The plight of the typ­i­cal inde­pen­dent book­store, such as City Lights in San Fran­cisco, high­lights the chal­lenges for the lit­tle guy try­ing to com­pete against the online giants. In this piece we take a look at what a retailer really has to offer, and how to turn that into a suc­cess­ful busi­ness. The small retailer has some real com­pet­i­tive advan­tages over the giant online store. The chal­lenge is to let go of the old busi­ness model and make the most of the new reality.

This piece was writ­ten for Huff­in­g­ton Post, so there’s a lot more that could have been said about the oppor­tu­ni­ties for the small retailer to cap­ture and build a thriv­ing com­mu­nity. It starts with tak­ing advan­tage of the fact that you’ve got real peo­ple in your store. Cap­ture their con­tact info, give them a dis­count for stay­ing in touch. Build a loy­alty pro­gram (the more you shop with us, the bet­ter your dis­count.) If you give it a lit­tle effort, you can cre­ate a rela­tion­ship built on value and trust that no one can com­plete with.

Here’s the orig­i­nal post:

She seemed like what you might call ‘a nice per­son.’ He seemed decent enough, too. His voice a tad too loud, but not mean­ing to be obnox­ious. They were just enjoy­ing the days between Christ­mas and New Years, chat­ting, flirt­ing, brows­ing the new non-fiction cases at City Lights. Mul­ti­task­ing ran deep in their veins. They were jok­ing, scan­ning book jack­ets and dis­cussing sev­eral top­ics at once.

I would have turned back to my brows­ing, when sud­denly it caught my eye. She wasn’t even look­ing at her phone, but in a well-practiced ges­ture that you might not have seen if you weren’t pay­ing close atten­tion, she hov­ered her phone over the book and snapped a pic­ture of the cover. It took less than a sec­ond but there was no mis­tak­ing the intent. City Lights had lost another sale. That $35 book would soon be com­ing her way from Ama­zon at $24.95.

The store was bustling with cus­tomers. We try to visit reg­u­larly because the brows­ing is always so superb — it’s impos­si­ble to glance at a shelf with­out dis­cov­er­ing a ter­rific book that you haven’t heard of before. A year ago I had been scan­ning a cat­e­gory of books near the cashier called “Books With CDs” and Arnold Steinhardt’s exquis­itely crafted Vio­lin Dreams fell into my hands. (And I bought it there.) I’d never heard of it before and never seen a men­tion of it in print since. If not for City Lights I would never have dis­cov­ered one of my favorite books of all time.

Brows­ing is like mid­dle chil­dren — some­thing you take for granted but when it’s gone soci­ety loses some­thing impor­tant. Mid­dle chil­dren are the buffers in a fam­ily, the ones who learn to nego­ti­ate between the typ­i­cally aggres­sive eldest child and the clingy youngest sib­lings. Mid­dle chil­dren are like saints, actu­ally. (Full dis­clo­sure, yes, the author of this piece is a mid­dle child, but you prob­a­bly already knew that.) It was pre­dicted a gen­er­a­tion ago, and clearly now come to fruition, that with the shrink­ing Amer­i­can fam­ily and the decline of the num­bers of mid­dle chil­dren, we would become a more con­tentious peo­ple. Clearly this explains what’s going on in the Senate.

Brows­ing has a big role to play in soci­ety, too. Brows­ing is the enabler of serendip­ity. With­out brows­ing, the chances for the out-of-frame dis­cov­ery are ter­ri­bly dimin­ished. I am still wait­ing for some­one to say, “I dis­cov­ered this really great book on Ama­zon.” What would our world be like with­out serendip­ity? That would be gray, dear reader.

Busy as the store way, the City Lights cashiers had noth­ing to do but chat with each other and answer the occa­sional ref­er­ence ques­tion. They just weren’t ring­ing up sales. City Lights had become a free brows­ing ser­vice for Amazon.

We took a break from brows­ing and headed out for some non-touristy North Beach food. We stopped in front of a restau­rant and were imme­di­ately assaulted by a hawker who swept down, appar­ently attempt­ing to entice us with a breath that sang of fresh gar­lic. She announced the spe­cials in an accent so obscure that even as we read the menu along with her, not a word could be under­stood. The dim sum par­lors pro­vided a dif­fer­ent sort of brows­ing: plates of wax food that was meant to speak directly to one’s sali­vary glands.

And then I got it. Both the restau­rants and City Lights were pro­vid­ing a brows­ing expe­ri­ence. The dif­fer­ence was that the cus­tomers brows­ing the restau­rants came in and actu­ally bought stuff. But peo­ple brows­ing the books at City Lights were buy­ing their books from Ama­zon, even while they were still right there in the store!

What to do?

If I ran City Lights and wanted to stay in busi­ness, I’d put big signs in the win­dows and behind the cash reg­is­ter: “We’ll meet Amazon’s Price!” Appar­ently City Lights man­age­ment believes that they can’t make enough money try­ing to match Ama­zon, but I have news — mak­ing $7 on a book is bet­ter than mak­ing noth­ing on it. The day I was there thou­sands of dol­lars in sales were being lost. And as long as you have the traf­fic, do what the car­washes do. Sell other stuff to your cus­tomers at full price: acces­sories like read­ing lamps and book­marks, gift cards, even Smith­field hams, dammit! But don’t turn your book­store into a brows­ing facil­ity for Ama­zon. You can’t go on like this.

I left the store a lit­tle depressed, fear­ing for a great insti­tu­tion. As we walked by The Stink­ing Rose, another North Beach fix­ture, I noted a woman in her thir­ties deep into her book as she sat by her­self in the win­dow. There was no ques­tion where she had bought her copy: she was read­ing a nice fresh vol­ume of Kerouac.

So City Lights had man­aged to make at least one sale. I hope it wasn’t the last.