Everyone recognizes the changes in the wholesale side of the bargain/remainder business, but what of retail sales? Are bookstores changing their methods for selling bargain and remainder books to end customers? What impact are such changes having?
Off the Tables and Onto the Shelves
For years, the preferred way to display bargain books in stores has been to group them on tables, but these days, many stores are moving away from that model. Several stores tell PW they're “ghettoizing” bargain books less frequently (although almost every store maintains some bargain tables) and often shelving them along with mainstream stock, by category. The results, however, seem to be mixed. While having the books available to all shoppers is a plus, dedicated bargain buyers are often disturbed that they can't find low-priced titles all in one place.
That's what happened at the Tattered Cover in Denver, Colo., says bargain/remainders buyer Dennis Tyler: “Tattered Cover integrated its bargain books in two of our three stores about a year ago. This upset 'bargain' shoppers who only shopped the bargain area. Customers can identify bargain books because they are spine-tagged with bright yellow stickers, and price labels are on the front rather than the back. But we did not see the increase in sales that we expected, although sales didn't really decrease, either. However, we do plan to keep the bargain books integrated in the two stores where we've done that.”
At University Book Store in Seattle, new and used book manager Mark Mouser reports, “We are now buying small-quantity bargain, one or two copies, for the new book sections. We feed those into the sections to give us a deeper inventory and we also are feeding in a lot of the leftover single copies from the remainder stacks. That changed when we started doing used books about three and a half years ago, which gave us the opportunity to do things in a different way.”
The move has resulted, says Mouser, in “marginally better sales. We still sell an awful lot off the tables—that's how we really sell bargain books. In my mind, tables have been proven to be the way bargain books sell best. We've tried them on shelves, but they fly off of tables. But integrating them definitely supplements the selection in our regular section. It was a tough winter at our store for bargain books, but the last four months have been killer.”
Powell's Books in Portland, Ore., also uses both intershelving and separate tables to sell bargain books. Bargain buyer Jeff Hudson says, “Bargain is attractive to us because our customers like selection and value. It's amazing, however, how many people will choose the new book even when the bargain book is there in the section. We also have a lot of display space devoted to bargain books, though. Many books sell a lot better face-out, and at Powell's they can get buried in the sections.”
“We have changed a little bit,” reports Arsen Kashkashian, inventory manager at Boulder Book Store in Boulder, Colo. “It used to be that all the bargain books were on tables throughout the store, and for the most part that's still true, 80% are on the tables—but we are starting to incorporate more and more into the sections. Yesterday I was working in the regular fiction section and took a look at the Joanne Harris books. I saw Chocolat is still selling, but I put all the remainders in with it, face-out, so now her whole backlist is in the fiction section, too. The same is true of several other writers throughout the store—customers seem to like seeing all their books. Otherwise, a customer might think, oh, they only have Chocolat and I read that one. We're trying to work it from both angles.” But the store still maintains six cases of newly arrived used books by its front door. “People live for that section,” says Kashkashian. “They come in week after week. We have 20,000 square feet, and some people only shop those six cases and the remainder table right in front of them.”
Some stores are simply sticking with the tried-and-true. At Green Apple Books in San Francisco, which remainder book buyer Nick Buzanski describes as “a rambling staircase kind of store” about 8,000 square feet in size, books remain on the tables. Says Buzanski, “I have about six different main tables throughout the store. One is downstairs, so when you walk in you have display tables of new books and staff picks, and just after that is the main remainder table.” Remainders account for 7% or 8% of sales, Buzanski estimates, which, as he points out, is high, given the low price point for many bargain books.
Finally, the three Books & Books stores in Florida haven't integrated bargain books or left them on bargain tables. Instead, these books are mostly displayed in stacks throughout the store. “It's a way for us to show our customers they can get value at our stores,” says owner Mitchell Kaplan.
Many Sources of Change
It's not just the retail side of the business that's shifting, of course, and changes to the entire system—changes to the availability of titles, the frequency of orders, and so forth—are having an impact on the retail end as well. Technology continues to be the 800-pound gorilla of change throughout the book business, impacting how stores buy, sell and organize their stock.
Tyler has been with Tattered Cover for more than 18 years and has been purchasing bargain/remainder books for the last eight. He recalls, “Just a few years ago, I still met with book reps who filled out sales forms in pen, shoved book covers at me and kept up a constant chatter about the value of particular titles. The remainder business is still fun, but becoming more and more impersonal every day.”
Boulder Book Store has sold bargain books since it opened in 1973, but, says inventory manager Kashkashian, “It's becoming a tighter and tighter business. We're trying to push more of our sales to remainders and used books. The margins are so much better, and you don't have to compete against the Internet the same way. If you have a $6 remainder, even if a customer could get it for $4 on Amazon, it's not worth it. It's so cheap that I don't think that same calculation goes on in people's heads.
“And the biggest change in the industry as a whole is that so much of our own shopping, too, now happens online. You can do a one-book order now. I saw Paulo Coelho's novel The Witch of Portobello, which is the number one paperback in our store right now, on Book Depot, so I bought it and sold the copies. That's a big difference from the way it used to be, when you'd go to the shows and the warehouses. Being able to replenish inventory constantly, even by just going online at the end of the day for 20 minutes, is a lot different than waiting for the next show or rep or warehouse visit. Some stores check the sites religiously. We don't do it quite that much, but I'm online a decent amount. Finally, we're running the store leaner because of the economy, but also because of new tools like Above the Treeline. Remainders are a good way to fill the shelves, to look like a good, healthy stocked store with less of an investment. Otherwise we'd have some sections that wouldn't look as strong as they do, and customers want a store that looks robust. I can't pay for full-price inventory like we did 15 years ago.”
Mouser of University Book Store, where bargain books account for about 8% of volume, says, “There are certain publishers we used to rely on for really incredible bargain books that now pulp their books instead. They're making the argument that if they remainder a hardcover, it will compete with the paperback sale, but that's not our experience. Bargain books are impulse buys. People are able to afford a library and start collecting, and they become real book people. But I do blame the visibility of hurts and remainders through the Internet for what's happened. When they were just in our stores, they were invisible and they truly were impulse buys.” In an attempt to make the books even more visible, the store is also for the first time entering bargain and remainder titles into its own computer system so they can be listed on the store's Web site. “They've been off the grid,” Mouser admits.
Hudson of Powell's points out that there have been three major changes in the bargain book business in recent years: “There's more choice than ever in terms of books, which is great as a buyer; there are more ways than ever to buy the books, so wholesalers have become more sophisticated in terms of how they sell; the third and probably biggest change is a move toward more exclusive deals between publishers and wholesalers, where they'll basically take all of their hurts and returns and get first rights on remainders as well. The landscape can change rather quickly if those deals change hands. But things are always shifting. In fact, the big challenge is to stay on top of what's going on in the industry, which is why shows are important. Because there's a lot of choice, we have more sophistication in terms of choice. There are more choices as to what you can put on the shelves, and the quality is better.”
