Borders War Rages in Santa Cruz
On its first day of business here, Borders Books and Music got the full Santa Cruz treatment.
Hundreds of tourists and curious locals browsed and bought. Scores of protesters beat drums, hung banners and set off stink bombs inside the store. The “Bare-Breasted Ladies,” a masked group of topless women whose previous chain store targets include Starbucks and the Gap, roamed the aisles.
The commotion is not likely to abate any time soon. The arrival of Borders to this city of five independent booksellers has fanned the flames of a bitter legal battle and spurred the City Council to invent laws to ban other large chain retailers from moving in.
“Borders is not welcome here and they know that,” said Mayor Keith Sugar, who has vowed never to shop in the store. “These kinds of predatory chains pose a threat to our town and to local businesses and to the character of the community. We want them out.”
When Borders opened the doors of a 23,000-square-foot store this month, it became the biggest bookstore in town.
But size doesn’t matter, say Borders officials, who promise to be a good neighbor downtown. Borders started out as an independent bookstore and each new outlet retains that spirit, they said. Every new store soon becomes an integral part of the community it joins.
“I think the people in Santa Cruz will see that, because we’re more than books, we’ll attract people to that area and we’ll revitalize that area,” said Ann Binkley, a spokeswoman for Borders. “We’ve had so many people come in and tell us how excited they are that we’re in town. People here want us.”
Santa Cruz is the latest California community to wrestle with the impact of large retailers that buy in bulk and offer deep discounts.
An increasing number of communities have fought back.
Eureka’s battle against Wal-Mart landed on the local ballot, where the retailer’s plans were rebuffed last year. Neighborhoods in San Francisco have successfully lobbied city and county leaders to resist drugstore giant Sav-On. Residents in the Marin County town of Mill Valley have formed a George Bailey Society to fight encroachment by chain businesses.
In 1999, when Borders announced plans to open a store in Capitola, residents and business owners in nearby Santa Cruz helped fight the move. At a late-night public hearing, Neal Coonerty, owner of the Bookshop Santa Cruz, gave a stirring opposition speech observers say helped turn the tide.
After a judge found that the size and scope of the proposed Borders violated Capitola’s city planning regulations, the chain looked elsewhere. To Coonerty’s great dismay, Borders set its sights on a location near his own store in Santa Cruz.
Without specific laws on the books, Santa Cruz city leaders said they were unable to prevent Borders from leasing space and obtaining permits. Although the City Council plans to vote on anti-chain regulations in July, some members worry about the perils of driving such reliable sources of sales tax dollars out of town.
When the Santa Cruz Borders opened June 3, eager buyers flocked to the store. The city’s other booksellers geared up for a fight.
“They’re a block away and they’ll have a big impact,” said Coonerty, a former mayor of Santa Cruz who opened his store in 1966. “Downtown Santa Cruz is such a vibrant area right now, and they’re here to get their share.”
A decade ago, that would have been impossible.
In 1989, when the Loma Prieta earthquake leveled Santa Cruz’s thriving downtown, locals banded together to rebuild. Coonerty immediately reopened his store in a tent. Customers loyally shopped in the cramped and stuffy confines for three years while Coonerty struggled to secure a bank loan.
“We spent 10 years rebuilding this thing after the earthquake, sticking with the community and the community sticking with us, and to have them come in and poach the area is very hard,” he said.
Coonerty is president of the American Booksellers Assn., an organization that represents 3,500 independent bookstores nationwide and has sued Borders and the big book chains, alleging unfair business practices and demanding to see financial records.
He also is one of several ABA booksellers being countersued by Borders, which denies that its stores cause economic hardship. In their most recent salvo, Borders attorneys have subpoenaed all of Bookshop Santa Cruz’s financial and business records too. An appeal of the scope of the subpoena is now before a judge.
Such suits, countersuits and legal maneuvering are a new wrinkle in bookselling, but Coonerty shrugs it off.
“It’s what’s happening to booksellers all around the country,” he said. “I’m facing what thousands of independent bookstores have been faced with over the years.”
Ironically, Borders and Bookshop Santa Cruz share similar beginnings. Borders Books and Music began as an independent bookstore in the college town of Ann Arbor, Mich. Today it sells books, music, videos, magazines and cafe items in more than 300 stores in the United States, with 41 in California. It also owns the 900-store Waldenbooks chain.
Although Borders is now a $3- billion chain, small booksellers in Santa Cruz and other Borders towns have nothing to fear from the stores’ arrival, officials say.
“We coexist with independent bookstores all the time, like the ones in Palo Alto and Davis, where we opened new stores,” said Border’s spokeswoman Binkley. “The Shaman Drum bookstore in Ann Arbor actually expanded because of us.”
Not exactly, according to the folks at Shaman Drum.
“Yes, I know they use us as an example, and it’s wrong,” said Keith Taylor, an Ann Arbor bookseller who worked for eight years at Borders before moving to Shaman Drum.
“They were here first, and then Shaman Drum opened,” Taylor said. “Shaman Drum carved out a niche selling the expensive academic books that Borders wouldn’t carry; Shaman Drum existed in spite of Borders, not because of them.”
Cathy Jamieson of Printers Inc. in Palo Alto also sees things differently. “Our sales have been dropping steadily since Borders came into town,” she said. “We’re not benefiting here, I’d say it’s more like a Cold War.”
There is a discernible decrease in variety when chain bookstores gain the upper hand in a community, said Pat Holt, who writes a weekly column for the Northern California Independent Booksellers Assn.
“Taken together, independents offer a wider range of books than any chain store, which use formula buys and a single buying office,” Holt said. “When we talk about the need in our democracy for an informed citizenry, we have to know that the choices we are offered in terms of the books that we read are not falling into fewer and fewer hands, that our choices don’t get narrower just for the sake of profit.”
In the end, the success or failure of independent bookstores depends on the support of local residents, said Don Lane, a former mayor of Santa Cruz.
“That’s what it comes down to, ongoing patronage of the alternatives,” Lane said. “Winning out over Borders won’t happen this year or even next year; it will be about making the independent bookstore your choice every day, year after year.”
