Our second interview on Tuesday was with an owner of a local bookstore, known as Ravenous Reader, located around ten minutes outside of downtown Charleston. Unfortunately, as we pulled into the parking lot in front of the small pink storefront, we saw a huge banner displaying the message: "Going out of business!" So we obviously had to alter some of our questions in our heads to cater to the fact that this local business wasn't surviving or able to compete against the larger chains. We figured that maybe we would be able to figure out something that this business was doing that may have hurt it and caused it to go out of business.
We entered to find the storeowner sitting behind a desk, quietly reading while music played throughout the tiny, vacant store. The shelves were far from full, so we realized that the business was trying to get rid of all of the books without receiving shipments of any more. When we talked to her, she mentioned how a lot of her difficulty with her business lately was from dealing with the new technologies, just like we had found with the owner of Mac's Backs Books in Cleveland. The difference between the two businesses that seemed to have helped Mac's Backs but not Ravenous Reader was that Mac's Backs had set up a method for buyers to purchase eBooks towards the store, yet Ravenous Reader did not even have a website. Another reason Ravenous Reader was going out of business was because the owner was in her early sixties and ready for retirement, so she wasn't as willing to fight against all the big businesses and the new technologies.
When we asked for her opinion on the eBook movement, she mentioned how she thinks they are just a fad, and that what is troubling is that consumers always want what is currently trendy. However, she doesn't believe that eBooks will completely take over the book industry because there are some types of books that are important to have in the physical form, such as certain non-fiction and self-help books. She does not plan on adding eBooks to her business' products because she is not willing to pay the expenses for a website, so she hasn't been and won't be able to compete with other businesses in that aspect.
She did mention that in the seventeen years that her store has been open, it has had a very loyal group of customers, and that often times several generations of her customers' families will shop there. Her first location was right next to a Publix, similar to a Giant Eagle, which brought a lot of foot traffic. But after ten years of open business, she moved down the street to a location a little more tucked away, but that wasn't as much of a problem because she had already built many customer connections.
One coincidence that we thought of while talking with her was that she did advertise more than other businesses we had previously talked with. Other businesses would maybe advertise a few times in a local newspaper, but they depended heavily on word of mouth, whereas Ravenous Reader advertised much more often in newspapers and magazines, budgeting a lot more money towards that part of the business.
The owner did not want to be filmed, so it was a quick conversation that was short yet informative, and it gave us a different aspect on local businesses because we had talked with one that was no longer successful.
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