Last week, Eso Won Books in Los Angeles, Calif., saw such an incredible surge in online orders that co-owners James Fugate and Tom Hamilton had to suspend all website orders.
On Saturday, May 30, the store received more than 400 orders, Fugate recalled. It was the first time in all of the two and a half months of covid-19 that he and Hamilton could not process all of the store's orders on the same day they were received, and they both went in the next day just to continue working on them. But as they were working on Saturday's orders, they could see Sunday's orders building.
"It reached 1,000, then 2,300," said Fugate. He went to bed Sunday night thinking it was still manageable. The store didn't receive many new orders overnight, but Monday brought well over 1,000 new orders. He first broached the topic of cutting off website orders on Monday, but they decided to keep it going. By Tuesday morning, however, both he and Hamilton agreed that they needed to close it down. As of Friday morning, the store still had a few thousand orders left to process.
At the same time that online sales were spiking, Fugate continued, in-store sales became incredibly busy. Every day last week brought a stream of customers. Several people donated to the store, and a popular author who didn't want to attract publicity bought 110 copies of How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi. On Wednesday, Governor Gavin Newsom visited the Leimert Park neighborhood and purchased some children's books and more at Eso Won. "What a way to recover from covid and sales being 70% down," remarked Fugate.
Comparing the George Floyd protests to similar protests in years past, Fugate said this feels "definitely different," like nothing he's seen before. "This is a changing moment for a lot of people. I think they're waking up to the fact that there's more to being a good person than just being a good person. You have to educate yourself about how the other half lives."
Fugate told the Los Angeles Daily News that last week he received a call from publisher W. Paul Coates, founder and director of Black Classic Press and father of writer Ta-Nahesi Coates. "He said every store he's talked to, they're saying the same thing. There's this outpouring of support like they've never seen. Things are going to change. People are going to realize the mistake they made in 2016. I think you're going to see a sea change in people's attitudes."
Eso Won reopened to browsing only a short while ago, and Fugate and Hamilton are requiring customers to wear facemasks. They are also opening the front door for shoppers and asking them to use hand sanitizer at the door. While most customers have been amenable to these restrictions, there was one incident over the weekend of May 30 that Fugate described as "terrible."
"I'm in that age group that this thing seems to like," Fugate said. "At the store, I'm not going to talk to anybody that doesn't take this seriously."
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On June 1, Women & Children First in Chicago, Ill., began to bring back some of the store's booksellers who had been either working at home or furloughed for more than two months. Co-owner Sarah Hollenbeck reported that the store is offering contactless, curbside pick-up, and she and her team still have a lot to do before "we reopen our doors to the public in any capacity."
Every bookseller in the store must wear a mask, and although the store is 3,000 square feet, only four or five booksellers are ever working at a time. Hollenbeck and her team purchased "gallon jugs of hand sanitizer" from a local distillery and have been wiping down all workstations frequently.
As protests began in the last week of May in response to the murder of George Floyd, Hollenbeck said, several of the store's neighboring businesses boarded up their stores, but she and co-owner Lynn Mooney decided not to go that route. They changed all of the store's street-facing displays to convey solidarity with the protestors, and community members chalked the store's sidewalks and exterior walls with "Black Lives Matter" and the names of those murdered, including George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery.
The store has been distributing BLM buttons during curbside pick-up, and many Women & Children First staff members have joined the protests. Last week, from #BlackoutTuesday through Friday, June 5, they closed their online store and redirected sales to Semicolon, the only Black woman-owned bookstore in Chicago. The store also issued two e-newsletters over the past week, the first of which included a statement affirming that as an intersectional feminist bookstore, Women & Children First stands in solidarity with Black Lives Matter.
On the subject of her staff, Hollenbeck said "there's a lot of heartache and anxiety right now mixed with frustration. In this critical moment, with so much momentum and so much at stake in the fight for racial justice and systemic change, the task of fulfilling online orders can feel small and so passive. We have to constantly remind ourselves of our mission and the foundational role that books can play in a revolution."