In the latest edition of the SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte looks back to those dimly remembered days early in the never-ending pandemic lockdown theatre we’ve all been trapped in since, like, forever:

I was in downtown Toronto one morning this week for the first time in a long time and while there was still lighter traffic and fewer people than in pre-pandemic days, things were bustling. That’s good news for thousands of retail businesses in Toronto’s core, not least Ben McNally’s bookstore.

Grumpy Ben is a favorite of this newsletter, always good for a quote. Way back in SHuSH 10, a reader asked us: “Why do books have prices printed on them? Very few items I purchase have ‘suggested retail prices’ but books and magazines do.” We went to Ben for an answer and, as reported at the time, almost lost our hearing:

Why do they have prices printed on them? Great question! It makes me fucking nuts. Why shouldn’t I be able to set my own price? I mean, the publisher can have a suggested retail price, fine, but I shouldn’t have to honor it. As a bookseller, I should be able to sell it for what I can get. Some of those books from places like Harvard University Press, I could price the shit out of them. Who else is gonna carry the goddamn things?

I caught up with Ben again at his former Richmond and Bay store […] for SHuSH 53, a few months into lockdown. He was closed to foot traffic but delivering by courier and fulfilling curbside pickup orders. His lease was almost up and he had no option to renew. His landlord was turning his space into a breezeway. He felt fortunate not to have signed on for another ten years given that the retail world was falling down around his ears and I was happy for him from a financial perspective, but that location was easily the most beautiful bookstore in Toronto, and maybe in Canada. It was a real loss when it closed in August of that year. Ben put its gorgeous hardwood fixtures into storage and moved to a temporary location with plans to perhaps open again at a new spot if life ever returned to normal.

It was interesting for me to re-read that conversation. So much was unknowable at the time. Would the virus pass as quickly as SARS, or would it haunt us for years? Would there be a vaccine? Would people return downtown or work from home in perpetuity? Would they ever feel comfortable returning to a bookstore, buying a book off a shelf that some other customer may have handled a few minutes before? Was the future of book retailing home delivery and, if so, would Ben ever need another store? Were book launches and book events, an important part of his business, ever coming back? On a brighter note, would there be great opportunities to snap up prime commercial space on better terms after landlords had suffered for a year or two?

He also revisited the situation of Canada’s only big box book retailer (who long ago gave up on selling many books and now seem to give much more floor space and marketing attention to candles, housewares, decorative cushions and goodness knows what else):

“Indigo Books and Music” by Open Grid Scheduler / Grid Engine is licensed under CC0 1.0

In our review of Indigo’s travails in SHuSH 152, I complained, almost as an aside, about the chain’s commitment to selling crap general merchandise. It strikes me that putting blankets and candles on an equal footing with literature leaves the customer with the impression that the retailer believes books are nothing more than housewares or decorative objects. It trivializes them. Most of the feedback I received focused on this point. I’ll let author Judy Stoffman speak for the majority:

Ken is absolutely right about Indigo having to learn or relearn to be a decent bookseller first instead of selling cushions and cheese boards. Here in Vancouver the store stocks few quality children’s books and no children’s music — staff has never heard of Dennis Lee. They never host a reading or book launch or an interesting talk about books. It’s a continuing source of frustration to readers like myself.

While we had his attention, we asked Ben McNally what he thought of Indigo’s merch strategy. He understood the attraction: “The margins are ok on that stuff. Books, you’re pretty much locked into a 40 per cent margin. You sell sweatshirts or something and you price them at whatever you want. So the margins are there, but long-term, I don’t know. I haven’t been into [an Indigo superstore] in a long time but I’m hearing that their stores are pretty spotty. Not looking healthy.”

Ben sells some gift cards, because people are often buying his books as gifts, but he’s otherwise light on general merchandise: “We’ve always shied away from that stuff because we want people to think that we’re serious about selling books.”

Serious about selling books. Imagine that.

I can see the sense in selling book-adjacent items, but Chapters/Indigo seemed to decide well before the pandemic that they needed to attract a non-reading audience who otherwise would never set foot in their retail stores. In the process, of course, they de-emphasized the advantage that big box stores have over smaller retailers: the width of stock they can offer. If you go into one of the cavernous Chapters or Indigo stores these days — and it’s been over two years since the last time I did — you rarely find much in the book sections beyond the “bestsellers” (taking up vast swathes of shelf space) and suggestions to go to their website if you are looking for something they don’t have on hand. If I have made the effort to go to your store, telling me I’d have been better off firing up a web browser isn’t the best method of luring me back again.