially if it includes
business practices that seem unbusiness-like; you can read it in the cottage
industry of business books arguing that the key to a customer’s heart lies in not
seeming so desperate to get there.
As consumers, we’re so sick of being managed and sold to, and we can only
look forward to the heavy hand of the digital marketplace reaching ever deeper
into our souls in coming years. So we
eagerly embrace shopping experiences that feel like something more than slick gimmickry designed to get you to buy. There’s
something uniquely nauseating about mega-banks that only want to be your
friend.
For the book industry, achieving an irrational, on the fly business
persona is an easy fit. It’s playing on
our home turf. Despite the decades of
mergers, downsizes and attempts to standardize our world, many publishers
and booksellers have clung to a DIY “we’ll do it our way”
approach. Perhaps this is because very
few people enter the book world in search of some product to sell. They sign on because they love books and
reading, writers and writing. Business
plans, P&L statements, turn analysis and chirpy customer service bromides
are all a necessary evil.
The book business is filled with eccentrics.
Like the retro diners that draw customers who
expect and hope to be abused by
sassy waitresses, some may actually turn a
chronically cranky special order department, an extreme lack of amenities, or a
lunatic inventory into a selling point.
It seems like bookstores are more personality-stamped than just about
any business going today, with the possible exception of local indie coffee
shops (though many of those have mastered a kind of fake authenticity.)
I’ve been pondering the line between
eccentricity in business practices and plain craziness. Can we really sort the charmingly
counterintuitive and the economically suicidal into two neat piles, or must
they of necessity bleed into each other a bit?
What got me going on this was an anecdote in
a review by
Michael Lewis (a wonderful writer) of
Capital
(a wonderful book) by John Lanchester (a wonderful writer) in the New York
Review of Books.
Lewis is lamenting that
cutthroat capitalism and money-grubbing have taken hold of contemporary
London.
When he lived there in the
eighties, he said, the city seemed to “exist for just about any other purpose
than for people to make money in it.”
“…the
most extraordinary anti-commercial attitudes could be found, in places that
existed for no purpose other than commerce.
There was a small grocery store around the corner from my flat, which
carried a rare enjoyable British foodstuff, McVities’ biscuits. One morning the biscuits were gone. ‘Oh, we used to sell those,’ said the very
sweet woman who ran the place. ‘But we
kept running out, so we don’t bother anymore.”
Though I can’t swear that this particular scenario plays out
in bookstores, it struck a chord. It’s
both eccentric and a little crazy, or at least straddles the line. But it’s charming, and I suspect Lewis found
it endearing and continued to shop there.
I’ve been in many bookstores over the past couple
decades. I’ve worked in them and sold to
them and patronized them, and a long roster of “crazy or just eccentric?”
business practices come to mind.
There’s the wonderful store where you’re welcome to browse
until you take out a pencil (or heaven forbid, a phone) and begin to take
notes. You will be pounced on by the
proprietor and given a stern lecture about how bookstores have become showrooms
for Amazon. Perhaps you will be back,
perhaps not.
There’s the new/used store piled so high with inventory that
it’s impossible to turn around. There’s
a vague categorization, but new unorganized piles colonize every corner. Luckily there is an inventory control system,
but it resides in the proprietor’s head and on his Blackberry. I’ve never met a better master at ABS (Always
Be Selling) in the book business. But I can’t
help wondering whether potential customers scared off outweigh potential
customers won.
There was the superb academic store, now just a good memory,
where inventory was sorted and displayed by publisher rather than subject since
it made stock checks and returns much easier (for the store, not the customer.) Visitors to the shop would be met by a large dog and a front table full of rep and bookseller debris, including
Indian takeaway lunch. Charmingly eccentric
or a little nuts?
The publishing side of the book industry has its own menu of
incomprehensible business practices. As
I chuckled to myself about the London shopkeeper, I was reminded
somehow of a peculiarity of academic publishing that drives retail booksellers
and customers- rightly- insane. This is
an archaic textbook pricing model whereby you are charged more per book the
more copies you order. This is business
counter-intuition at its finest, and there is a very convoluted and arguably
rational justification for it. But on
the face of it, it’s hard to think of another kind of retail where the price per
piece goes up the more you buy. Lacking
any shred of charm, I code this bit of eccentricity crazy.
Many booksellers find the freight policies of publishers
deeply eccentric, and more than a little crazy.
I could say more but the subject is also deeply boring.
And- back to textbooks- there is the ongoing revolt among
students over what they see as unnecessarily high prices and needlessly
frequent new editions and updates. The
last place I got an earful about that was, of all places, at the US-Canada
border crossing in Port Huron, Michigan last week. When the young agent asked about my job and I told
him who I worked for, he responded with a tirade against the high cost of
textbooks. (In truth, this seemed more
crazy than eccentric, since there was a line of cars behind me. But I've had more idiotic conversations at this particular crossing.)
When I was a bookseller, I managed the downtown Milwaukee branch
of a small local chain. The store owner,
David Schwartz- who walked the high wire between shrewd businessman and crazy
eccentric with great skill and love- had a pet peeve: he thought I let our
staff spend way too much time indulging the street people, characters, and
assorted downtown problem patrons who spent lots of time in the shop. It wasn’t that I had a more generous spirit;
I just thought he underestimated how hard it was to keep them away.
One man in particular drove David bananas. He was nearly blind.
He was deaf. He couldn’t
speak. He drooled. He smelled bad. When he came into the store we knew we were
in for an hour of incomprehensible note-passing that always ended in
stalemate. He was forever in search of
some elusive book and we were never able to identify it. But what could you do?
One Christmas Eve afternoon, David made the rounds of the stores to
monitor how things were going. He popped
in at a very busy time, and one desk had a very long line of customers. At the front of this line, passing notes to our most patient bookseller and
drooling on the impulse display, was our friend. David headed straight for him and shouted in
a very angry voice “YOU! OUT! OUT!!!”
The man was steered toward the door while the line of customers
retrieved their jaws from the floor. In
terms of impression management, this store full of
many once a year customers probably didn’t leave with the warm fuzzies.
It’s a tricky thing. David was a mensch and anyone with a misleading snapshot takeaway of that scene would be missing essential background. But true
eccentricity in a retail setting can’t be tamed or branded in some top down
way.
Sometimes I’m not sure the people who
are advocating the real, the local, the authentic know what they are asking for,
or will be happy when they get it. For a
buying experience to feel honest, it may not necessarily feel “nice” in that
plastic, have a nice day way. If you
want interactions with real people, you have to be ready for the realness.
But I’m pretty sure that more and more people will be
craving real (as opposed to real™)
shopping experiences in years to come, and bookstores are poised to be those
spaces.
