Thanksgiving weekend, the traditional beginning of the holiday season, was a mixed bag for independent bookstores this year, despite many booksellers noting that customers were intentional about shopping local. While some booksellers reported large crowds and strong sales, others reported dips to varying degrees, whether due to economic uncertainty or the severe weather that battered the Midwest.
“I’m calling it S’No Business Saturday,” said Nina Barrett of Bookends and Beginnings in Evanston, Ill. A blizzard kept people away, resulting in sales being down “a financially devastating” 50% from last year’s Thanksgiving weekend. A number of other Midwestern indies had even worse experiences, due to weather that destroyed any expectations of the traditional Small Business Saturday bump. “My shop was closed all weekend due to 15 inches of snow,” says Cori Theroux of Green Dragon Bookshop in Fort Dodge, Iowa. “It was a total loss of the weekend.” Despite the snow, Bob Dobrow of Zenith Bookstore in Duluth, Minn., reports that weekend sales were up 20% over last year, with customers enticed by the store’s Jólabókaflóðið promotion of free cocoa and cookies, inspired by an Icelandic holiday tradition, along with ARC giveaways and book signings by local authors.
Katya d’Angelo of Bridgeside Books in Waterbury, Vt., says that while sales were “excellent” on the Friday after Thanksgiving, they dropped significantly on SBS. Still, she notes that November sales overall “tracked virtually the same from last year, so that the SBS drop was made up through the rest of the month.”
Heading south, David Landry of Class Bookstore in Houston says that sales had been slow, but they picked up significantly when the store participated in a holiday market organized by Mossrose Bookshop, a new pop-up romance bookstore. “We know people are feeling the crunch under this administration and that hardcovers going for $35 were going to be a hard sell,” Landry says, “so we brought in a bunch of zines from Microcosm, and they sold like crazy.”
Elsewhere, booksellers reported a busy weekend. In Washington, D.C., East City Bookshop’s Emilie Sommer says that customers “were eager to shop and appreciative of our presence” as well as the offerings of homemade baked goods on SBS, inspired by the booksellers’s favorite cookbooks. In Nashville, Sarah Arnold of Parnassus Books reports that weekend sales were “up a bit from last year, a promising sign amid some fears that folks will generally be spending less this holiday season.” She added that there’s “some widespread negative sentiment toward a few of the big-box retailers,” so that despite “the economic question marks right now, there are also some reasons for local retailers to be optimistic.”
Up and down the West Coast, booksellers reported crowded stores and ringing cash registers. “It was wild,” says Diana Portwood of Bob’s Beach Books in Lincoln City, Ore. “Friday was one of my busiest days ever. It was entirely unexpected, and over the top.” While Saturday sales were “great,” it also was “a strange day,” Portwood adds. “I did more than half the daily sales in the first hour and a half, then it seemed downright mellow after that rush.”
Warwick’s in La Jolla, Calif., was packed with customers all day Friday, head book buyer Mallory Groff says, while on SBS, foot traffic came and went. Groff says that sales were up from last year over the long weekend, which she says was “impressive,” since last year’s were also up. This holiday season might be a short one, she says, but such an enthusiastic start “makes me believe it will be a powerful one.”
A few titles booksellers observed to be resonating with customers across the country include The Correspondent by Virginia Evans and The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) by Rabih Alameddine. On the children’s side, Dog Man: Big Jim Believes by Dav Pilkey and Wimpy Kid: Partypooper by Jeff Kinney flew off many bookstore shelves.
