Indie Bookstores Defied Amazon. Who's Next?
It's called the retail
apocalypse. No zombies yet, but thanks to the rising dominance of Amazon and
its infinite inventory of inexpensive items (plus free shipping with Prime!),
traditional brick-and-mortar stores are struggling to survive. In the last few
years alone, dozens of national brands have declared bankruptcy or shuttered
their stores altogether, including mall staples like Toys"R"Us, The
Limited, Radio Shack, Claire's and Payless.
But one long-dismissed
business model has unexpectedly thrived in the Amazon age: independent
bookstores.
If the last time you
thought about the plight of independent bookstores was the 1998 rom-com
"You've Got Mail," you've got some catching up to do. When Meg Ryan
and Tom Hanks starred as a boutique bookshop owner (her) and the CEO of a
Borders-like big-box chain (him), independent bookstores were poised on the
brink of extinction.
Indie bookstores took
their first hit in the 1980s with the arrival of mall retailers like B. Dalton
and Waldenbooks, which opened new stores at the rate of one per week. The
second shock was the dominance of big-box chains like Borders and Barnes &
Noble in the 1990s. Then Amazon launched in 1995 promoting itself as the
"Earth's Biggest Bookstore," offering a deadly combination of online
ordering, huge selection, low prices and convenient shipping.
Between 1995 and 2000,
the number of independent bookstores in the United States shrunk by 43 percent.
Yes, almost half of all indie bookstores went out of business in five years. No
wonder Meg Ryan's character hated Tom Hanks's so much (before she loved him, of
course).
But something
interesting started to happen around 2008, a year after Amazon released the
Kindle, its game-changing e-reader that not only threatened to flatten
bookstores once and for all, but also the existence of physical books
themselves.
As Harvard Business School
professor Ryan Raffaelli explores in a fascinating case study, America's
independent booksellers, assisted by the American Booksellers Association,
engaged in a coordinated effort to awaken consumers to the value of buying a
physical book from a knowledgeable local bookseller.
The Buy Local Movement
Since bookstores were
some of the first victims of Amazon's dominance, says Raffaelli, they were also
the first retail sector forced to adapt to the new reality. They responded by
essentially creating the "buy local" movement that's now widely
celebrated through events like Small Business Saturday following Black Friday.
When chain bookstores
like Borders and its subsidiary Waldenbooks went belly up in 2011, locally
owned and operated independent bookstores were waging a comeback. Between 2009
and 2015, the total number of independent bookstores in the U.S. grew by 35
percent.
"In my mind, this
is a story of resilience, a story of hope and a story of the power that can
come from local communities," Raffaelli says.
Raffaelli cites
bookstores as a shining example of what he calls "technology
reemergence," the unexpected ways that industries respond to disruptive
technological shocks to their core business models. In a previous study, he
showed how Swiss watchmakers reinvented themselves after the disruption of
digital (think Swatch). Over the past five years, he's conducted hundreds of
interviews and field visits with independent bookstores to understand exactly
how these once-threatened shops have thrived.
What emerged is what
Raffaelli calls the "three Cs" of the bookstore resurgence:
Community: Promoting
the idea that shopping locally strengthens the community financially and
supports community values.
Curation: Knowledgeable
bookstore owners choose and promote hidden gems that aren't on the bestseller
lists. They can also make highly personalized recommendations, including titles
and authors in completely different genres. "That's actually quite
difficult for an Amazon logarithm to do," says Raffaelli.
Convening: Bookstores
host hundreds of events each year, from author readings to game nights to
children's birthday parties. "Convening is about finding ways to bring
people from the community into the store to connect with others and have a
conversation about ideas," says Raffaelli.
An Independent Woman
When Melody Williams
opened Winding Way Books in Lancaster, Pennsylvania in 2010, Amazon wasn't even
on her radar. As a woman of color in a rural city, she wanted to create a space
where inclusion and honest conversation were just as important as the books on
the shelf. The slogan on Winding Way t-shirts reads: "Make some noise. This
is not a library."
"Your bookstore
becomes whoever you are," says Williams, who worries about the effects of
gentrification in Lancaster, and is vocal about socioeconomic and racial
issues. "I put books in the window like 'The New Jim Crow' so that people
know that we're aware of what's going on. And when people come into the store,
we try to make them feel as comfortable as possible."
The unique role that
this small, one-woman bookstore plays in the Lancaster community is something
that's impossible for Amazon to replicate. Which is precisely the kind of
differentiator that other small businesses need to identify and cultivate if
they hope to survive the retail apocalypse.
Serving Your Clientele
Adam Lean is founder of
The CFO Project, a consulting service that connects small businesses with
experienced chief financial officers for a monthly fee. He says that any small
business can follow the successful model of independent bookstores by being
hyper-aware of their target audience and serving that audience in real and
authentic ways.
"Amazon wants to
serve everyone," says Lean in an email. "Smaller stores can survive
if they don't try to serve everyone; they need to serve a very specific target
audience."
Once you know that
target audience, it's all about providing superior service and a superior
product in a way that shows that you truly care about the customer. As Lean
wrote on The Startup, people make purchases based on emotion and they buy from
people they trust. That kind of loyalty takes time and energy to cultivate, but
it's something that small, independent shops are uniquely positioned to offer.
In fact, if you look
around the retail economy, the bookstore boom isn't an isolated example of an
independent David facing down corporate and e-commerce Goliaths.
-
Neighborhood toy stores known for
curated gifts and helpful staff have soared where Toys"R"Us sank.
-
Independent hardware stores are
leveraging knowledgeable staff to compete with Home Depot and Lowe's.
-
With the surprise comeback of vinyl and the
international notoriety of Record Store Day, record and CD stores are making a
modest comeback, with 400 new shops opening in the U.S. between 2012 and 2017.
-
Even travel agents, an industry famously
killed by websites like Expedia, are seeing an uptick thanks to customers who
are willing to pay more for personalized recommendations.
source:
https://money.howstuffworks.com/indie-bookstores-defied-amazon-whos-next.htm
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