Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
I suspect regulatory approval would be forthcoming. Amazon, Walmart and the like are the competition.
|
Amazon has a larger market share than either. It wouldn't surprise me if it had a larger market share than both..
Quote:
But the big chains beat you on pricing, which is why the mom & pop operations are an endangered species. B&N/Borders are large enough to order directly from publishers. Mom & pop shops must go through a distributor like Ingrams or Baker and Taylor. The distributor takes a cut off the top, so the mom & pop store has less margin to play with and less flexibility on pricing. People shop on price, which is why B&N/Borders are killing the smaller retailers. If I'm a mom & pop bookstore, I can tailor to the local climate, but I can still expect customers to go the the local chain outlet for the stuff they carry, and come to me for the less known stuff. Can I sell enough of the less known stuff to stay in business? I wouldn't lay bets on it.
There are an assortment of small book retailers near me, but they are specialty places with a niche focus, like Juvenile/YA, travel, and photography.
An old friend used to operate an SF/Mysteries specialty shop. He fulminated about how the Association of American Booksellers had misled him about the ability of a single person to run such a shop. (They said it was possible - he discovered he couldn't do it effectively, and my SO worked for his for a while. He closed his doors when the building his storefront was in raised the rent and made it impossible to continue.)
|
I think that even having experienced mom & pop bookstores puts you in the top 5% of the population.
When I was a kid, the fairly typical town in which I grew up had no independent bookstores; only "Book and Card" stores, where the books were on spinners or displayed on shelves withe the cover out.
These were replaced (in 1980 or so) by Waldenbooks and B.Dalton at the mall. This was a huge step up; it's hard to describe how great these stores were. They had so many books that they even displayed some *spine out* - as they didn't have room to display everything cover out!
Around 1995-98, Barnes and Noble opened and the B.Dalton closed and the Waldenbooks went on life support. I had moved away by then, to much larger cities, but it was amazing to come back and see a bookstore like this in the town I grew up in.
So no mom & pops were harmed when B&N opened. Although I do have to wonder whether this was an example of overexpansion, Amazon notwithstanding.