Did Borders kill the small, downtown bookstore?
I live right outside of downtown Wilmington in a suburb that’s overloaded with retail stores because Delaware is the land of tax-free shopping, so folks on the Pennsylvania border flock here.
When I need to buy a book fast, this is what I do.
I drive down the main suburban retail drag and go to Borders. When they don’t have what I want – which is typical because none of these big box stores stock variety anymore – I go to the Barnes & Noble a few blocks down and check for the book. When that turns up nothing, I head to my favorite bookstore, the Ninth Street Book Shop, which is right downtown but is the farthest away.
It’s an independent store, and it tends to have a more eclectic mix of books.
Well, when I heard Borders was putting itself up for sale and that Barnes & Noble is considering buying its competitor, I immediately thought this would be good news for Jack and Gemma Buckley, who own the Ninth Street Book Shop.
I was wrong.
I got Jack on the phone and asked him if he had read about the Borders sale. He said he had but didn’t think the sale, or a merger between the two book giants, would really impact his business.
Turns out the Buckleys' bookshop, which has been in the city of Wilmington for 31 years, is at a precarious point in its history.
“Business is awful,” he says. While he acknowledges that the big book retailers put pressure on small shops and even ran some out of business, his business is suffering now because of the lack of customers in downtown Wilmington.
He calls the city a “retail wasteland.”
Twelve years ago, he explains, business began to fall off and it’s gotten worse and worse ever since. At the height of the store's success more than a decade ago, they had six full-time workers. Today they only have one.
It’s not that the city is lacking corporate tenants. It’s just that the employees don’t like to venture outside of their company cocoon.
“Even when companies relocate to the city, they bring the mentality with them that they had at their office parks. They don’t leave the building and venture outside,” he says. “We used to have a big business clientele, but no more.”
And he shared some awful news with me. That when his lease is up in a year and a half, if things don’t change, he’ll be closing up shop for good.
At age 60, he says, he’s too old to go into debt to relocate the store, so it may be goodbye Ninth Street Book Shop.
Suddenly I’m overwhelmed with the thought that we all should have done more. Why didn’t I just head over to Ninth Street to pick up the books I needed instead of first driving to a huge parking lot and walking into a huge chain?
