Lee Booksellers Serves Nebraska Communities for 25 Years

Lee Booksellers is the only locally owned, full-service independent bookstore in Lincoln, Nebraska. And this year the store's owners, Jim McKee and Linda Hillegass, celebrated 25 years in business and 26 years of marriage. The couple had celebrated their nascent marriage with a bookstore venture romantically named for both of them -- each happens to have the middle name Lee.

Store owners Linda Hillegass and Jim McKee.

The store, like many partnerships, has experienced some great years, some not-so-great years, and moments when the end seemed to be at hand. McKee and Hillegass have risen to each challenge through sensitivity to their market and conscious efforts to diversify. They have expanded -- opening new stores -- with varying degrees of success, but have continually been willing to regroup and adapt when necessary.

Currently, Lee Booksellers consists of a 5,000- square-foot flagship store at the Edgewater Center and a 2,600 square-foot store at the Piedmont Shops. McKee and Hillegass also run a small regional publishing company with over 30 titles, and the smaller Piedmont store houses McKee's original business, a coin shop. Hillegass told BTW that good years for the coin business or the publishing house helped tide the couple over lean years for the bookstores, and vice versa.

The first two Lee stores opened simultaneously in 1979 -- one in Edgewood Center and one in East Park Plaza, at the time, a new diverse shopping area. The first lasted only about one year due to untenable interest rates on a business loan and construction on an adjacent building that was halted, stranding the store. The East Park Plaza store remained a successful business up until 2000, when the center's new owners terminated the leases of 60 local stores, including Lee's, and transformed the mall into a "big box" center.

Similar retailing strategies ended Lee's 1980s leased operations in two local department stores, Crossroads and Miller & Paine. When the two stores closed and were converted to national chains, Younkers and Dillards, in 1989 and 1990, respectively, Lee was left with inventory that in 1990 was moved into a new location in Piedmont Shops. Ten years later, at the closing of its East Park Plaza location, Lee Booksellers relocated to a much larger space within the Piedmont Shops and has remained there. In September 1992, McKee and Hillegass triumphantly returned to Edgewood Center, the home of their unsuccessful first store, to open what is now their flagship store.

In the early 1990s, Lincoln's first chain bookstore, which Hillegass refers to a "Voldemort -- that which cannot be named," opened nearby. "Our business dropped by 37 percent that year. We had a few more of those bad years and realized that we had to do more than smile and have great customer service. We started thinking of possible marketing angles and began making a big deal about our being local. We had never done that before, and many people always thought we were part of a large chain. Our advertising, publicity, newsletters -- all stressed that we were a local business, and many people expressed a commitment to buying local."

Hillegass told BTW that when a second branch of the same chain bookstore opened two or three years ago in an affluent part of town, near Lee's flagship store, "I said, Well, that is it. We're done for. In fact, the effect on our business was nonexistent; it was not the disaster we thought it would be."

Hillegass said that they reasoned that people who were going to shop at the chain store already did and that business was simply divided between its two locations. People committed to an independent store would continue to shop at Lee.

Hillegass attributes some of the relatively new customer loyalty to independent stores to the spreading national awareness of the Book Sense program. "As Book Sense became better known, we started hearing from people that they wanted to support independent bookstores. For example, someone driving past Lincoln on the highway stopped into our store when she saw a sign of ours. The first thing she asked was, 'Are you an independent. I only shop at independents.'"

In our store, we took an underused wall and turned it into a Book Sense display. We have 12 to 14 shelves full of Book Sense books face out. Now people stop there first, before browsing in the store."

Lee Booksellers -- www.leebooksellers.com -- was among the earliest participants in BookSense.com. It was part of the program's beta test and signed on as soon as the program was officially launched. "We kept hearing about it at [BookExpo America] and said to each other, 'We can either get into the 21st century, or not.'" – Nomi Schwartz