Problem-Solving in the Backroom
Judith Rosen -- 7/17/00
Booksellers discuss how they cope with behind-the-scenes difficulties
Shimmering windows, colorful display tables and shelves laden with books may catch customers' eyes and make them want to come in and buy, but without the backroom, none of it would be possible. The veritable heart of a bookstore, the backroom is where orders are received, new books are first cracked open, returns are boxed and gossip is exchanged. When the backroom gets clogged with the bookstore equivalent of too much cholesterol--piled-up boxes from misshipments, overflowing bins filled with invoices that need to be straightened out, and take-out wrappers from too many late nights spent trying to set things right--store operations are greatly slowed. To extend the metaphor a bit further, PW asked booksellers what they see as the primary contributing factors to their stores' blocked arteries, and what can be done (short of bypass surgery, or only ordering direct from distributors) to alleviate the problems.
Shipping Shape
"I think most of our problems in the backroom are the publishers' problem," stated Cammy Mannino, owner of Halfway Down the Stairs (Rochester, Mich.). "The problems are gargantuan as these giants get gianter." Despite the rhetoric concerning "efficiencies of scale" and "synergy" that publishers tout each time they merge--Random and BDD, Penguin and Putnam, Harper and Morrow--Mannino and other booksellers find just the opposite, at least for their stores. Mannino said that when Penguin started buying up companies, she started consistently getting multiple shipments of her orders. "They talk about efficiencies, but it d sn't look efficient on my end," she remarked. "They don't upgrade their computer system. They have hired consultants to harmonize the systems, which is like layering software on software. I had an autographing last fall for Rosemary Wells, where I got triple-shipped. I counted 60 boxes I had to send back.
"For me," Mannino continued, "it's just a constant set of little irritations. I want to support the publishers: (a) I get a better discount, and (b) I want to support my sales rep. If Ingram can be as efficient as it is, why can't publishers?" She cited as an example Simon & Schuster, which has a $75 shipping minimum per warehouse, but d sn't let customers know their order is being shipped from two warehouses, so it d sn't meet the minimum for one of them. "Why should it be a responsibility for me to know which warehouse the books are at?" Mannino asked. "It's nuts to put your customer in that position. I can't make my customers do anything that complicated."
Mannino's not alone in shipping and order problems. "Whenever we have large orders, of which we have many, there are errors that take a lot of time making phone calls and being put on hold," said Gloria Cain, sales associate, Yellow Book Road (La Mesa, Calif.). "Publishers need to check out what's happening in their warehouses. There are consistently so many errors that we joke about what they are smoking."
Then, too, it can take a long time for an order to come in. "There are some publishers whose turnaround time is still not acceptable, when I can get turnaround time in less than 24 hours from my distributor," said Lily Bartels, book buyer, Open Door (Schenectady, N.Y.). Also, for books with onsale dates, she added, "I'd like to see the books come a few days before laydown date so I don't have to bite my nails and I can call if there's a problem." Instead, she hedges her bets, ordering from the publisher with a backorder to her distributor of choice.
Similarly, Dennis Ronberg, co-owner, Linden Tree Records and Books (Los Altos, Calif.) remarked, "To make a gross generalization, we order from three distributors--Bookpeople, Ingram and Baker & Taylor. We order electronically, and we know what is coming. Ninety-nine percent of the time, it will be there. We would prefer to go to the publisher, but so many times the shipments from the publishers do not come in as good a shape, it takes longer, and if it's more than two boxes, they come at different times."
Those split shipments to which Ronberg referred are the bane of booksellers from coast to coast. Often only one box in a shipment contains a packing slip--and it's seldom in the one that arrives first. The box itself can be an important clue in tracking down a shipment, so booksellers have to jot down its tracking number before it g s into the recycle pile. Then, too, the same person may not end up receiving the rest of the shipment when it arrives the next day, or over the course of several days. At Halfway Down the Stairs, there is a shelf in the backroom just so Mannino and her staff can write notes to each other about the status of the shipments. In addition, new books can sit for days off the sales floor while the bookseller waits for the rest of the shipment and the packing slip to arrive.
At least for some booksellers, these multiboxes are no longer coming with only one or two books per carton. Jennifer Anglin, owner of Enchanted Forest (Dallas, Tex.), solved that problem by sending out a letter stating, "Don't send us any less than six books per box." Nowadays, she said, "If we get three sequential boxes, we pay for only one of those boxes, and the others we deduct." She's willing to pay what she considers to be a fair price for shipping, but for one-box cartons, shipping can cost more than the book. When there is an error, she includes a copy of her original letter with the invoice.
Get Packing
Of course, getting the books in is only half of the problem. They can't go onto store shelves until packing slips are matched with orders and everything has been filed in the store's computer. These slips, which one bookseller once found nestled in a box of promotional materials that were shipped with a book order, are yet another reason that boxes in mean phone calls out--and lots of time on hold. "One wishes to operate efficiently," said NECBA president Carol Chittenden, owner of Eight Cousins (Falmouth, Mass.). "One wonders why there are so many little stumbling blocks. If booksellers are the best marketers, why wouldn't publishers want booksellers spending time handselling, rather than on hold with customer service?"
Large bookstores, too, suffer the same problems. Catherine Rihm, inventory control manager at Joseph-Beth Booksellers (Lexington, Ky.), estimated that on any given day, shipping and packing-slip problems can hold up the sale of as many as 50 books. "It d s seem like almost every day we have to call a publisher," she said. "We don't want to receive something if we don't have all the information. Since we don't receive invoices here [Joseph-Beth has a billing office offsite], and we don't have pricing or discount information on our packing lists, we need more information." For her store, which uses a lot of dump displays, additional difficulties arise when packing slips contain only the dump's ISBN, and not the list of books that are supposed to go in it.
Rihm also runs into problems just trying to figure out what didn't come in and trying to make up for it by going through Ingram, which handles most of the store's buying. "You have to run reports on publishers," she said. "But the big danger is they can show a certain amount on order, so we can't get our reorder from Ingram." That has caused out-of-stock situations on the floor for books that may very well be in stock at the publisher.
"Lately," Rihm said, "the thing that has been causing problems with my inventory team is 2-for-1 deals." She has found them to be a bit like the Trojan horse: a great gift, but one with complications, because often booksellers don't know how to ring them up. "One item we purchased we decided not to put out, because it was so complicated," she said, lauding another publisher that shrinkwrapped the two books together with one ISBN.
If packing slips seem confusing now, Mannino spoke of a time a decade ago that was even worse--when many publishers listed books by ISBN. That all changed, at least for Random House, thanks to a project that the publisher initiated to learn exactly what happens in a store when a shipment arrives. "About 10 years ago, Random House did a cool thing," Mannino recalled. "They sent out sales reps to be there when the shipments came in. The reps couldn't believe how long it took. After that, their packing lists were alphabetized. It would behoove publishers to do that now, and they'd quickly see where the problems are."
Gripes of All Stripes
Chittenden believes fulfillment in general is a major problem for children's booksellers in New England. When asked what publishers could do to clear out the backroom, she responded, "Just generally improve fulfillment. When you call up to place an order, it's a rare salesperson who asks, 'Do you want to put any backorders with that?'"
In California, where accelerated reading disks are a popular teaching tool, Cain at Yellow Book Road has spent hours tracking down books to use with them. The program, which is especially popular in secondary schools, enables students to choose their own reading material and be tested on it. Since the school population is so diverse--an immigrant who reads English on a second-grade level can be in the same classroom with another who reads at a college level--the program is particularly useful. Yellow Book Road and other bookstores provide individualized books for the classroom based on the school's selections. These, in turn, are determined by the tests that are available to the schools to download onto the accelerated reading disks.
Part of what makes supplying the books so time-consuming for Cain is that there is no easy way to determine the status of the books the schools want. "Out-of-stock indefinitely occurs when, in fact, the book is just getting a new cover, a new ISBN or a new price. If there were some general Web site, a publisher's clearinghouse, that would help," she says. "We have the disk we get from Baker & Taylor that's supposed to be Books in Print, but it's not that. It's what's in Baker & Taylor's warehouse."
Reading, or the lack of reading, also causes problems for Janet Lund, children's book buyer at The King's English (Salt Lake City, Utah). Her gripe is with reps who aren't knowledgeable about the books they're selling. "I would say that most of the reps have read the books," she acknowledged. "But there are some who don't read them, and it's clear during a sales call that they're reading the one-line comments from the sales meeting. My response is usually, 'Can you send me a galley?' It's such a different kind of buying." On top of that, she's found that those all-important galleys are not so easy to come by. "A lot of publishers are cutting back on galleys for middle readers and YA," Lund said. "I know that one publisher said that they find it too expensive. That really concerned me, because my order did go down without the galley."
Of course, not all problems are the publishers' fault. One that almost every bookseller singled out was timing. It sometimes seems to booksellers as if the large publishers must be in cahoots on shipping big spring and holiday orders, because these orders often tend to arrive at once. "It would be nice if they didn't all come in at the same time," said Anglin, who conceded that there's as little likelihood of that as doing something about the weather.
Ellen Mager, owner of Booktenders Children's Books (Doylestown, Pa.), likes to quip that when she wins the lottery, she's using the money to hire a business manager. Even if she had the money, help might not be so easy to come by in today's economy. "The big thing for us is to find help," said Mager. "I'm so grateful for summer, because of all the students. Summer is catch-up time. It's unbelievable--people come in and think it would be great to work here. They want to work with the books, but not open up the boxes. There's a lot of boring stuff in a bookstore."
That Eureka! Moment
Food may be love, but a good massage can be even better. So even though Janet Hutchinson, owner of Open Door in Schenectady, tries to make sure that her staff has lots of good things to eat in the backroom during stressful selling seasons, she gave them massages last Christmas. "We had a local massage therapist who has a portable chair come in two days in a row and give 10-minute massages," she reported.
It may not be as good as a backrub perhaps, but Ronberg of Linden Tree finds that time efficiencies, like sorting the mail as soon as it comes in, can help relieve stress. One of his favorite timesavers is to have a working lunch in the backroom sorting the mail, which can be as much as five inches thick. He has found that it takes less time to deal with each piece of mail just once. "Fifty percent of the mail I round-file right away. The checks--hopefully there are a few--will go to the check registers, and the catalogues will go in catalogue drawers." He even takes the time to toss the previous season's catalogue and to enter ISBNs for forthcoming books that publishers and/or authors write to him about that are musts for his store. "I like to handle the mail, because that way I can find out what's important," Ronberg said. "It's much quicker to speed-read something than to have someone summarize it for you."
Ronberg also recommends being open to doing things in new and different ways as a potential timesaver. For years, he said, that whenever the store got a shipment, staff would unpack all the boxes, put all the books with the same title together, alphabetize everything, and then run the labels. One day, he recalls, one of his staff just put the books on the carts and started running the labels. "She printed them in that order," he says. "It was such a simple thing, but eureka! When you get a mindset in a certain way, it's hard to break."
While typing is seldom anyone's favorite task, at Booktenders, Mager finds that it really can save time to add orders to the inventory as they're placed. "We're now trying, when we place an order, to put the order in the computer," she said. "You can put in 90% of the information. When 10 boxes come into the store, all you have to do is unload that stuff and put it away."
For Chittenden at Eight Cousins, a simple envelope would be a big help. With warehouses and offices changing faster than a nine-year-old can say "Muggles," it's often hard to know how to even get the check in the mail to pay for all the books. "Publishers complain about it if you don't send the payment to the right place, but there's an easy solution for that," she observed. "They could include a self-addressed envelope with the invoice, or it could even be a window envelope, if they sent a duplicate invoice."
At The Children's Hour (Salt Lake City, Utah), owner Diane Etherington has found an effective way to deal with damaged stock and keep young children from destroying even more. "I put damaged books in a little bag that's kind of cute and fun and has some toys that are damaged," she said. She hands out the bags to toddlers who are just a little too busy for moms and dads to keep up with. Then at the end of their visit, she puts the bag away for the next curious child.
That's only for the damaged stock that Etherington can't, or d sn't have to, return for credit. As damaged books come in, she first puts them in a box in the backroom. Then the ones that need to be sent back are readied for shipping. Etherington, who said she gets very few misshipments, but d s get damaged stock, commented, "If you're going to send something back, I like to do it right away. It's amazing how much money you can get."
If keeping the inventory straight seems like a lot of work, that's because it is. But with perseverance and help from publishers, it d sn't need to be quite so time-consuming. When questioned about Enchanted Forest's backroom, Anglin replied without missing a beat, "I have a quote from The Wizard of Oz: 'Pay no attention to the person behind the curtain.'" No bookseller wants customers to have to worry about the wizardry behind the curtain, but it's time that publishers did. They just might find that it makes sense for booksellers to have more time to get out of the backroom, and sell.
Back toChildren's Fall Special
Electronic Lines of Communication, by Judith Rosen
On the Fourth of July, while everyone else was at the beach, many children's booksellers were glued to their computers, checking on their orders and last-minute promotion plans for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Kathy Goddard, owner of B Is for Books (Bolton, Conn.), who set up the New England Children Booksellers Association (NECBA) listserve in 1998 and continues to maintain it, e-mailed her comrades in wizardry. Under the subject heading "I am nervous," she wrote, "I am getting anxious (and a little bit angry, too!) that I haven't gotten my copies yet. But if no one else in New England has them yet then I will feel better." Within an hour, other anxious booksellers had let her know that they were all in the same boat, waiting for books.
With 75 active participants, the NECBA listserve not only gives members a chance to vent emotions about the business, but to keep up a dialogue about the books themselves--what they've read, what they've liked, and what they haven't liked, but wonder if others had enjoyed. It's also used as a last resort for those who can't remember the name of that book that was popular last year with the blue cover that one of their customers wants now. Occasionally, too, Goddard said, "we'll use it to share an order for a company that has a high minimum; or if a publisher is out-of-stock on an item, we'll put out a call on the listserve."
The NECBA listserve, which is for NEBA members only, complements parent organization NEBA's own year-old one. As such, "it may have a bit more flexibility and freedom in what it runs," noted NEBA executive director Rusty Drugan, who likens NEBA's own listserve to "the New England town crier of yore." Since many members choose to belong to both, they usually use the NEBA listserve when they want a broader reach, as when Carol Chittenden of Eight Cousins (Falmouth, Mass.) posted an offer for mailers that she had purchased from a store that closed. "This system works," Chittenden exclaimed, after disposing of the mailers in a matter of days.
Last fall, Drugan, who acts as a gatekeeper for the NEBA listserve by making sure that libel laws are observed and civility maintained, reviewed the e-mails and found that the majority were notices of articles about the book industry. The second most frequent postings concerned queries on business practices, followed by discussions of industry issues and help wanted.
As Drugan pointed out, both the NEBA and NECBA listserves must tread carefully. While they "really maintain a connectedness," he noted, many booksellers are starting to experience the problem of "a surfeit of e-mails." Still, membership in the NEBA and NECBA listserves is optional, and to date, very few people have unsubscribed. |
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