From Bloomberg:
When the final Harry Potter installment was published on July 21, 2007, bookstores across the U.S. celebrated with midnight release parties — some with booze, befitting a series whose earliest readers were now in their 20s. These parties took place at thousands of bookstores at a time that was, in retrospect, Peak Bookstore.
“That era, 1997 to 2007, was truly a sweet spot for readers,” Jenna Amatulli reminisced in HuffPost in 2017. “They watched the fandom bloom from nothing, lined up willingly outside of a physical store — oftentimes without a celebrity-sighting incentive — and read without the fear of a push-alert or Twitter spoiler.”
Turnout for the same release today would be lower, because of Amazon.com Inc., because of dying malls, because of J.K. Rowling’s support for gender essentialism — and because there are simply fewer bookstores. Between 1991 and 2011, the U.S. lost 1,000 chain bookstores. A story in The Bulwark checking in on Borders locations 10 years after its 2011 bankruptcy revealed that some had become Books-A-Million, but many more of their “medium-box” locations now sold food, furniture or clothes.
Even so, that HuffPost story, now five years old, may have played taps for the chain bookstore too soon.
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Plenty of Millennials who grew up with a Waldenbooks, a Crown or a Borders have the same nostalgia for those chains that they feel for the malls that once contained them. At the same time, Gen Z is taking to TikTok to talk about books — driving billions of views as well as sales for authors’ backlists — and staging those videos at Barnes & Noble. B&N’s green-and-cream decor persists as an accessible symbol for books and, in a country recently starved for social interaction, a place where one day we will browse together again. Trends may come and go, but wooden shelves and squishy chairs will always mean, “Curl up with a book.”
The last of the major chains is betting on that rebound: Barnes & Noble, which once said it would whittle itself down to 450 stores by 2022, started the year with 625 — and plans to add 20 to 25 more in 2022. James Daunt, who took over as chief executive officer in 2019 after hedge fund Elliott Management Corp. acquired the company, has been refurbishing existing stores and empowering store managers to use their local knowledge. Book sales have boomed during the pandemic, up 13% year over year, and at least 172 new independent bookstores opened in 2021. Some of those indies have even taken to the mall.
Chain box stores were big businesses, sure, but they were also a crucial third space for casual hangouts and serendipitous run-ins that metro suburbs, smaller cities and rural places often lack. As literary critic Adam Morgan tweeted in January, “I grew up in post-boom textile mill towns in North and South Carolina; we had no independent bookstores, so Barnes & Noble was the only literary space I knew until grad school … It felt like New York to me. That forest green and warm polished wood was like walking into another world I didn’t want to leave.”
Why do we have nostalgia for these shops that were, by many rubrics, worse than the bookstores we have now? More generic, more plastic, less curated, less authentic. Because those bookstores were never just about books — they were about access, and freedom. The chains reached deeper into America, and brought books to a wider demographic, than today’s approximately 6,000 stores can. Yes, we have Amazon now. But it will never be the same as sitting on the carpet in some under-trafficked aisle and reading your first Sweet Valley High, your first Stephen King, or your first biography of The Great One.
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“The big-box store was a glorious thing while it lasted. To people in many parts of America, they were a kind of Aladdin’s cave,” Wharton management professor Dan Raff told All Things Considered in 2011.
The chain stores were pick-up joints without the alcohol, teen hangouts without the style pressures of the mall, opportunities to explore identity.
Barnes & Noble bought B. Dalton in 1986, setting off a race to be the biggest national bookstore chain, with the various stores adding software, music and standalone kids shops. But the downfall of the mall spelled trouble for both Borders and B&N, leading to bigger and bigger locations, selling more and more items that weren’t books. The stores added cafes, whimsical children’s sections and big comfy chairs, expanding to multi-level spaces of the type satirized in the 1998 rom-com You’ve Got Mail.
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It’s not until you add the coffee shop to the chain bookstore, circa 1990, that it becomes the best illustration of sociologist Ray Oldenburg’s concept of the “third place.” The chain stores were pick-up joints without the alcohol, teen hangouts without the style pressures of the mall, opportunities to explore identity both socially and via reading material out from under the thumb of parents and teachers. As with the malls and shopping centers that often support a bookstore, these private enterprises offered accommodation to a broad range of people, in terms of class, race and age.
“Nowadays you look at a Best Buy, a Ross, and you shop and you get out,” says Daniel Gerber, regional director for Barnes & Noble in the south. “But with the cafes, people would go in there and spend five and six hours. It was a pick-up place, the antithesis of the bar scene.”
Readers found platonic community in the aisles as well. “Romance readers know where they are welcome,” says Sarah MacLean, bestselling romance author, co-host of the podcast Fated Mates, and one-time Cranston, Rhode Island, Borders employee. “They know they can get their books at a supermarket, at Costco, at Barnes & Noble or Books-A-Million and they can get them without judgment.”
Link to the rest at Bloomberg
PG suggests that basing a come-back business plan on nostalgia may be a little risky, but his type is definitely not in the business plan for any big box store, so what does he know?