Getting a Read on the Future of Book Selling : Retailing: The superstore concept comes to Southern California, with two of the industry’s giants squaring off.
First there were the Home Improvement Wars--Home Depot versus Home Club.
Then came the Electronic Wars--Circuit City versus Silo.
Now, the Battle of the Books has come to Southern California.
Two national chains are going head-to-head in the lucrative Southland market with plans to open dozens of super bookstores--the latest wrinkle in retailing’s superstore boom--over the next several years. Only three are open now.
The big winners in the battle between Bookstar Inc. of Austin, Tex., and Crown Books of Washington will be Southland consumers, analysts said. Instead of limited selections and high prices, book buyers will find as many as 50,000 titles at each superstore location, along with discounts that average 35% to 40%.
The contest for Southern California’s book dollar pits two of retailing’s keenest marketing minds: Robert Haft, the boyish-looking Crown president whose television commercials remind viewers, “If you paid full price, you didn’t buy it at Crown Books,” and Tom Christopher, who joined Bookstar after helping lead Pier 1 Imports from purveyor of Bohemian oddities in the 1960s to retailing powerhouse in the 1980s.
To Haft, Christopher is a Johnny-come-lately in the highly competitive book business. “A lot of people think books are like anything else” in retailing, he said. “They’re not. People who have ventured into the book field have learned that sadly. What you read is important to you. It’s not just another purchase.”
But Christopher’s company pioneered the book superstore in the early 1980s and has never operated any other kind of store. He views the launch of Super Crown with a touch of wry amusement: “I guess more people got the idea that (the book superstore) would be a good way to go.”
In size, layout and furnishings, the Super Crown in Torrance and Bookstar’s two Los Angeles-area stores--a 6-month-old outlet in Brea and a month-old store in Torrance--are similar. Each is about 10,000 square feet, four times the size of most of their conventional competitors.
They have the best sellers that most bookstores offer, plus more extensive selections of classics, children’s books, computer books, business books, art books, travel books and other categories. Between the racks are wide aisles, benches for customers who want to do more serious, sit-down browsing, and molded-plastic seating and toys for kiddie visitors.
In a recent visit to the Torrance Super Crown, which opened in May, a casually dressed Haft answered questions while watching customers out of the corner of his eye.
“Look at this lady,” he said suddenly, beckoning sideways toward a customer heading for a cash register. “She’s got six books under her arm. One of the things that we’ve found out about superstores is that the prices are so good and the selection so broad that many customers make multiple purchases.”
Crown has always had low prices. Haft introduced discounting into book retailing when he opened his first store in 1977, after completing an MBA at Harvard. Much of the industry scrambled to follow.
Superstores allow Crown to couple its longtime strength of low prices with the bigger selection that once eluded the company, Haft said. Super Crown stores typically carry about 30,000 titles, compared to 10,000 at traditional Crowns.
While the superstore concept was carefully studied, Haft said he used anything but a scientific process in selecting the desks, train-shaped seats and other furnishings for the children’s sections.
Haft realized just before the first Super Crown opened in Washington that he had no between-the-racks diversions for youngsters. So he scooped up furniture and playthings from the rooms of his sons, Michael, 4, and Nicholas, 2, and loaded them onto a truck.
“Daddy, these are our things,” one protested--to no avail.
Super Crown’s kiddie customers liked the accouterments so well that Haft put the same combination in all seven of his superstores. His children quickly got replacements.
Haft said Crown plans to replace about 50 of its approximately 100 conventional stores in the Los Angeles area with Super Crowns over the next five years. And Bookstar, which has 35 stores, plans to open in Tustin, Beverly Hills, Oceanside, Culver City, Studio City, Woodland Hills and Marina del Rey, among other sites.
Without mentioning a specific number of projected stores in Southern California, Christopher said the chain is planning such a fast-paced expansion nationally that its revenue should double in a year.
But he declined to say what kind of revenue growth privately held Bookstar, which operates in most states under the name Bookstop, is generating at stores already open a year.
Haft contends that it is too early for publicly held Crown to have a grasp on year-to-year superstore sales growth, because the oldest Super Crown has only been open for a year.
But many analysts believe that not only are the supers doing well, they are likely to be the stars in an industry that the New York-based Book Industry Study Group projects will have revenue increases averaging 8.3% a year through 1994.
Neil Stern, a partner in the Chicago-based retail consulting firm McMillan-Doolittle, said much of the book business is privately held, so he has not seen revenue figures for the super stores. But his sense is that the supers are doing well. Otherwise, he said, the industry wouldn’t be rushing pell-mell into the much more expensive investments such large outlets require.
Industry watchers say the potential superstore market is being carved up quickly by region: Bookstar in the Southeast and much of the Southwest; Bookstar’s parent, New York-based Barnes & Noble Inc., in the Northeast; Crown in the Atlantic Seaboard, part of the Midwest and much of the West Coast; Ann Arbor, Mich.-based Book Inventory Systems Inc. (its bookstores are called Borders) in the Midwest, and West Sacramento-based Tower Books in Northern California and the Pacific Northwest.
At first blush, it might seem that an impending onslaught by huge superstore operations would worry independent bookstores, the mom-and-pop segment of the industry. But that is not the case, according to established independents.
“I don’t think it’s going to seriously affect the stronger independent bookstores,” said Dave Dutton, co-owner with his wife, Judy, of Dutton stores in downtown Los Angeles, Burbank and North Hollywood.
His theory is that when a chain store springs up, it increases residents’ awareness of books. And that actually leads to spillover sales at independents.
Glenn Goldman said his Book Soup store in West Hollywood has prospered despite the fact that “we’ve had a lot of chain stores that have opened here in the past.”
Among the reasons, he said, are that “we’ve always stressed service” and that “the areas we’re strong in (art, architecture, performing arts and drama), I think we’re much stronger in than they are.”
