Sainsbury Right, Tesco Right, TDC Wrong? A booksellers view of trends in shopping and RiverOak want to build 2,000 houses at Manston.

 The world of retail is undergoing a process of change, which as a small independent town centre shopkeeper is of great interest to me personally.

Partly this is a direct result of internet shopping and partly I think it is due to people changing their behaviour due to changes in our social environment. 

 Now about twenty years ago our local council decided that the way forward was out of town shopping and have actively supported the construction of Westwood cross and other large out of town shopping ventures, now the biggest and pretty much the longest lasting in Thanet Sainsbury and Tesco are both reporting difficulties, particularly in their large out of town shops.

At the same time our local council adopted a policy of reducing the size of our shopping centres, the idea here was I think to allow the shops on the edges of the towns to be converted to residential, so there were less shop properties in the towns which they thought would result in less empty shops. 

 In retrospect I don’t think this policy was successful, the middle of Margate town centre collapsed completely and Ramsgate town centre pretty much survived and now seems to be recovering.

During the period of the expansion of out of town shopping which I think started to affect the town centres adversely around 2000 and peaked with the opening of WC in 2007, when WC phase 2 opened in 2010 and not all of the units were let immediately, I did wonder what was up, but I think it is only now that I am beginning to understand it. 

 Of course now in Ramsgate the council have taken this policy to a new extreme of buying up shops in fully let shopping areas of the town centre and then using the fact that they are the planning authority to get planning consent to turn the shops into social housing. I am not sure if this a last ditch attempt to help out of town shops or some vain hope of regenerating Margate as a food shopping centre.

Recently while Sainsbury and Tesco have been seeing reduced sales, my sales in the bookshop have been increasing, I guess that is partly because I can regulate prices in a way that Sainsbury and Tesco just can’t.

 This is because the majority of my stock is either secondhand or manufactured by me, so I can produce prices to compete with the internet. I wont go into the economics of the new books that I source from bankruptcies and various booktrade sources as it is fairly complicated and my local book publishing enterprise was never intended to be profitable, more of a hobby or interest gone bonkers.

The secondhand book business is much easier to explain and in this area Amazon leads the field, another big source is ABE also owned by Amazon, ebay is also a contender but for the most part my main competition is Amazon.  

 The secondhand bookbuying on Amazon started with secondhand bookshops selling their books through Amazon, they put their best books for sale there, sold them and then their shops closed, partly because of the online competition and partly because they had sold all their best stock.

Now I would say that most of the secondhand books for sale cheaply on Amazon have been donated to charities, sold to large commercial organisations with automated warehouses and listed for sale on Amazon by someone who doesn’t know much about books.

 This is very difficult if you are trying to sell a book using the internet as there is usually a copy available for a price including postage that is around what it would cost you to post it. It is also very difficult if you are trying to buy a book cheaply and therefore secondhand on Amazon as it is very difficult to tell what sort of condition it is in or even if it is a stolen library book.

I guess from my point of view this means that people are likely to get more money selling their books to me than they would if they sold them on the internet.

 So as an example an ordinary thin paperback will post as a large letter for £1.17 plus about 20p for jiffy bag I would think the average price including postage on the internet would be about £2 including postage and I would think that about 40p of this would be listing fees and paypal charges so around £1.70 selling costs giving you around 30p for every one you sell, I would say the average price we are selling an ordinary thin paperback for is £1.50 and as we pay a third in cash or half in exchange vouchers, it isn’t difficult to see what the options are. 

I am not saying here that I don’t sell books via Amazon, because I do, there are always going to be a certain number of books that have no local market, but for the most part I make sure that my walk in shop customers get the first chance at all of the books I buy for stock. I also endeavour to make sure that the on the shelf price is more attractive than the internet price. 

 There are various different types of bookshop both new and secondhand, some seem to stock any old book that comes along cheaply and some seem only to have books that are much more expensive than you could buy them for online.

What I try to do is to have defined book sections that relate to people’s interests and over the last few weeks I have been working on what I would loosely describe as the “craft section” I guess my children would describe it as the “design and technology” section, social history perhaps, anyway hard to define so the pictures tell the story.

 As well as buying books for, collating books for, covering dust jackets for, pricing books for this section, I have been trying to get these books into some sort of order and it is the latest pictures of this section in the bookshop I have used to illustrate this post with.

So still the question why is my bookshop doing better, I don’t think my books stock is very different in quality to what it was this time last year, I think it may be partly to do with book shopping becoming more of a leisure activity, partly due to Ramsgate town centre being busier than it was last year. 

 The pictures in this post should expand if you click on them, and I may ramble on here if I gat more time.

At the moment no blog post seems to be complete without something about Manston airport, the latest being the minutes of the Kent International Airport Committee going into the public domain, these seem to say that RiverOak want to build 2,000 houses on the site, here is the link http://www.scribd.com/doc/246454440/KIACC-Minutes-2014-09-30   

There are various comments flying around the internet to effect that these are the wrong minutes, or that the information in them is incorrect, so about the norm for Manston.

As far as I understand KIACC is either some branch of or in some way related to TDC and so either this means that the information is wrong and just a clerical error, or the information was right and may have to be changed, or of course the councillors knew that they were mounting a cpo for a property investment company.

In the craft section of the bookshop I am wondering whether the people who normally buy books about sewing, knitting and fabrics will be interested in me adding a whole shelf of books about cotton spinning, fabric dyeing and wool spinning to this section.

If you have some preconceived ideas about this it could be seen as a sexist question.  

I think that is about it for the blog post, apart from our new sales director who is late for his book advertising meeting. 

I managed to track down Flat Eric, he has found a book that greatly interests him and doesn’t seem to like the idea of me selling it, so he won’t display it for tonights advertisement.

RiverOak have issued a rejoinder see http://www.riveroakinvestments.co.uk/riveroak-responds-residential-units-challenge/ some of the phraseology is interesting and as I have many American customers I am used to them saying “I’m mad about my flat” when they have a puncture. However I am left with an odd feeling about this