My Home Town: An Author's Take on the Coming of a Chain

The following column by Amy Stewart, author of The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms, forthcoming from Algonquin Books (January 2004), originally appeared in the May 8 edition of Humboldt County, California's North Coast Journal.

As you may know by now, a Borders bookstore will open at the Bayshore Mall on May 17. I have mixed feelings about this: on one hand, I am fiercely loyal to our local bookstores, and I dislike the homogenization that chain stores bring to a town. When I go on vacation, I don't want to eat at the Olive Garden and shop at the Gap. I'm more interested in local color, but as chain stores move in and small shops find it harder to compete, that local color starts to fade.

On the other hand, I lived in Santa Cruz when a Borders opened down the street from my beloved Bookshop Santa Cruz. Like many of Bookshop's customers, I worried that business would suffer in the face of competition against a corporate-owned bookstore that could afford to offer deep discounts on popular books. But Bookshop survived, and when I visited the store a few months ago, there were lines at every register. Loyal customers did not desert Bookshop.

That's not to say that locally owned bookstores always have it so easy. Oren Teicher, chief operating officer of the American Booksellers Association (ABA), told me that in the early nineties, ABA had five thousand members. Ten years later, that number has dropped to two thousand. Several large cities in the U.S. no longer have a major independent bookstore.

"And during that same ten-year period," Teicher said, "we've quadrupled the square footage of retail space devoted to books. For a small bookstore, the margins are modest and the competition comes from all over. Half of all books sold at retail are not sold at a bookstore at all. Costco and Safeway sell books, as do drugstores and specialty shops like Williams Sonoma. Only about 16 percent of books are sold by independent bookstores, but the good news is that that market share has held steady for the last four years, even as the number of independent bookstores has declined. That means that the survivors -- most of them, anyway -- are doing all right."

How, then, should a locally owned bookstore react to the opening of a chain store? In Austin, Bookpeople and Waterloo Records joined together to protest the opening of a nearby Borders. They helped launch a "Keep Austin Weird" campaign that encouraged customers to support local shops. They commissioned an economic impact analysis that compared the economic benefits of locally owned businesses to those of chain stores, demonstrating that for every $100 spent at Borders, $13 would return to the local economy in the form of jobs, purchase of goods and services, and support of local artists. That same $100 spent at Bookpeople would return $45 to the local economy. In fact, the report stated, if every resident in the county would redirect $100 of the money they already spend on holiday gifts from chains to locally owned stores, the economic impact in Austin would reach $10 million per year. (For a related article, click here; to read the report, click here.

Armed with this information, and backed by an irate group of citizens who protested the $2.1 million in fee waivers offered by the city to the new retail complex that Borders would occupy, Bookpeople rallied support, and, [in late April], Borders announced that, for a variety of reasons, it would not open the store after all.

No such controversy has erupted here in Humboldt County, and there is no "Keep Humboldt County Weird" campaign underway (although if there was, I'd be the first to buy a T-shirt.) I called around to some local booksellers to find out their reaction to the new bookstore.

Most booksellers emphasized the unique character of their stores. Nancy Short at Booklegger said, "Our store's in the center of Old Town, a neighborhood of unique stores that you don't find in any mall. We have a personal connection to our books and our customers. Basically, no chain can be as intimately involved in the community, or as good for the community, as an independent store."

Tom Clapp at Rookery Books in Arcata agreed, saying, "We get a lot of tourists in this store. We hear over and over that there aren't any small, independent bookstores left where they're from. So they really appreciate what we're lucky enough to have."

Walt Frazer, owner of Perfectly Good Books in Henderson Center, emphasized the loyalty of his customers. "A lot of people who buy books here don't buy from chains. I started ordering new books because there wasn't another new bookstore in Eureka, and some people just don't like to go to the mall. It's not a bookish place."

Courtney Blake of Blake's Books in McKinleyville also talked about the special relationships she has developed with her customers. "For instance, I have one customer who is really into books on wrestling. He might go into another store to see what they have, but he usually comes back to me to order them. I let him look at the listings on my computer so he can read the annotations and decide what he wants."

Judith McGinty at Consider the Alternatives in Eureka has a similar relationship with her customers. "People bring in their book club catalogs and ask me to order the books they've found. They use the catalog as a reference, but they like to shop locally. I'm the same way. The money I spend at Many Hands helps pay wages, and that money comes back to my shop eventually. It may sound like a parasitic economy, but it works."

Barbara Turner at Northtown Books in Arcata also emphasized their unique selection, saying, "We customize our stock to the obsessions, interests, and whims of the locals, filtering out the schlock and looking for the books with real merit. We always like to say that we stock the interesting titles that sell as well as the interesting ones that don't, and this practice keeps us honest booksellers who aren't just looking at the bottom line."

Turner brings up an interesting point: local booksellers buy according to their own unique tastes. Some authors have expressed concern that chain bookstores, with only a handful of buyers on the national level, will gradually influence what gets published. Barbara Kingsolver has been particularly outspoken about this issue, calling the local bookstore that popularized her first book her "guardian angel" and saying that she owes her career to independent bookstores that handsold her early books and kept them from going out of print. I should point out that my own book was chosen by Barnes & Noble's Discover Great New Writers program, a special recognition for new writers that boosted sales tremendously. Borders has a similar program called Original Voices. Both highlight the work of new and emerging writers.

I called Pam Parsons, manager of the new Borders, who transferred here from the Santa Rosa store, and asked her about the concern that local booksellers often have about a chain store coming to town. "People believe there's not enough literate people to go around, and that's not trusting your community," she said. "Both new and used bookstores will continue to have readers shopping at their stores. In my experience, we bring in new readers. And if we don't have what a customer is looking for, we'll send them to another local shop. I want to be part of the book community here. I think there's room for everybody."

The new Borders will be 21,000 square feet, will stock about 100,000 titles (books and music), and will include a café. They plan to have about 30 employees, including three from the Santa Rosa store and some -- but not all -- of the Waldenbooks employees who will be out of work when that store closes. (Waldenbooks and Borders are owned by the same parent company, but, according to Parsons, have different hiring standards.)

Where does that leave us? I can only speak for myself: my buying practices won't change much once Borders opens. When I want a hard-to-find book, I check the Internet for the title and call a local bookstore and ask them to order it. It's usually there in a few days. I buy Book Sense gift certificates (available at Northtown) that can be redeemed at hundreds of participating independent bookstores around the country. And I have shifted my holiday spending to local shops. The gift I give most often? A book, of course.