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| Avid is closing its Prince Avenue store. | |
Avid Bookshop in Athens, Ga., plans to close its original Prince Avenue location on December 31 to focus on its other bookstore, at Five Points, which opened in September 2016.
"Avid Bookshop is safe, but I need to tell you something," owner Janet Geddis wrote in a detailed letter to customers explaining the decision to shift back to a one-store model again. "The burdens of business ownership are high, but so are the rewards. I would not trade this life for anything, and that's why I have made the decision to downsize while we're in good shape. I didn't come to this decision lightly." She added that while both locations have seen a decrease in sales over the last 18 to 24 months, "we're hanging on. Due to the heavily predicted 2020 recession (which some think has already hit certain communities), we want to be extra cautious with our budgets."
Geddis recalled that when the second location opened three years ago, "we were experiencing year-by-year growth that was becoming difficult to handle (I know, cry me a river--but sometimes rapid sales growth can be hard to keep up with!). The ideal situation would have been to expand our Prince location so that we had much more retail selling space as well as storage, back rooms, offices, and more--but expanding was not an option for us. So we opened a second store. Despite our best efforts (and trust me: we worked very hard to make this particular two-store model work), our costs were outpacing our sales numbers at an unsustainable rate. Meaning we had very little, if any, money to invest back into the business once our bills were paid. We could technically go on another couple of years like this, but the stress would be enormous and the risk of losing everything we've built would be too high for my comfort."
The decision to close the Prince St. store came down to a familiar dilemma for booksellers nationwide: "For the last several months, we've been in lease renewal negotiations with our landlord of Avid on Prince. Since October 2019, we've been operating on month-to-month terms. I won't get into detail here, but I will tell you that several of my bookstore-owning mentors, some financial pros, and trusted commercial real estate advisors wholeheartedly support this plan and think it's the smart thing to do (even though it's true that we are all bumming). Not being able to reach lease terms I was satisfied with was perhaps a blessing in disguise--it gives us a natural time to close up shop and regroup."
In addition to the lease problem, Avid on Prince is in a 790-square-foot space, with about 750 square feet of selling area and no room for storage or a back office, while Avid at Five Points is more than 300 square feet larger and has an office/receiving area as well as significant storage.
Noting that she hopes "to retain everyone that plans to stay on board," Geddis said Avid will be refocusing some of its programming and outside-of-the-shop sales opportunities "in a way that will allow us to generate more sales per square foot than we're currently getting, allowing us to retain as many of the booksellers as humanly possible. If you know me, you know my fellow managers and I exert a lot of effort taking care of our staff. No one is going to be tossed out on their ear, promise."
Near the end of the letter, Geddis again noted: "Seriously. Avid is okay. Not as stellar as we'll be when we regroup and reorganize a bit in 2020 and reevaluate some things, but we're okay. I actually think it's good to be making this decision before things do get more financially difficult with the upcoming recession. Being smart and thinking ahead is one thing we can do pretty well (don't forget it took me four years between announcing the shop and actually opening)."