Barnes and Noble

 Barnes and Noble no longer sells books, I guess. Else they was to de-empathize the selling of books? Anyhow the company has replaced the sign on the west facing side of the building. Previously it read "Barnes and Noble, Booksellers". The new sign says "Barnes and Noble". I would assume this is part of the company rebranding as an entertainment retailer, rather than solely a book retailer. Of course, on the occasion I have to walk into the place, it is still wall to wall books

A letter From Mary Alice

 A friend of mine, Mary Alice Wilson, owns a used book store in Yellow Springs Ohio. She emailed me as to how she has adapted to retailing in the time of COVID-19

“Dark Star is doing ok with ebay and one employee.  Our comic guy whom we laid off, is getting the unemployment boost to his check . The check is for more than his salary.  he was hinting it would be   good thing if he stayed laid off. and that we hire a newbie. Kate wasn't good with that idea! 

Our Gov. De Wine just announced plans for the future.  First doctor, dentist and then veterinarian.  then construction and factory work.  and on May 12, WE can open.  Already have the $335 plastic shield at cash register. trying to buy a large hand sanitizer dispenser for at the front door,  which is  hard to find.  However, i could see Magic and Pokemon games with a plastic shield between the players across from each other.  I don't really know much about gaming, but it might work.

One of our staff has been making masks like a demon - and today i saw one with clear plastic over the mouth area, so folks a little hard of hearing, like me, can read lips a bit.  i either have to have visitors lift the mask up  or have someone tell me what they said.  Getting folks to just talk louder doesn't seem to be in my skill set.  Our staff mask maker  said, “oh yes, I know about those”.  Well, MAKE some, for goodness sake.  i wouldn't know how.   I said, there is one thing a comic book store has, is plastic, and Mylar. 

Hoarding is great!  I don't know why I bought - and much less KEPT - bathroom decals from the 30's; a whole box full of boxed 12" figures from the 70'S (well i know NOW it was a good idea - best one sold for  $400); boxes full of mads and cracked and warren mags like elvira.....we have a double house. The other side was was where we put stuff we didn't know what to do with after we bought it.  or stuff that came in while buying things we DID know what to do with.  but along comes our staff member Kate and her pop culture know how, and all that stuff now has price tags.  Being in the book biz means we had hoarded lots of first editions for when we got an on-line presence.  Well we have that now, and 1700+ items currently listed.  Some of the things that sell are from early days.  we sold something the other  day that had been on eBay for 10 years, maybe, and i cringed at the way it was listed and the price - too low - but hey, it sold, that's all good.

Where do I sell online? Ebay, baby! and abe and amazon.  Gary does abe, which is strictly books.  He also does amazon - and Kate and staff do ebay.  and the latter does amazingly well.  if there is someone out there that wants to pay some outrageous price - and remember this is being available to everyone in the world with an internet device - that person can find us.  They would NEVER find us on our website.  The most looked at items on our website are cat pictures.  (They are really cool; kate finally put up a video.) Really glad to hear from you.”

Sales Light

Have talked with a few retailers this holiday season and all of the ones along the Hwy 13 corridor I spoke with say that sales are noticeably softer than they were at this time last December. We have started seeing a pick up in sales in the downtown area but it is running about 4 days later than 2018.

TJ's Fine Jewelry

TJ's Fine Jewelry on East Main has morphed again and is now TJ's Fine Jewelry and Repair. Although the press release does not specify, I assume that means jewelry repair. Now that I think about it, I believe that leaves Carbondale with only two jewelers, TJ's and one in the mall. 25 years ago, the community could support four of them, 2 in University Mall and 2 downtown on S. Illinois, Don's Jewelry across from the Amtrak station and one, the name of which escapes me, located where the Carbondale Tourism office is now.

Life and Style (in Southern Illinois)

Received a copy of the winter edition of the Southern Illinoisan's Life and Style bundled with this morning's copy of the paper and found the amount of focus on areas outside of Southern Illinois bemusing. One article looked at a Florida artist working on statues in Paducah, while another discussed the holiday programming coming to the Carson Center, also in Paducah. Is southern Illinois all out of artists and holiday programming?

However, the capper was the article directing people shopping for holiday gifts to shops in Saint Genevieve and St. Charles.  This time of year accounts for around 40% of retail sales for the year and southern Illinois already has a large problem with shopping leakage, consumers choosing to cross the rivers to shop in Cape Girardeau and Paducah instead of Carbondale or Marion. Southern Illinois has a difficult enough time of it economically without a magazine focusing on the region sending shoppers elsewhere to buy gifts.

Retail Space in Downtown

Given the number of people that the Evolve complex was supposed to bring to downtown, there is certainly a lot of empty retail space there. The 4 space strip mall just north of Evolve sits completely empty and, with the movement of the Printing Plant to the old Tantastic just south and the planned exit of Axe Monkey to a new location, the strip just north of what is now the Printing Plant will be empty save for Sun Nails. The whole "Let's put an apartment complex smack in the middle of downtown in order to bring students there" idea doesn't appear working so far.

Amazon and You

Use Amazon?  Most likely you do, at least at some point.  According to a recent not I saw in Business Week, roughly 36% of all consumer purchases in America intersect with Amazon at some point.  Either you start out looking at a product on Amazon, do some research on it on Amazon or buy it on Amazon, but at some point, if you buy a product in the US, your path moves through Amazon just over a third of the time.  That's a pretty amazing figure

Not so much so, though, when you consider that Amazon's total sales equal that of the next 4 largest online retailers combined. (Amazon's total sales only reach about 10% of Wal-mart's total, so the online retailer has quite a distance to go to catch Wal-mart).  In order to increase its sales and have a chance of eventually overtaking Wal-mart, Amazon had decided to start same day delivery on products other than digital ones.  You would order a product in the morning, and, by the afternoon, it would arrive at your door. In fact, it has introduced this in a few large cities.  

 In order to put the process in place, Amazon will have to drastically expand its distribution network and expose itself to collecting more sales taxes, a major reason why the retailer has thrown  its weight behind the Marketplace Fairness Act.  The company figures that, since expanding its physical presence into more markets will obligate it to collect sales tax in them, requiring all online retailers to collect sales taxes takes away another competitive advantage those retailers would retain over Amazon.

Small Business Saturday

Just some thoughts about Small Business Saturday.  It's a good idea but some major problems in execution.

If you haven't heard of it, Small Business Saturday is a promotion by  American Express set the day after Black Friday.  AmEx makes a big deal of this, offering free advertising to participating businesses, listing them on a website and offering a $25 credit to AmEx using customers who register their cards and spend at least $25 in a participating retailer.

The idea is good, I am in favor of anything that drives business into local retailers.  However, I question the wisdom of placing it on the Saturday after Black Friday for a couple of reasons.

First, the Saturday after Black Friday is arguably the third busiest shopping day of the year, only topped by Black Friday itself and the Saturday prior to Christmas.  It doesn't need any additional promotion to draw more customers into local stores. They are out there and they are spending and Saturday gets a lot of additional spillover in terms of spending from Black Friday.

Second, having it on such a busy day makes it very hard to quantify the effect of all the promotion.  Were increased sales due to Small Business Saturday or due to the halo effect of Black Friday?  I can see if Small Business Saturday had an effect on AmEx sales as I can easily measure the number of purchases made with AmEx on SBS and compare them with a typical Saturday (FYI, it did bump AmEx sales up) but it would be much easier to quantify the effect on local business if AmEx would put this focus on a Saturday outside the holiday season.

Thirds, if you are a local retailer and doing anything with Black Friday, you are are trying to develop two promotions for major events that take place within 48 hours. That's a lot of work for a small retailer with limited hours, staff and funding.  Moving SBS to a different Saturday would allow greater focus by retailers on both events, rather than diluting the attention paid to each.

Still a good program but certainly think the date should be moved, but I don't think AmEx will pay that much attention to one blog post.

Wine and Beer Sales

Short interviews with Francis Murphy of the Neighborhood Co-op and Darla Lubelt of Kroger on the effects of allowing grocery stores to sell beer and wine.  It's interesting to compare Kroger and Schunucks beer an wine areas as Kroger has not jumped into the area with the same enthusiasm as Schnucks did.  Within days after getting the license, Schnucks had cleared out the are that used to be their video department and stocked it. Then a month or so after that, cleared out 2 full grocery aisles and converted them to beer and wine, along with reseting most of the counters throughout the rest of the store.

Meanwhile, Kroger still only has the half of one aisle that it devoted to beer and wine, with no refrigeration set up for beer yet.