I’m curious how you know this. Do you own a piece of the store? Have access to their financials? Or is it an assumption based solely by walking into the store as a customer?
I’m well aware of the business model that uses a variety of profit centers to support a used book business. I’ve already talked about them. I’m also aware that most people have no idea how the underlying business functions.
The model in the book business is that books are rarely enough to produce reasonable profits by themselves. It was not an accident that the big chains like Borders and B&N added huge CD and DVD sections to their stores, along with lots of other seemingly little things that customers don’t even realize are major, like cards, gifts, blank journals, cafes. It’s also not an accident that Borders started to slip when the CD market took a huge nosedive. Although that was just one of many, many problems that Borders had, surviving on books alone is a tough proposition.
When people ask about the survival of used book stores, I’m pretty sure what they have in mind are the small single-purpose stores that sell pretty much nothing but used books. That’s what I’ve been talking about.
If you want to introduce stores based on an entirely different business model, you will be subject to criticism if you just refer to them as used book stores. I don’t know where the balance of profits come from. Despite your claim, you don’t either, I’ll bet.
If you want to argue this on the basis of “random bookstores I have walked into that haven’t folded yet” without providing any facts or backup I’ll treat that the way I treat any worthless anecdotal information. If you want to talk business models, though, stick to business, not impressions.
I have seen very few used book stores that don’t sell *some *other stuff, generally other used media (just like Recycle does), or sometimes coffee. That doesn’t disqualify them from being a Used Book store. You have a unusual definition that few others use. Very few retail businesses sell just one thing- grocery stores sell household supplies also, such as TP, etc, Drugstores sell more than drugs, and so forth. Even Sees, a speciality retail business if there ever was one, also has sold coffee, toys, shopping bags and even a special Barbie.
Recycle gets more than 90% of it’s business from books- according to the owners, anyway.
The decline of paper books due to electronic alternatives will not and has not been as dramatic as say music, movies or newspapers. Unlike the other forms of media, for the most part electronic versions (ebooks) are more expensive (compared to used paper books). A used book is very cheap and if it is a great book than the value is incredibly high. The market shouldn’t and won’t put anything with incredibly high value into decline.
My better half has worked for them for well over ten years (back when it was only one store and much smaller than it is now) and is one of the people who price books. For many years it never had the items you think disqualified it as being a bookstore and made very good money, and it was decided that devoting a small percentage of the store to those could add even more money.
I’m curious how you think it’s not a bookstore based upon your total lack of any knowledge about the place except for having glanced at the website.
Which has nothing to do with this situation, as I already stated.
That’s what I have been talking about too, yet you somehow refuse to accept that. I don’t know of ANY used bookstores (having been to many in several cities) that sell nothing but used books, and the extent that these stores do sell other items (as a percentage of the store) is about the same percentage McKay Books does. Any criteria you could come up with to try to discount McKay would discount all used book stores.
If you want to introduce the concept that it’s an entirely different business model out of thin air and call a store that consistently is voted the best book store in Knoxville by the public year after year and literally has miles of shelf space devoted to used books “not even a bookstore” then you will be subject to criticism.
Well, you’d lose that bet.
You never once even asked about the business model. You’re the one talking about your own impressions without any knowledge of the actual business.
You know, you could have simply asked for more details instead of insisting it must be impossible and that nobody other than yourself could possibly know what they are talking about.
What makes McKay a successful used bookstore is that it uses a solid financial formula to determine what price any book should be priced at to ensure it gets sold fairly quickly and open that shelf space back up to another book that will in turn be sold quickly. The database sees how long a title or type of title has been in the store, and if it has been a while, it reduces the price or puts it on a do not accept list so they don’t buy any more copies. More rare items, or items that go very quickly, get priced higher. The system is set up specifically to determine the most efficient price. That efficiency means higher volume, which means they had to take some rather unusual steps to keep the volume up, like installing a conveyor belt to get the crates of books the public sells to the store to the pricers in an orderly fashion.
Contrast this with most used bookstores, where they generally just have gut feelings about what to charge, and the same stock can sit on the shelves taking up valuable space for months or even years.
Of course this model does have some downsides. They are not at all prepared to handle rare books, as those are the type that have a very limited interest which means the price can go very high for that collector market. McKay targets the average book-buying public. Rare book dealers to go through the store looking for finds that they turn around and sell in their stores or online, so it works out.
And there are other reasons people cite for McKay’s success: customer loyalty, sheer range of books available making it a good place to browse (again, there are literally miles of book shelves constantly being filled and refilled), people getting buy back credit if they return the books for resale, the good will the store raises by donating books to local charities.
Anyone who is interested in the business of used book sales and is ever in the area should check it out and see how it works – although the specifics involved in the number crunching behind the scenes is guarded, proprietary information, of course.
In my experience- which is certainly not scientifically statistical or anything- the “pulp fiction” used bookstores where you trade in your paperbacks for credit or buy used paperbacks don’t seem to have been affected, but the high end used book stores (the ones that are more selective and sell hard-to-find/out-of-print type stuff) are going or gone with the wind. Easy to understand why: If you have a signed I, Claudius from the late 1930s or a coffee-table book on Victorian mansions you can probably sell them online for a better price with a lot less overhead than in a store, while there’s not a big market online in good condition 4th printing paperback copies of The Shining but people looking for something to leisure read will pay three bucks for it in person. (Online it would cost that much to ship it.)
Really, used book stores that just sell books don’t exist? There are eight used book stores in Monroe County around Rochester that people would identify as such. The Book Center, Bookends, Greenwood Books, the Houghton Book Store, the Millstone Block Book-Tique, Rick’s Recycled Books, Small World Books, and the Yankee Peddler Bookshop. Nine if the Book Lady is still open. Of those nine, the only one that has more than, say, 1% of its volume in something other than used books is Rick’s, which has some videos. (Still probably single digits, though.) Five are actually inside the city limits.
Merging together various types of products is a valuable and common business model. But it is separate from the pure used book store, even if used books are 51% of the business. None of those nine even have cafés.
I was surprised today to learn that New Haven, CT, a city dominated by Yale University, has exactly one used book store left in town. That’s a small store that seems to be half restaurant. There’s a big “book barn” (literally) in the suburbs , I’m told, but not much more.
How do you survive as a book store? I’ve given four models. 1) Be a physical front for an internet operation. 2) Sell volumes of books at prices that compare well to price+shipping. 3) Get a huge walk-through traffic for reasons other than used books. 4) Sell books as one of many profit centers in the store. (There might be others. A good used book store probably can exist in a college town or in a large city just on the strength of its books. But those are increasingly rare.)
Those are business models. Every store has a business model. If you want to talk about a store and tell me it has a successful business model that isn’t listed, I’m ready to learn. But don’t tell me that the four are the same or a store that is obviously one of them isn’t. Books are a business like any other.
I think the Book Lady is out of business (I went looking for it one time and couldn’t find it). But there is a good used book store in Webster - Yesterday’s Muse on Main.
Most of the remaining used book stores in the area are “used book only”. I’m frankly surprised that they can continue operating. Two of them in Boston are old,established stores that have been around a very long time and sell a lot of very old and rare books, which I suppose might be the key to their success (although plenty of other established, rare-book sellers in the same area have gone under). The others are newer, and are continuing to survive despite having lots of other used book stores around them fail.
The Harvard Bookstore still sells used books downstairs and new ones upstairs, but that business model apparently failed for other stores – nobody else seems to be doing it anymore. (This is not an official college bookstore, despite the name, so it’s not getting any sort of boost from the university. Their official bookstore is still the Harvard Coop.)
The “Charity” bookstores I mention above sell audiobooks and DVDs as well as books, but that’s not much of a stretch.
I have known used bookstore/cafes, but they’re all closed now. Aside from new books, audiobooks, and DVDs, I don’t know any used bookstores with sidelines – no coffeshops, bakeries, music CDs, stuffed animals, cards, or anything else. *
*with the exception of the Traveler’s Bookstore on I-84 in Connecticut, which is mainly a diner with a used bookstore as a sideline downstairs.
Thanks for the update. I was, um, musing about Yesterday’s Muse but I thought it contained a mix of used and new books. I haven’t been in it since shortly after it opened, though. I’ll have to get back there.
Cal, there’s a large store in Niagara Falls that is new books on the first floor and a huge basement of used books. It didn’t look like it was thriving, but nothing in Niagara Falls does.
I don’t doubt they exist elsewhere – I was referring mainly to the Boston area, where these used to be fairly common, but are now pretty much extinct. Sam Weller Books in Salt Lake City used to operate this way, too. I see they’re still in business, but I haven’t been back to SLC in ages, and don;'t know if they still have a basement full of books.
They did two years ago when I dragged my wife there. I found them when I stayed in SLC for a meeting.
All the Silicon Valley used bookstores have a small amount of shelf space devoted to used DVDs and CDs, and one in Palo Alto has a small section of games and puzzles. All are easily 95% used books.
There is one other used book store in Webster (last time I checked). It’s a little hole-in-the-wall place in that church on main street that was converted into stores. But I can’t find it on google so it may have closed. A real small one-room crowded full of hardcovers.
The neighbourhood is in full decline but Book Corner itself seems to be doing okay. It’s been open for a couple of decades now so it seems pretty stable.
And it actually has three floors. The main floor is their new books and remainders. The basement is used hardcovers and trades. And the second floor has used paperbacks.
The problem with ‘Mom & Pop’ stores…and I speak of having to grow up in a secluded rural area where there were little chains (yet) and the mom & pop stores were king…is that they grossly underpay and under benefit the rank & file help and grossly overpay the family help including themselves. They also promote terribly…promoting not so good family members over much better qualified non-family members.
Therefore they cannot compete because you get the wonderful combination of crappy service, inefficiency and really high prices.
While I do also lament the fact that these places are dying like crazy…It is tempered with my experience that these places were terrible slavemasters when they had their day in the sun. When chain stores came into the community (I still remember the first one) it was amazing that they paid above minimum wage and offered some bennies like health insurance. The rank & file workers do better under chain stores (which still sucks so that is saying something about mom & pops)
Now family farms can f off and die for all I care. They were TERRIBLE when I was a teacher. They can all go shovel manure for minimum wage.
This isn’t unique to book stores. “Mom and Pop” businesses means some of the people you see aren’t just employees - they’re the owners as well. And a worker who owns the store is going to be better off than a worker who doesn’t. You’d see the same difference in a Borders or Barnes & Noble except that you don’t see the owners in these stores - everyone you see is an employee so it looks more egalitarian.
None of the used book stores in my home town (4 or 5) sold knick-knacks or other crap. They sold books. That’s it. Just books. None of the dozen or so in San Diego when I was going to school there sold anything other than books. They might now (I’ve been living outside the US for years now) but 10–15 years ago when I was living in those areas, they sold books; not coffee, not wrapping paper, diaries, etc. Most of those places had been in business for a decade or more, so I’d say that up until fairly recently selling used books—and nothing but—was a sustainable business model, and was the norm, not the exception. I’m with Exapno on this one, it was and probably still is a perfectly sustainable business to trade in used books.
Hell, there’s a traditional used book store in Ebisu that I visit that manages to sustain itself on nothing but books. Which is impressive considering they have maybe 50,000 to 75,000 English speaking foreigners in the Tokyo area to cater to, and the astronomical rents most places in the area have. That’s a smaller population than my home town, by the way, and a cost of living easily 4x higher than there. Even after the exorbitant “tax” on foreign books (maintained by collusion long after the actual tax was dropped by the government) mostly has gone away in new book shops, they still get enough business to keep going. They’ve been there for something like 15–20 years.
In recent years, the growth of our new book business has tapered off, but used books remain strong. Some other bookstores have not shared this experience. Why? Because “used books” is not one single market.
The majority of our used book business is mass-market paperbacks. People buy them because they’re cheaper than new–and cheaper than ebooks. You pick up a used paperback for $3.00 or so, and then trade it back in when you’re done, so the effective price is under $2.00. Even if you don’t trade it in, you can read it on the plane or in the bathtub or on the beach and toss it when you’re done, and you’re ahead of the price of a new book.
We used to do “collectible” used books as well. That market changed dramatically about a decade ago. People who used to be excited about finding that first-edition autographed Michael Crichton for $80.00 now hit bookfinder.com and see that someone in Oklahoma has one for sale for $10.00. The market crashed almost overnight with the advent of ABE and alibris. Five years ago, we had a couple of thousand of our collectible used books listed online with ABE and Amazon, and we watched the comparable prices drop to the point where we just took the whole thing down.
Why hasn’t the Internet killed our mass-market business? Because the majority of our used mass-market paperbacks sell for less than the standard shipping to buy them online. Online sellers simply can’t compete with that.
As for what constitutes a “book store,” the name seems to go along with the store’s primary market. Did the hardware store cease being a hardware store when they added an aisle of beach toys and a sporting goods section? Then my store didn’t cease being a bookstore when I added a toy section and a tea bar.
All generalizations are false (including this one).
Personally, I seek out “mom & pop” shops not because I own one, but because it’s where I’m most likely to find people who are enthusiasts and experts. The big chain stores hire many employees who know little to nothing about what they’re selling–they’re simply working there because it’s the first place to say yes to the job application. In a “mom & pop” shop, you’re more likely to deal with people who own their widget store because they have a passion for widgets.
An update. I was at the Houghton Book Store today and they’re closing. They’re not sure how soon - they figure they’ll be there through the end of November (the rent is paid for this month) but will probably be closed for December.
I think the Yankee Peddlar is closed too. The location it had been at is closed, so it’s either closed or moved. And the two used book stores in Geneseo have also closed.