Wetherby Bookshop by Katya Shipster, on Picasa, all rights reserved, click image to see original

Back in October 2008, I blogged about the change of ownership of 'The Wetherby Bookshop', one of my favourite local haunts. This time, I have to report on its impending demise, something that we discovered when we went out shopping in Wetherby on Saturday afternoon. In my previous entry, I mentioned that my initial impressions were that it was a little chaotic after the transition, and that I hoped that things would settle down. In my experience, this wasn't the case.

When Jill asked why the shop was closing, she was given the answer that "The people of Wetherby haven't supported us – only four people visit per day. They'll be sorry when we're gone." Although I'm really sad to see the shop go, I think that there are a number of factors in play here that have made the failure of the business inevitable.


Competition Arrives

1) The arrival of a competitor.
Last year, another local bookshop "The Cut Price Bookstore” opened in premises in the centre of town. This was an additional branch of a shop based in Helmsley. It sells a large and varied amount of stock, most below RRP (as I suspect that some of it is clearance material) but it will also order books in. So, direct competition. There was no discernible change in how 'The Wetherby Bookshop' operated in response to this.


2) The recession and Amazon.
Amazon made a significant change to their shipping pricing over the last year, when they dropped the threshold for "super-saver" free delivery to £5. This changed the whole economics of the local bookshop, as prior to this it was cheaper – and faster – to order from the 'Friendly Local Book Shop' (FLBS) rather than get it from Amazon. Plus it gave me a warm, glowing feeling of supporting my local community. I'm guessing that this will have hurt, a lot, if people are looking to cut back on expenses yet retain their standard of living. I also suspect that the amount of impulse buys will have reduced as people’s budgets have tightened.

Both of the above are clear changes to the business environment, but this was a business with a huge amount of goodwill and what seemed to be a lot of traffic through the doors. Why would that collapse? Well, here are my thoughts.

3) Criticising the past.
Penny, the previous owner, was a classic small market town shop owner. She knew her clients, often by name. She searched out books, and if they were out of print would give pointers or suggestions of good places to get them. She used a laptop and a monthly CD ROM book catalogue to see what was in print, and more detailed searches at home if this yielded no success. When the stock came in, she knew precisely where it was and could lay her hands on it immediately. This all changed; the new shop was hooked up to the internet and could place orders online (rather than through a phone call) to the publishers.

The new owner was on record in the local newspaper as saying that this was one of the improvements she was bringing to modernise the shop. The tone of the article was that the previous owner was fuddy-duddy and the place needed a serious change to improve it. As a regular customer, I felt pretty outraged on the tone of the article. My experience suggested completely the opposite to the 'improvements'. On at least two occasions I stood there for 5 or more minutes (in a shop the size of our front room) whilst the owner hunted for a book I had ordered and she had called me to say it was ready to collect. At no point was there any suggestion of an improvement to how things used to be.

At the same time, the selection of books seemed to get worse. I'd usually – at least 2 out of 3 times – end up with an impulse buy when I visited the shop, as Penny always had a good selection of interesting titles. The titles may have still been there, but they weren't obvious to the casual browser.

4) FLBS no more.
Bookshops have that special kind of feel. You know the one I mean? Kind of like a library, a little reverential but with an enthusiasm for literature and stories. They're often at their best when they aren't clinical and pristine.

The Wetherby Bookshop definitely needed a little sprucing up, but the changes since October 2008 made it a lot less welcoming. The central book display was halved in height; it probably held the same amount of stock, but it was less accessible and the place looked like it had less books. An armchair appeared; great in somewhere like Waterstones – or the now defunct Borders – but not so good in a room the size of most people's lounge.

This in itself was not terminal, but the change in attitude was. The whole vibe of the shop went from welcoming classic little bookshop, to something quite different. I no longer felt welcome in there. One of the really obvious things was the number of times that I came in and the owner and friends were there drinking wine, and generally having a great time. You got this whole feeling that you were intruding and an inconvenience. And it was something that I disliked. The 'F' had gone from the FLBS.

In Conclusion.
Looking at myself, although I've bought less from the bookshop in the last 18 months, I don't actually feel guilty about it, as it coincided with a general crash in my reading rates. Usually, I manage around 80 to 100 books a year, but 2009 saw me read just over 40 due to other demands on my life at work etc. I doubt my level of purchases will have made the difference between survival and failure.

So, I am sad that 'The Wetherby Bookshop' is closing, but I think that the comment about the attitude of the people of Wetherby is myopic; it fails to look at the conditions of trade and the reasons why so much 'goodwill' would be burned away so quickly. It's so much easier to blame it on the people of Wetherby and to forget that no-one owes you a living. The customer remains king.

Goodbye, old friend; you actually died in October 2008, although we didn't know it then.

It’s a tradition on some the BBS boards that I frequent related to gaming to post plans for the next year, kind of a New Year’s resolution. This is my take on that challenge. I’m trying to keep this as simple as possible this year as I think that 2009 was overly ambitious and doomed to failure from the start!

Writing:
*Complete "This Fear of Gods" for Traveller, a scenario I've been playing with since Furnace 2006!
*Rewrite "Singularities" into a full setting for Wordplay (which means doubling or tripling its size).
*Several other Wordplay related projects that I have bubbling in the background.
*Get "Power Projection: Reinforcements" off the ground after far too long in development, probably by some initial PDF releases.

Playing:
*Attend more TomCons (ideally run Doctor Who, Wordplay and maybe some indie fun stuff)
*Get another block games day together
*Try and run something by Skype again.

Conventions:
*Travcon, Continuum and Furnace as a minimum.

Today brought the inevitable return to work after a lovely break away from work with Jill and Nathan. The early part of the holiday was spent at my parent's house, celebrating Christmas with them. It was great to see my mum looking well after yet another operation; she wasn't up to being bounced on by Nathan (but who is?), but she appears to be making steady progress in her recovery.

It's fair to say that I didn't get nearly as much done as I'd planned during the break, but when it comes down to it, the time out in itself was more than welcome in itself, and I was probably deceiving myself about what I could achieve in the time that I had.

Nathan really enjoyed himself and was generally spoiled in the way that you'd expect from his grandparents. He had lots of lovely presents, including a farm set and a toy cooker, plus quantities of toy tractors. He wasn't overwhelmed in the way he had been in previous years, and got extremely excited shredding the paper off presents, with not a care as to whether they belonged to him or someone else. The excitement and thrill of ripping the paper off was the best part of the whole experience to him.

I was very lucky in getting an upgraded version of the Flip Ultra, which records in HD, as my present. It was one of those things that Jill and I had chatted about, as the original Flip Ultra I bought on a whim got used very heavily over the whole of 2009, culmulating in the Furnace video being released on YouTube. It's excellent, and my hard disk drive continues to disappear under a digital media onslaught. In reality, it's a present for the family rather than just myself, but it did fill that gadget rush need I seem to have.

We spent Christmas Day with my parents, and Boxing Day with Jill's mum and dad. They were both lovely days, all family time, something that I feel is the best thing about Christmas.

Other strong memories of the break include a visit to one of the local Mere's to walk the dog with my dad, chancing the ice and enjoying the strange glow of the light off the water surface. Nathan was absolutely fascinated by the ducks, geese and swans on top of the ice and swimming in flotillas to keep part of the lake unfrozen.

We also visited a nearby garden centre which had a ride on train for entertainment. Nathan managed to blag two full trips around the gardens; one with Jill, and the other with my dad and I. We'll definitely have to go back there again when we next visit.

I guess that the other thing that's worth mentioning was how much that Nathan has loved the snow; he has seen it before, but much like Christmas itself, this has been the first time that he has had a real chance to interact with it properly, and he loved it. However, he wasn't impressed that it was cold!

New Year was different this year; for a start, we weren't ill, which had been the story of the past two years. We actually had a very quiet evening in, with Nathan in bed early, watching the latest Harry Potter DVD ("Rock and Roll" Yeah!) and answering some IT support questions from Jill's dad. Fortunately, having upgraded his eMac on boxing day I could now see what he was talking about when helping out, which made things much more simple to do. The quiet evening was partly as I was dry (on two hour emergency call as a favour to a colleague who swapped Boxing Day with me), and partly as we'd not got a party to go to. However, it was a good night...