When a bookshop works, there is really nothing quite like it – and Foyles works. As an independent, it cannot compete with the big chains on advertising or discounts. So it has come up with other, more subtle strategies to bring in customers. Its staff, for instance, are passionate and knowledgeable (I know for a fact – as do lots of Soho art directors – that a certain member of its art department can find you any image from any period in art history in a matter of minutes).
Then there’s its loyalty scheme. At Foyles, the requisite number of stamps on your card brings more than a discount on a future purchase; there are other benefits too, such as a deal on a subscription to the Times Literary Supplement
Or what about its cafe? While Borders has Starbucks and Waterstone’s Costa, the Foyles cafe is not only chain-free and organic, it hosts regular jazz gigs. No wonder, then, that its events sell out – even the ones with awful, trembling hosts like me. It is a shop that knows how to connect with its customers.
I thought of Foyles as I read that HMV, the owner of Waterstone’s, is planning to close up to 30 bookshops and, in its remaining stores, put more emphasis on novels, cookery and children’s books, and rather less on what Gerry Johnson, the head of Waterstone’s, calls ‘academic and humanities’. The contrast between the two shops is already pretty enormous: while Foyles stocks 221,000 titles, and still manages to make money, Waterstone’s carries some 160,000, and is busy issuing profit warnings.
Now that gap is set to widen further. Johnson has denied that this change of focus is a dumbing-down, but no one who knows anything about the book business believes him. Last week I spoke to several high-profile people in the industry, and they all said the same thing: we’re talking chick-lit and Jamie Oliver. If you’re the kind of person who walks into a bookshop hoping to stumble on as yet unknown treasures that you just won’t be able to resist buying, you’d better forget it.
Extract taken from;
Real readers want bookshops with personality and choice. Waterstone’s take note…
Rachel Cooke, The Observer, March 18, 2007