In Washington Depot, Conn., Hickory Stick Bookshop started offering curbside pick-up in April and reopened to the public in a very limited capacity by the middle of May. Owner Fran Keilty and her team are still offering curbside pick-up, as well as private appointments to customers, and they've been gradually expanding the store's hours. Currently the staff is in store 48 hours per week and Hickory Stick is open to the public 40 hours per week.
Prior to opening to the public, the team installed a plexiglass barrier at the counter, removed nearly all of the store's seating and set up hand sanitizer stations around the store. There are signs on the door and a board on the sidewalk outlining the rules and letting customers know that they must use hand sanitizer and wear a mask at all times. The store's bathrooms have also been closed to the public.
Keilty reported that the store has gotten a little pushback for not allowing young children in the store except by appointment, but otherwise everyone has followed the store's safety protocols without issues.
On the subject of how the pandemic has affected her buying, Keilty said she's still playing catch up with all the orders she canceled in the spring, trying to determine which books are needed from those lists. She also postponed her fall buying and is playing catch-up in that regard as well. Like many other booksellers, she continued, she is concerned about availability and restocking problems going into the holiday season and is trying to anticipate what the big books will be.
Customers have been more purposeful in their browsing, so Keilty is not ordering the breadth of titles she normally would. The store's web sales have slowed since the early months of the pandemic, but she expects online orders to increase leading up to the holiday season. She also plans to encourage early shopping. In a normal year, she added, gifts, holiday cards and gift wrap are staples of the holidays, but she doesn't know how they will perform this year. Most sidelines are down, with children's toys and especially puzzles being the exceptions, and as such she's ordered more modestly in those areas.
After protests began around the country in late May and early June, Hickory Stick Bookshop saw a huge demand in anti-racism titles and books by diverse authors. While those titles are still selling, they have slowed a bit, and Keilty has been working meanwhile to make the store's inventory more diverse.
On a daily basis, Keilty said, she and her staff have heard from customers how happy they are to be back in the store. There have been a lot of challenges associated with switching to a shipping facility and back to retail, but "we're doing it and will continue to do so barring circumstances we can't control."
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Jill Stefanovich, owner of bbgb books in Richmond, Va., reported that since closing to the public in March, her store has been offering free local delivery, curbside pick-up and media mail delivery. The store will reopen for appointment shopping on September 30, with a $20 gift card purchase required to reserve a spot. Given the store's size, bbgb is allowing no more than four related customers in store per appointment. All of the store's seating has been removed, display cases have been moved against the walls and there is now a plexiglass shield at the counter.
The store's main source of income, Stefanovich noted, is usually its book fairs. When schools closed in the spring, the store was hit hard, and she and her team knew they had to "pivot quickly." The team built a new website, loaded most of the store's inventory onto it and began offering virtual book fairs. All told, bbgb held onto half of the store's spring book fairs, and sales at those virtual fairs amounted to about 25% of physical book fair sales. Over the summer the team has continued to improve the website and is working on expanding the store's reach.
The pandemic has dramatically altered bbgb's buying. Where Stefanovich and her team used to order books in "chunks," with many book fair titles ordered by the case, they now have to keep a much tighter rein on buying. They order smaller amounts and "really evaluate" whether a given topic or subject matter is already adequately represented in the store's collection. Now it is no longer enough to order something "just because we loved it."
When protests began earlier in the summer, the bbgb team was "thrilled" to help meet the requests of customers who wanted to diversify their own collections or learn more about anti-racism and social justice. Due to some Richmond businesses being damaged during protests, however, Stefanovich made the decision to board up the shop for two days.
"It was one of the hardest decisions I've had to make in the 10 years of owning this shop," she explained. "We stood with the marchers and their mission, but felt it necessary to ensure our shop wasn't damaged." --Alex Mutter