This is an interesting but I think ultimately flawed rebuttal to my earlier post: Bookstores Now Selling To The Rats
He states:
Whatever though, these people on one book a year aren’t rats. Their one-or-two-books-, one-or-two-albums-, one-or-two-DVDs-a-year is what keeps everything afloat because they’re legion…which does make them sound a bit like rats I guess, with their power laying in their numbers.
That sounds all swell, until you begin to ask, Why did the music stores disappear? Why did the video stores disappear? Why did Blockbuster just file for bankruptcy? Why are Barnes & Noble and Borders both closing stores?
I think he takes exception to the term “rat,” really. Blame Godin for choosing the metaphor. The fact remains, changing the terminology, that when your best customers leave, you can’t support a business with casual customers.
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Hi Mike, thanks for responding and reposting this.
I can’t lie, I found the ‘rats’ term to be loaded, and the more I thought about it, it seemed to be reflected in the sentiment, that those left behind are the unsavvy ones, that if you don’t buy enough then you’re not ‘good’ for the industry everyone else is escaping anyway.
I agree, a business built on casual customers struggles to get going, but I’m not so sure that it can’t be sustained on them. Casual customers support supermarkets for instance (there’s not so much loyalty to a particular brand that people will travel for them, people tend to transition quite well), and I think this is a useful analogy to what music and book stores became long before digitisation.
Barnes and Borders and Blockbusters and Tower, I believe, are all in trouble because they never catered to a hardcore clientele, they catered to the supermarket crowd, those who wanted cheap and easy, not to the real ‘best’ customers who would stick with them when times got tough, but those who, when the money ran out, went for cheap, free, and easy elsewhere.
If Tower had cared for people who really loved music they’d have made long term sustainable profits on a small scale, rather than the short and explosive gains that late stage capitalism prides. Tower is boom and bust, Borders is boom and bust. Local bookstore and music stores are sustainable and dependable, bar the threats imposed on them by the wider market. Local indies suffer when they’re driven out of business by the big names, which then themselves die on the features they were built on (cheap, easy) when digitisation takes over. Then the indies can’t come back because now ‘free’ (or even just ‘non-physical’) is normalised.
I wonder how many bibliophiles with a great local bookstore have switched to the Kindle?
The local bookstores are in trouble too, with closings announced in my Twitterstream several times a month. I think Godin’s point is valid, despite the bombastic terms he used: Those who spend the most keep businesses going, not those who spend the least. Scott McKain famously said in Twitter to me today: “Casualness causes casualties.” There’s merit in the numbers hypothesis you posit, but not for stores dedicated to single products, such as books. By sheer numbers, WalMart rules and books then become relegated to a few shelves there and fewer titles published than ever. That’s a far bleaker future than one in which people switch to and buy eBooks.
Absolutely, if the the fates are either obliteration or ereading then I’m certainly pro-ereading! I’m just not so sure that the reason it’s got to that stage is that the dedicated hardcore buyers defected to new media leaving the book stores to perish. Dedicated buyers would, I assume, love to stay with the bookstores they know and trust, but those stores got shut and replaced with massive book superstores. These hardcore buyers had no commitment to the big book stores (which were never really for them, but instead for the rest of the population who were far more casual in their buying, who wanted ease not terrifying variety, a good book not a long search, who prided good prices and efficiency over shop character and staff knowledge, and who can blame them, books aren’t their obsession, they merely quite like, or even like them a lot, and their few dollars, multiplied over and over and over sure added up…), so when there was another option which, while not as good as the dead indie stores, gave back the variety they’d missed, the big buyers, the hardcore, went online, and maybe switched to ereading too. And as ereading gets more popular, the casual crowd are seeing that it’s perhaps even easier and more efficient than the big stores, even though they were aimed at them, ever were. So now they go online too, and some of them find out that you can even download stuff for free, which is even better than cheap and efficient. So the big stores die (and in their death throes deploy a certain kind of competition which kills off the last of the indies). When the dust settles, the big stores long gone, with few indies able to return, everyone who gives a damn about reading will be online and ereading. This is a fate, and maybe not a bad one. I have no doubt that there are others too.
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