Holiday Hum: A 'Fun Holiday Season'; Understanding Customers

Javier Ramirez and Kristin Gilbert

At Exile in Bookville in Chicago, Ill., co-owners Javier Ramirez and Kristin Gilbert have seen a sizable increase in sales over previous months, but they haven't experienced a real holiday rush. The store is located in the Fine Arts Building in downtown Chicago, Ramirez explained, and many of the store's customers are tourists who are still mostly "shopping for themselves." 

That has resulted in a "fun holiday season," the likes of which Ramirez said he has not experienced in 25 years of bookselling. There's almost no shipping, very little wrapping and he can relax and talk about books with customers. That said, business is still great and has "given us something solid to build on."

Asked how he and Gilbert prepared for potential supply-chain issues this year, Ramirez noted that they learned relatively quickly that the tourist portion of their customer base doesn't usually seek out new releases, as customers would in "any other independent bookstore." While "nobody comes in on Tuesday looking for the new Colson Whitehead or Lauren Groff," they do pay attention to staff picks.

With that in mind, Gilbert and Ramirez chose a handful of hot fall titles and brought in eight to 15 copies of each for the season. Because they've bought relatively lightly on new titles, they "haven't really been affected by supply-chain issues." Staff favorites are selling better than the major new releases, and there are recommendations selected by a variety of local authors that have also sold very well. Some of the bookstore's big sellers at the moment include Parakeet by Marie-Helene Bertino, as well as the 33⅓ music book series put out by Bloomsbury, which they "can't keep in stock."

Small press titles and works in translation, whether new or old, are always popular. Laszlo Krasznahorkai's Satantango and Chasing Homer, along with Hiroko Oyamada's The Factory and The Hole, are all "flying off the table." Ramirez and Gilbert also love that "readers both young and old" continue to discover Joan Didion. It also helps that when they purchased the store earlier this year, they took on mostly used stock. That used inventory is nice to have as a "backup," and most purchases tend to be a combination of used and new.

Ramirez added that although the store gets mostly tourist traffic, there is still a "host of loyal regulars" who are local to Chicago. They continue to build on that, and in coming holiday seasons hope to "enjoy the benefits of both local and tourist traffic."

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DIESEL, a bookstore has two locations in Southern California, one in Brentwood in L.A. and the other in Del Mar, slightly north of San Diego. The two stores, reported owners Alison Reid and John Evans, are having slightly different holiday seasons. In Brentwood it is "madness," while in Del Mar things are "nice and steady." Evans remarked that in Brentwood it is "about all you can take," but being so busy is a good thing. Customers there are especially appreciative and supportive of the store, bringing in candy, chocolate and cookies for the staff. 

Given the sheer volume of warnings about the supply chain, and that in Southern California you can "see the boats off the coast," customers have been very understanding about supply-chain issues in a way that they usually aren't. They know why a book doesn't show up on time, and "we don't have a lot of people upset." Some publishers, they added, have been far worse than others in terms of supply-chain issues.

When titles aren't available, Reid and Evans use the opportunity to "show off all the other books you have." That said, there are still certain books that "people automatically want," like Ann Patchett's These Precious Days. On that and similar titles, DIESEL did "beef up" their orders, but in general the stores did not have the storage space to buy early and buy huge in quite the way that publishers and distributors suggested.

Mel Brooks's All About Me! was another title DIESEL expected to be big, as he is sort of local to the Brentwood store, while Jimmy Chin's There and Back: Photographs from the Edge has been a surprise hit.

The stores' numbers are "really good" this season, and Evans said he's never heard so many customers mention that they're deliberately supporting DIESEL and avoiding Amazon. "They say they're irritated, disgusted and tired of Amazon." --Alex Mutter

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