Bottom Line: Bookbuyers need time – and tea
WHAT is a bookshop for? Waterstones boss James Daunt is staunching the bleeding, as shown by the slowing rate of losses in the latest results. But to cure the patient, he needs an answer to that question. It’s harder than it seems.
With Amazon winning on volume and price, chains like Waterstones need to find new reasons why people still need to visit in person to pick up a book. Enter Cafe W.
Here’s one reason why: online only wins when you’ve made a decision. If you don’t know what book you want, a shop is still more useful than wandering Amazon’s limitless library of Babel guided by nothing but impersonal algorithms.
That means the most important lesson a physical bookshop can learn today is how to step back, giving would-be bookbuyers time and space to discover their choice. And if the experience is pleasant, maybe they won’t get out their smartphone and buy it on Amazon.
So far, letting people think it over in Cafe W apparently increases book sales significantly. Sometimes you don’t want to be in a hurry to get the customers to the till.