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 

Friday ramble from the bookshop in Ramsgate.

As I have been saying I am still very busy with my bookshop at the moment, this partly due to the shop being much busier than it was this time last year and therefore much busier than I expected and partly due to having to make considerable changes because of changing trends in shopping and the sale of text and pictures.

Basically the key here is to forget the medium, in my case paper books and concentrate on what is available inside them, text and pictures. So taking what I see as my competition which is mostly the internet, either providing the information directly of selling paper and e-books, all I have to do, is to better and cheaper than the competition in areas where there is strong demand.

My main focus at the moment is on expanding the area relating to the history of what ordinary people did, combined with books about how to do these things, nearest I can get is a sort combination of social history and craft.

I have just taken some pictures of the work in progress which should appear between paragraphs and should expand when clicked on.

On the news front I guess TDC plans to close Pierremont Hall and giving the town council and the folk week organisers their marching orders interested me. With TDC it is looking increasingly as though if it isn’t in the Thanet North parliamentary constituency then they don’t want to know.

This brings me on to the other news item that interested me, see it seems Laura

Sandys replacement has spotted a local vote winner, I would guess if one of his main issues is abolishing TDC he may well get elected.

http://www.thanetgazette.co.uk/Tory-PPC-East-Kent-authority-replace-Thanet/story-24457122-detail/story.html

On the blogging front, apologies for not being very quick allowing comments and only responding to them in the evening, the difficulty is getting the time.

Flat Eric is promoting a book on the history of screwdrivers and screws this evening.    

Manston decision another delay, book buying in Margate and a ramble.

First Manston and this is what the council leader has to say:

"I know a lot of people will be very disappointed that Manston back to back investor follow up is not in the agenda. A decision had to be made yesterday.

Following meetings between RiverOak and our 151 officer Mr Cook last Thursday I understand further information has been submitted which must be thoroughly sifted through.

This must be done properly hence the acting Chief Executives decision to remove Manston from the 13th November agenda.

This is essential so that we can ensure every effort is given to RiverOak to answer the questions we originally put to them last summer.

We will probably need an extraordinary Cabinet once all the new information is examined and the 151 officer makes his report."

I am afraid my patience is wearing a bit thin over the council’s attitude to the former Manston site and their hostility towards the new owners £1bn investment, with the aim of providing 4,000 jobs.

Anyway in the real world here is how the new owners are progressing the site http://www.thanetgazette.co.uk/Urban-planners-hired-regenerate-Manston-airport/story-24316991-detail/story.html here is the link to the firm that is planning the regeneration of the Manston Airport site http://www.planit-ie.com/

The picture of the concrete arrow was taken looking out of the window by the loos at Turner Contemporary, I think it’s a sort of inadvertent art exhibit.

The gallery also has an “Interesting Thing Tree” possibly something to with Adrian Mole, I didn’t measure it but it seemed quite big to me.

It was pretty cold walking from the car to the Turner today, and I though the “Pole of Cold” exhibition fitted with my frame of mind.

What the gallery lacks at the moment is a major work of art of international significance.

Here are the books I bought in Margate today, I was particularly pleased to get some jewellery books and a decent motoring book, the mistake was probably the Mentmore as they probably won’t sell but I am fascinated by large country house auctions so will enjoy looking at them and probably afterwards sell them at a loss.

A few more books for the part of the shop I am expanding at the moment which falls under the category of art and crafts, although actually includes, architecture industrial archaeology, anyway books on woodturning and marquetry along with the jewellery.   

The council have published the agenda for next weeks cabinet meeting as mentioned with respect to Manston, see http://democracy.thanet.gov.uk/ieListDocuments.aspx?CId=151&MId=3451 one interesting document relates to closing Pier Yard car park in Ramsgate, see http://democracy.thanet.gov.uk/documents/s39562/Pier%20Yard%20Ramsgate.html?CT=2 I guess we are all aware of the two problems with cars in the vicinity of Thanet’s two main piers. Roughly the majority of traffic entering Harbour Parade in Ramsgate or Turner Contemporary vehicle entrance fails to park and comes out again 

Plane Tales from the bookshop, the Manston Airport Endgame, The Throw-up or Hoosh and the blog problems.

I have been interested in crafts and engineering for as long as I can remember, I was – in that other country that goes under the name of “the past – the small boy who took the clock apart. Not as it were looking for the tick but to see how it worked.

This means that my bookshop has a fairly extensive craft section covering most aspects of most crafts from the social history through to “how to do it books” but. What does this mean? An example – if you want to know how our society developed through charcoal burning and early iron smelting, I will probably have a book on it. On the other hand if you want to make your own charcoal, smelt your own iron ore and learn to be a blacksmith then I can probably provide the literature. 

I am not obsessive about this in a bookshop with about a 1000 shelves perhaps 40 are devoted to craft.

Anyway I was put in mind of misunderstandings about planes and particularly Manston today by the customer who wanted to look at a book in my section of rarer books. He was under the misapprehension that various editions of British Planemakers from 1700 were aviation books.

As you can see from the pictures of the books surrounding the plane books, were. What? Stanley not Wright and I had to do some mental gear changing to deal with this one.

We do have a fairly substantial aviation section but there are surprisingly few aviation books that go in the rare book section, perhaps the print runs are about the same with most aviation books, but for the most part even early aviation books are not rare books.

Now to some people this may seem like, I am delving into anorak land, but you and I are. What? A long time dead. Perhaps. This may have something to do with the enthusiasm of the Manston supporters who are. What? Plane spotters perhaps.

I take the view that someone who has reached the third decade of life without developing any serious interests to the point of having a collection of books about their interest – apart from the universal interests of sex and death which to some extent don’t count – is going to be a person that I will find. What? Dull perhaps.

Anyway on the Manston front the following post has been doing the rounds on the SMA FaceBook page, I have published it here small and in red; assuming that everyone interested has already read it anyway:

A post from this morning from R. John Pritchard that I think needs reading.

I had a long chat with an experienced TDC Councillor this morning about Manston and RiverOak. This Councillor speaks with the benefit of having had years of experience in the City of London and feels sure that everything would have gone smoothly if RO had registered a company in the City of London and put it in funds. My informant believes that may have been a fatal mistake, and that it is what firms like Pfizers, Roche, etc., have always done when investing in the UK.

All of this, the Councillor feels, has taken far too long, Councillors are no longer reading stuff that comes in on Manston, and that the steam is just going to fizzle out of the campaign. On the doorstep, people are responding to questions on things like street lamps, bins collections, above all immigration issues and NHS services, job opportunities, but Manston is now regarded as yesterday's issue and people are fed up with it.

The Councillor suggests that only a miracle or perhaps central Government intervention or some dramatic development affecting the existing owners will save the situation now.

Point-scoring in relation to different pro-Manston groups, I am informed by every Councillor I speak to, is regarded as totally counter-productive and something to be resisted absolutely and with great determination. They tell me that the great schism was perhaps fatal to our campaign, but that at the very least we mustn't keep on sniping about each other's campaigns.

I do not share all of this assessment but there is much there to take to heart.

If the Councillor whom I spoke to this morning is right, RiverOak really need to listen, not dictate. If RiverOak are right, the converse is true. Both sides need to cite their authorities, and to go the extra mile to listen so that in their attempts to find common ground, policies and decisions taken jointly are evidence-based.

We know that RiverOak is prepared to put the Council in funds to secure INDEPENDENT legal advice of the highest calibre that RiverOak believes will convince Councillors and persuade Officers that in times of financial stringency, Councils up and down the country are successfully obtaining Compulsory Purchase Orders in partnership with private investors in the manner that RiverOak is convinced Thanet District Council should appreciate is now regarded as best practice. We know that ministers and officials in London are reported as having despaired at the advice Thanet District Council officers are giving to our Councillors in relation to that process.

We also believe that Thanet District Council officers really do need to share with RiverOak the advice that they've received from their own legal advisers (because there has been little or NO direct contact from the Council's legal team about what external advice they've received). Without sitting down at a conference table and working out an agreement, we are going to lose our struggle to preserve OUR airport.

God help those who fail to rise to that challenge. This campaign still has overwhelming public support. The negativity around is a product of despair, not a change in the outcome that the overwhelming majority of people who live and work in Thanet truly want.

I can perhaps add to this that talking to some of the people involved, two major factors in making the situation impossible to progress have been that the RiverOak site use has been too similar to the Discovery Parks site use for Manston to make a cpo in any sense viable and that RiverOak have set up a “Delaware LLC” to deal with TDC. I guess this is something like an American district administration starting dealing with a small British finance company that suddenly finds that they are dealing with a small British Virgin Islands finance company. I am not going to labour the point here, google “Delaware LLC”  if you don’t follow what I am talking about.

Back to Mill for me another confusion that occasionally occurs in the craft world of bookselling is the one between the mill and the mill.

Earlier today I was collating a 1930 first edition of D. W. Pinkney’s book “Rope Spinning” all 96 pages of it, which culminates in the reader developing the ability to launch a lasso with their foot, when I noticed it has a chapter entitled, The Throw-up or Hoosh.

So on to moving this blog. An interesting thing about paranoia is that occasionally someone may actually be following you. Coincidence? Perhaps.

Recently the council have bought the large shop opposite mine, which is in an otherwise fully let shopping parade, and have very recently granted themselves planning permission to turn it into social housing. Then in the last week I have had two letters from the council’s solicitor threatening me with prison if I didn’t remove items from thanetonline blog. It has dawned on me that the council may not like me very much and it further occurred to me that if the council backed by a high court judge were to ask Google to remove thanetonline blog then they probably would.

Personally it wouldn’t worry me much but over past few years it has over a million and a half visits and many of these relate to local history posts there, so I have moved my blog here.

I will endeavour to sort out links and so on here as I get the time, I will also try restoring anonymous comment, although I will leave comment moderation on.