I’ve found myself saying a lot, and it sounds more menacing than I intend, but the past year should compel my bookselling peers reflect long and hard about who exactly are their friends and allies. I mean this on multiple levels: from the staff thinking about their employers and their employers thinking about those with whom they do business.
I find it interesting that many bookstores expect a certain principle-driven (almost moralistic) approach to what we expect of our staff that we do not necessarily exemplify in our business decisions. Shots fired there, I know, so let me try to explain what I mean.
There’s an all-too-common sense on the employment side of things that the joy and love of the job (which I also talk about!) somehow makes up for the palpable lack in compensation. Disclosure: they don’t! That they don’t is what makes the expectation—when not stated, performed in a variety of ways— a principled one that is either imposed or imported, i.e., that the job is about more or something other than the money.
[Again, bear with me: I am fundamentally opposed to how this principle is often applied, especially as it relates to figuring out adequate and fair compensation. But the guiding principle itself is not necessarily a bad one.]
Curiously, such principles appear jettisoned when it comes to (only ever ostensibly) non-employment issues. The most customer-facing sign of this is inventory. Let’s begin with something painfully obvious: despite the sheer jaw-dropping, sometimes truly frustrating number of new and old books readily in print, a lot of us are carrying and displaying the same goddamn titles. Some of you are thinking now, “That’s just business, Brad. People want the new, hot titles.”
And that’s my point!
When the bulk of a store’s curation, especially their displays, are based on the marketing budgets of a a decreasing number of corporations and/or the coop money they offer, I would never argue they’re outright wrong. (The question of whether it is necessarily profitable is more complex.) The more fundamental issue for me is how askew it is from the notion of being about something more or something other than the money.
This extends further into even more turbulent waters of taking customer-facing stances on social and political issues. I’m not interested in dictating my Leftist ideological agenda into the displays other stores, but referring to the freeing of oneself and one’s staff to engage, problematize, and even proclaim positions. For some it would be irresponsible, bad business not to prioritize potential customers, even if that means keeping some things to yourself. Maybe so . . . but again, isn’t this veering yet further away from a guiding principle that allegedly sets bookstores apart?
To close out this point, I just want to nod again to my previous post: taking pride in what we do is a taking ownership of it. And this is an ownership that exceeds equity or debt or title. Pride isn’t a simple thing of ego, which suggests something static like a character-trait, but of agency in that it is pursued and/or enabled.
It’s sometimes measured in money, but rarely very accurately. The big question, I suppose, is less about accuracy but more about sustainably.
More on that later, perhaps.