Until Sam Weller’s Bookstore in Sandy closes its doors in February or March, everything in the family-owned shop — the books, the magazines, the shelves they sat on and the store space itself — is for sale.
When the merchandise is finally sold and the store stands empty, Sam Weller’s will be the third independent bookstore in the Salt Lake City area to close within the past eight months. A Woman’s Place Bookstore in Salt Lake closed last June after 11 years of bookselling in support of female authors, and Waking Owl Books, a 22-year-old store in the Avenues that catered to an intellectual University of Utah crowd, will be out of business by the end of January.
The closure of three area bookstores in a single year is atypical, but not, according to independent owners, surprising. They say the war between independents and national chain stores, already an issue in the public eye as a theme of the Christmas box-office hit “You’ve Got Mail,” is only beginning to net casualties in the Salt Lake City area.
“We’re paying out way more money than we’re taking in, and I see no prospect of that changing. That’s the story of 1998, and I’m afraid it’s going to be the story of 1999,” Waking Owl Books owner Patrick Defreitas said.
Defreitas and other owners and employees are trying to accept the closures with grace, saying they understand that some businesses inevitably fail, since laws of natural selection apply even in the book business. Their larger concern is that the closure of “Main Street” bookstores is a cultural loss for America and that the recent conglomeration of book-selling, -distributing and -publishing entities is a hindrance to the free flow of ideas.
“It saddens me to see this industry cheapened by the extremes of marketing. I know attorneys who quit practicing law to sell books. I know doctors who quit practicing medicine to sell books. It’s sad to see what has been a labor of love go down to the level of the Wal-Marting of America,” said Tony Weller, a third-generation bookseller and manager of Sam Weller’s Sandy and Salt Lake City locations.
“I just feel bad that independents are being pushed out of business by national chains. Pretty soon the big stores are going to determine what people can read because they’ll have all the control,” Joan Walters, owner of Valley Book Center in Provo, said.
Although both a Barnes & Noble and a Borders store have opened in Orem and Provo within the past few years, Utah County bookstores have not been hit as hard as Salt Lake stores. In part because most are specialized, selling only LDS, children’s or used books.
Lonnie Lockhart, owner of Timp Bookstore in Orem, said his LDS bookstore has been only marginally affected by the coming of the national chains.
“We have the widest selection in our market niche. We have staff that have worked here for years and have read a large, large number of books,” Lockhart said. He said his specialized merchandise and educated staff keep customers coming back.
Walters said Valley Book Center, which has been open in downtown Provo for 24 years, has successfully maintained its customer base during the changes in the valley booksales industry, but “in the last five years business has kind of slowly gone down.”
In defense of their popular stores, managers of chain bookstores in the area say they do exactly what the independents do, only on a larger and more profitable scale.
“What we try to do as a business and as a company is to focus on specific aspects of business such as service, selection, creating an environment for readers and people shopping for books so that they can enjoy the experience. These are things we think increase the enjoyment of the shopper. Many independents use the same principles and flourish,” Ben Beutler, assistant store manager at the Orem Barnes & Noble, said.
Beutler said he and other employees make an effort to gauge customer reading habits and to stock titles of regional interest, like The Work and the Glory series and other LDS titles. He also said that despite the frequent accusations that chain store employees don’t know anything about books, Barnes & Noble does make an effort to have an educated sales staff.
“A general literary awareness is certainly something we always keep in mind as a strong indicator of potential employment,” Buetler said.
Independent owners still insist that their personalized service is highly superior to that available at chains, making each small bookstore more than just another “specialty retailer.”
“The virtue of small stores and pleasure of working in a small store is that customers come back. This is part of their mental map, it’s a place they go every month, just like going to church or to a restaurant they like… I’m amazed by the heartfelt sense of loss that many customers have expressed as we’ve been closing, and very touched by that,” Patrick Defreitas said.
“We feel like we have a personal impact in people’s lives every single day that we’re in business,” Lockhart said.
Tony Weller, having seen the family business close a store first in Bountiful and now in Sandy, leaving only the downtown Salt Lake location open, said he intends to fight to protect the independent bookstore business. While big stores work on the same principles as independents at the local management level, Weller does not believe the chains’ corporate strategies and practices are completely legal.
Sam Weller’s Bookstore is one of 26 independents that filed a lawsuit in San Francisco in early 1998 alleging that Barnes & Noble and Borders “use their dominance in the market to bully publishers into giving the secret and illegal terms of sale that put independents at a competitive disadvantage.”
The American Bookseller’s Assocation hired Washington, D.C. law firm Genner & Block, the firm that defeated AT&T in a major anti-trust case, to handle the lawsuit. A court date is set for February 2000.
“When we go to court we expect to win,” Weller said. “Some of the lawyers have told me that they’ve never had a case they’d felt more emotionally attached to. They sense that this has an angle that’s very important to our culture, because if books are the containers of our culture, it seems unwise to but all our eggs in one basket. We need to diversify.”
The ABA has had previous legal victories in lawsuits involving the alleged “quasi-legal marketing tactics” of chains and publishers.
A 1994 lawsuit filed by the ABA against six major publishers alleged that publishing houses were giving illegal wholesale discounts, extra advertising money for book-promotion efforts, and more favorable credit terms to chain stores. All six publishers settled out of court, signed injunctions to cease the practices and agreed to having court supervision of their compliance.
A similar lawsuit in 1996 secured a $25 million damages payment to ABA from Penguin USA for allowing chain stores to renege on portions of bills.
And in November the ABA won a minor victory when the Federal Trade Commission announced it would begin investigating the connection between German publishing giant Bertelsmann, Barnes & Noble, and wholesaler Ingram Book Group. Barnes & Noble moved to acquire Ingram, the primary distributor for independent bookstores, November 6, a merger that the ABA’s official statement said “would make independent bookstores virtually dependent upon their largest competitor, one which … has a long-standing, systematic strategy of driving independents out of business to stifle competition.”
Independent booksellers have especial cause for concern regarding the Barnes & Noble/Ingram merger, because Ingram has a policy of requiring detailed financial information from each of its clients. Now that Barnes & Noble holds the reins, then, the private financial information of the independents is the property of their largest competitor.
“It’s just another monopoly,” Joan Walters said. “I think any time a big chain gets ahold of any of your records, you have to wonder if that’s right.”
Patrick Defreitas said Waking Owl Books has felt the
“Anecdotally, there’s already evidence that the merger changed things,” he said. “The woman who used to buy books for me every week said she thought we had been less likely to get the titles that we needed since the merger. She couldn’t prove it, but that’s what she thought.”
