Why Your Pension Will Kill Your Bookshop

The current model of high street bookselling cannot sustain itself. The cost base of any high street shop is part of a complex economic web that involves many other parties. I'll try to give the easy version. Most high street properties are owned by pension funds. The under performance of pension funds is well documented and the fund managers are forced to try to work all of their investments harder just to get close to the sort of returns that they enjoyed 20 years ago. This means that retail rents are being ratcheted up in order to provide that return. The result of this is that retailers who work from a relatively low margin base (booksellers, CTNs, record shops) are the first to feel the pinch. They cannot, in the current environment, put prices up. Indeed, their suicidal discounting and the supermarkets strategy of loss-leading on books has lead to a perception that books ought to be cheaper. There is no way for these retailers to squeeze their other costs much more. Their staff are already badly paid; their stores are, in many cases too big; there are often too many of them in any given town or city. Put this in the context that I've already discussed and you have imminent store closures on massive scale. Waterstone's and Ottakar's only overlap in 30 odd locations but I'm willing to bet that, if that merger goes through, we'll see more than 30 stores close down in the next couple of years.

Other retailers, with a higher margin base (food , clothes, electronics, - i.e. supermarkets) can partially absorb these increased costs via their high margins. (A book is, on average marked up by 100% so a £6.99 paperback costs the bookseller roughly £3.50. A pair of jeans is marked up by anything up to 500% so it's possible that the £60 pair of jeans only cost the store £10.) They are also able to put up prices on own branded products in a way that is just not available to a bookseller. You can only buy a Gap shirt in Gap so how would you know that it is costing you more than it used to?

Which of us, in all honesty, wants our pension fund to not strive for a maximum return on our nest egg? Which of us wants the goods we buy to be more expensive? We can't have better pensions and cheaper goods at the same time. Put another way, the better pensions we enjoy as a result of these hikes in shop rents will be eaten up by a rise in the cost of living.

It is this conundrum at the heart of retailing that will put the final nail in the coffin for high street bookselling as we know it. Sure, the supermarkets and the internet are threats but Amazon has an 80% market share of online book sales. A market share that high is easy to attack from below. Both of the major chains have announced plans to launch their own transactional web sites. It's the right strategy. It may be a bit late (duh!) but it's right. Yes they are threats but it's the threat to the cost base posed by rental hikes that will be the killing blow.

Shredding CVs Like The Americans in Saigon

Sorry for my absence over the past month and a bit: I've been closing down a bookshop.

No kidding. It's the least amount of fun you can have without a trip to the dentist.

Not only is it lousy fun it's also hellishly busy. You have no idea of the sort of things you have to consider. Have you, for example, shredded every single speculative CV and customer complaint letter? I don't know about you but, because our glorious industry is regarded by young arts graduates with such warmth and affection (ie. they think it's a doss), I used to get inundated with CVs. A worrying trend had developed whereby we'd all be standing at the till in clean shirts and ties and a 22 year old with a proto beard and jeans that smelled of wee would shamble up to the counter and hand in a CV. On closer inspection this document would reveal his extensive experience as a waiter/barman; it would refer to his MA or PhD thesis; and list, amongst other interests "travelling" whilst neglecting to mention books or reading once. Not only that but I was left to ascertain for myself, using the divination properties inherent in Gardner's discount structure, what sort of job he actually wanted. Full time, part time, Xmas temp.

Anyway, rather than file these things in the bin, I dutifully kept them and never sifted through to throw out the really old ones. So now, even though the writers of these awful documents have succeeded in irritiating the tits off me, I feel compelled to protect their personal data for them. I hate being me.

The complaints are in many ways worse. At least the CV writers believe that they may be of service to you wheras the complainers are all of this ilk:

"I arrived at the David Attenborough signing at the advertised time only to find a queue of people stretching right around the block. What is the point of me arriving puntually if you then expect me to wait in a queue? I run the largest firm of solicitors in the city and I have never been treated so poorly. Kindly send me £50 of book tokens forthwith or I shall come in on Saturday and make all of your weekend staff cry with my shouting."

I comfort myself by imagining that I am feeding their gonads through the shredder.

More on the whole closure thing later. I need some distance so I can write without weeping like a footballer who's been ever-so-slightly brushed against by another footballer.