Nina Barrett, owner of Bookends & Beginnings and Middles Used Books in Evanston, Ill., reported that the season got off to a "kind of terrifying start," with a blizzard "like something out of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" hitting the Chicago area on Small Business Saturday. Since then, the bookstore has been able to "regain that ground," thanks in part to a SBS "re-do" held on the following Saturday. And though this year has brought "the worst weather I have ever seen in a holiday retail season," Barrett said, "I feel like we're holding our own."
The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald by John U. Bacon and Heart the Lover by Lily King are the store's two "runaway bestsellers," Barrett said. Other titles that are doing very well include Lessons from Cats for Surviving Fascism by Stewart Reynolds, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai, and Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan, which "just keeps going." There are a few titles the store is chasing; the children's book If We Were Dogs by Sophie Blackall is a prime example. That book "suddenly blew up," and now the store is getting "multiple calls about it per day."
The supply chain, Barrett continued, has been "more of a mess than usual." The store has seen partial shipments arrive without invoices, damages, and "boxes going astray." What's more problematic, though, is the fact that there are books that will take Bookends a "week or two weeks to get" yet are still available from online retailers and would arrive for customers in a matter of days if ordered there. That necessitates Bookends staff having to comb through and "handhold" online orders and explain to customers that a particular book in their order likely won't arrive before Christmas.
"It makes us look awful," Barrett said, and the conversations often happen with the exact sorts of customers who make a point of supporting local, independent businesses. It is a frustrating situation all around, she added, and "I think it's going to catch up with us."
Asked whether the store has seen any differences in consumer behavior, Barrett said the team is still "seeing the same big stacks of books" brought to the register, and plenty of customers have mentioned that they're giving only books as gifts this year. And while some customers do ask why prices have gone up, sales at Middles are actually a bit lower than usual at the moment, suggesting that increased book prices are not getting in the way of people shopping for "new gift books."
In St. Petersburg, Fla., Tombolo Books has had a "wonderful" holiday season so far, said owner Alsace Walentine. The last few weeks have been very busy, and the team expects things to only get busier as Christmas approaches. In terms of expectations, it's been a "pretty normal season."
Tombolo Books has seen a few titles "really take off as of late," including The Gales of November, Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run by Paul McCartney, The Correspondent by Virginia Evans, Red Rising by Pierce Brown, the Dungeon Crawler Carl series by Matt Dinniman, and A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck by Sophie Elmhirst. Walentine noted there's also been a "real uptick in folks wanting to purchase classics."
On the subject of the supply chain, Walentine said the store has seen issues with "one publisher in particular," and one distributor's warehouse that is "usually very fast has been backlogged." There's also been a "huge amount of damages" from that distributor.
Touching on shopper behavior, Walentine reported that some people started shopping a little earlier this year, perhaps to "head off price changes," and people are maybe a bit more conservative with spending. But, said Walentine, "difficult times often inspire people to spend their money at the places they feel add value to their lives and their community, and there's been a nice movement back to local businesses this year."
For the King's English Bookshop in Salt Lake City, Utah, the holiday is "meeting expectations," reported co-owner Calvin Crosby, and although sales were slightly down for the first two weeks of December, "the year has been good and overall, we are up."
Crosby said he's been "blown away" by the demand for The Gales of November, and he noted that the special orders this year "definitely stand out," wondering if it's attributable to readers "making sure to get their book orders early." Community support for shopping local is "stronger than ever," and the store has not experienced delays or shipping distributions, due in part to "50- to 60-degree weather here." --Alex Mutter
If you are interested in having your store appear in a future Holiday Hum article, please e-mail alex@shelf-awareness.com.