I got a notification because I'd posted a few years ago, and agree that this made my day to read! It's wonderful when people can realize a dream in a very meaningful way. @Watchmaker do you have a space where visiting artists and authors can stay, as was an original plan? Also, what has made you the happiest with this venture? What have been the biggest challenges?
Regarding the space--yes, with caveats. There was an empty apartment in the building when we bought it (the previous owners home) and we've been renting it out to short term residents (three people who were in the area for seasonal work and one couple that was waiting to close on their new house) with gaps in between where it was available to use for visiting artists and authors. In practice, we haven't organized many bookstore events at this point, and none of them so far has required us to put someone up for the night. We have had a handful of musicians stay there that were doing things in my SO's studio.
We're going to continue to have a space available, but we're going to rent out that apartment and modify the space behind SO's studio to be able to hosts guests there. That space otherwise is difficult to utilize, and the rent we'll get from the apartment makes this a better deal.
It's hard to pick a favorite aspect of having the store, but I love that we get a lot of teenagers coming in and often hanging out for quite a while. I grew up in bookstores, and it makes me happy to provide that kind of space to others. I love talking about/recommending books to people, and I really love it when they come back and say they enjoyed my suggestion. And buying new books for the store is super fun.
@Watchmaker Would you share a little of what you've learned about how Amazon is "doing a bunch of things designed to raise costs for publishers and independent booksellers"?
Sure, with the caveat that I am not a lawyer, and I'm not claiming these things are necessarily illegal, they may be just business practices I dislike.
The first thing is that Amazon works to prevent third-party sellers from offering products cheaper on other marketplaces. They enforce this by trolling the internet for Amazon sellers selling on other websites, and punishing the ones who have lower prices elsewhere (punishment is usually in the form of showing up lower in the Amazon results). Because Amazon's marketplace is one of the more expensive places to sell third-party (between all the fees, Amazon is often taking >50% of the sales) a third party seller usually *could*
offer a product cheaper elsewhere, but they are disincentivized from doing so. An example (with made up numbers):
Seller BooksRUs sells a book for $10 on Amazon. Because of Walmart's lower fees, they could sell the same book for $9 on that marketplace and make the same money. But if they do so, Amazon will push them down the results page and they'll lose tons of sales, so they instead price the Walmart book at $10 as well. Higher prices for consumers.
Another thing that Amazon has done is use their dominant market position to force contracts on the big publishers that give Amazon steeper wholesale discounts than the publishers can really afford. The only way the publishers can make their numbers work is to raise retail prices. Amazon doesn't care because they are already getting deep discounts, but those higher retail prices result in higher costs for all the independent bookstores that don't have the clout to negotiate like Amazon. So effectively, Amazon negotiated not for a price decrease for themselves, but a price increase for their competition (me). In the past, it has been alleged that this is a hub-and-spoke conspiracy between Amazon and the publishers, but no court has found that to be the case (yet), largely due to lack of evidence of "rim" deals between the publishers on the spoke. It goes without saying that Amazon have excellent lawyers who may have designed a system that stays just on the side of what the law says is allowable.
Of course, there's the whole issue of Amazon being the dominant supplier and dominant marketplace for many things online (including books) which gives them a lot of power to manipulate the marketplace.
The last thing I'll add is pretty clearly not an illegal business practice, but it's one I don't like, and that's Amazon's willingness to take a loss on a segment, or entire business, to drive all their competition out of business and eventually reap the rewards of a dominant market share. It's right out of the Walmart playbook, and it's very different to how independent bookstores operate (I don't want to drive anyone out of business, even Amazon).
There's an ongoing lawsuit that covers some of these issues (
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/09/ftc-sues-amazon-illegally-maintaining-monopoly-power), we'll have to see where that goes. Other countries (especially France) have created laws that try to level the playing field (or protect small bookstores, depending on your viewpoint), but those seem unlikely to gain traction in the States.
