From The New York Times:
This fall, at a moment when retailers traditionally look forward to reaping holiday profits, the owner of the fourth-largest bookstore chain in the country surrendered to the forces of e-commerce.
Book World, founded in 1976, sold hardcovers, paperbacks and sometimes tobacco in malls, downtowns and vacation areas across the Upper Midwest. It had endured recessions, the expansion of superstores like Borders and Barnes & Noble, and then the rise of Amazon. But the 45-store chain could not survive the shifting nature of shopping itself, and so announced its liquidation.
“Sales in our mall stores are down this year from 30 to 60 percent,” said Bill Streur, Book World’s owner. “The internet is killing retail. Bookstores are just the first to go.”
As e-commerce becomes more deeply embedded in the fabric of daily life, including for the first time in rural areas, bookstores are undergoing a final shakeout. Family Christian Stores, which had 240 stores that sold books and other religious merchandise, closed this year, not long after Hastings Entertainment, a retailer of books, music and video games with 123 stores, declared bankruptcy and then shut down.
“Books aren’t going away, but bookstores are,” said Matthew Duket, a Book World sales associate waiting for customers in the West Bend, Wis., store.
. . . .
Replacing Book World as the fourth-largest chain, Publishers Weekly says, will be a company that had no physical presence a few years ago. That would be Amazon, which having conquered the virtual world has opened or announced 15 bookshops, including at the Time Warner Center in Manhattan.
. . . .
The [Book World] chain swung from a profit in 2014 to break-even in 2015 to a loss in 2016, although Mr. Streur declined to provide numbers.
“There was nobody interested in buying us,” he said.
. . . .
The store in Mequon is in a strip mall with at least eight empty storefronts. In Oshkosh, the store is on the main street, but at 10 a.m. there was no foot traffic. The stores in Fond du Lac and Manitowoc were almost as bleak.
These streets look as if an overpowering recession had hit, but the unemployment rate in Wisconsin fell this year to a 17-year low. Mequon is especially affluent: Its household income is double the national average. This is Amazon Prime territory, its shoppers drawn to the fast-shipping membership program that some analysts say half the households in the country have joined.
. . . .
“To draw people into a store now is a monumental challenge. This is a huge sea change for retail. I don’t see any end to it.”
. . . .
“The age of the physical chain of bookstores is behind us — unless you don’t need to be profitable,” said Daniel Goldin, the owner of Boswell Book Company in Milwaukee, the sole surviving descendant of a local chain that began in 1927.
Link to the rest at The New York Times
There’s a [very long] article on Bloomberg about America’s retail apocalypse, from early November 2017. It debunks the Amazon theory and is well worth a read.
I’d include a link but I’ve never figured how on this device. Sorry!
This one, perchance?
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-retail-debt/
Good one indeed, thanks for the tip.
I agree, thanks for digging it up.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-retail-debt/
and much more.
Debt without a sales drop works.
Sales drop without debt works.
Both together don’t.
Root cause? Pick one.
I liked the charts listing the number of bookstore closures and announced openings. 😀
Thanks for posting that. Certainly an eye-opener as retailers are raving about improved sales this Christmas.
You’re welcome, Elise.
If I read one more article about how great the economy is doing and how low unemployment is and how super-high consumer confidence is, I’m going to scream. Because as an ordinary person and a consumer AND a business owner, I am for SURE not seeing it.
What planet are these people living on?
> fourth-largest bookstore chain in the country surrendered
> to the forces of e-commerce. Book World,
I not only never saw one, I never heard of them.
> Hastings
We had one of those nearby for a while. They had about 10% of the floor space given over to books. The exact same “store mix” you could find anywhere, the tubs of “direct from the printer to the remainder bin”, and the cardboard Stephen King and Nora Roberts displays.
The rest of the store was originally a video store, with VHS tapes (it was that long ago…) and then DVDs. Then as the video rental business tanked, they carved out space for tchochkes – eventually half the store was a junk shop – and a coffee shop, and a kiddie playground, and a toy department, and CD music sales.
Sure, you could buy a book there… but they had the same books as Wal-Mart or Target, so why make the extra stop?
We moved to a town that had a Hastings when I was in middle school (early 80s). 1/3 of the stores was music (LPs, cassettes) and the rest was books. It was a great place. There were two where I currently live, and I rarely entered them in the last few years before they closed.
As a kid in the 70s there were many Mom&Pop bookstores in Albuquerque, they were fed by the national distributors. Then in the 90s the big chain bookstores wiped out the national distributors, buying direct from the publisher instead. That wiped out the Mom&Pop stores when they no longer had easy access to books locally. Now the chain bookstores are being wiped out by Amazon, that is able to sell me the book I want, where the chain bookstore was always filled with books that I didn’t want to buy.
I find that ironic.
> books that I didn’t want to buy
That describes what happened to my local bookstores to a T.
“Sales in our mall stores are down this year from 30 to 60 percent,”
Hadn’t we already heard that many malls were having problems – so of course any stores in those malls would also be in trouble?
‘The New York Times’ spins out this type of junk and then can’t figure out why I see no reason to waste money on a subscription with them …
Thirty percent decline in a year is huge for a store. Malls aren’t seeing that. NYTDS
If Amazon, with a measly little fifteen bookshops is the 4th-largest chain, I can’t imagine how small the other bookstore chains (aside from B&N) have to be.
I doubt there’s a fifth chain left.
1. B&N
2. Books a million
3. Half price books
4. Amazon?
Gone before Borders were Crown, Brentano’s, B. Dalton, Walden, Doubleday, and some 5000 independent stores, all without Amazon involvement.
Turns out Amazon isn’t quite
fourth yet. Seagul books is still bigger
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bookstore_chains
There’s a handful of chains still left though most barely qualify as chains. And one, Hudson, barely qualifies as a bookstore.
Last I checked, Hudson has more outlets than B&N, 970 vs 781. They may not have the selection, but they do sell books and I’ll bet they’re doing Ok.
They’re newsstands. They carry about as many different book titles as a Wallgreens or Costco. Not a place to find midlist or backlist. Just “bestsellers”.
That’s what “barely qualifies” is about.
All true, but consider that they occupy smaller high-rent high traffic locations and offer only what sells to a relatively uncritical impulsive audience. Yes, there are no dusty backlist titles on their racks. People go to Amazon for those. They have more than a Walgreens, not much more but a bit more. What they don’t have is financial trouble, which makes them bookselling survivors — they’re doing something right, at least as far as books are concerned.
They also have a web store, (BPH titles) and even sell Kobo editions.
https://www.hudsonbooksellers.com/
All true. Nobody is handwringing over newsstand closures. Hudson has a nice and safe niche.
Now, try a thought experiment: the DEMOLITION MAN test “What if all bookstores were Hudson’s?” What would that do to the pbook industry?
By ABA rules, a Hudson is a bookstore. By the point of view of most readers it isn’t the kind of place you go to on purpose. It’s all about drive-by sales.
Technically it’s a bookstore chain. It’s in the name. But when the literary culture types wax wistful over their bookstore pipe dreams, Hudson books isn’t what they pine over. Readers go to Amazon when they can’t find what they want in a B&N stocking 30,000 books. Are they going to be satisfied by stores stocking nothing but a hundred “NYT bestsellers”?
If all bookstores were Hudson everybody would be an ebook reader. Or a videogamer. 😉
Deseret Books has more, and so does Lifeways.
Barnes & Noble – 630 stores
Books-A-Million – 260
Half Price Books- 120
[ Book World 45 ]
Amazon 15
That’s actually more than I was expecting.
Amazon has 16 stores, not fifteen
A Streifield piece.
As expected it is filled with ADS like the usual “Amazon doesn’t need to make a profit” misinformation even when quoting a store manager that admitted they didn’t advertise or “put their name out there”.
(Big shock that “stock it and they will come” didn’t work out, right?)
The summation is that books aren’t going anywhere but bookstores are going away. Riiight…