Fair’s Fair “For Book Lovers”

Bucking the trend is seldom rewarding but then, trends in the used  book business seldom seem to lead anyone else to anywhere I would care to go.

We, like seemingly everyone else in the used books business, sought out an initial location with one primary consideration in mind - cheap rent. - MISTAKE!

It took us 17 years to realize if you really want to be in a retail business and be of service to as many customers as possible you need a legitimate retail location.

About seven years ago we belatedly joined the herd and started listing and selling books on the internet. One person was enlisted to do most of the listing and we eventually had 40,000 books online but found another two of our full time staff were absorbed in the shipping and email components necessary to maintain good customer relations. As time went by the listing agents started to take a bigger cut of the pie while being less than diligent in allowing penny sellers and multilisters (who realized there was a loophole which allowed them to sell books they didn’t own, didn’t have to buy, didn’t have to process - except through email - and could provide them an income) access to their services.

Maybe it was their attempt to curb such practices which started their suspending legitimate dealers who could not fufill orders placed by their customers(?). I am now happy they did us the disservice a couple of times. Even though the 40,000 books we had listed were set aside for internet customers our local customers soon realized they could come in and buy those books. That sometimes created a conflict whereby a local customer bought the book at the same time an internet order was coming in. In those cases, naturally, the listing agent was not receiving his cut and that created a problem for them in that their viability as a reliable source may start to be questioned.

After all, they, like the multilisters, had no inventory of their own but in all their advertising that fact was never mentioned and their processes kept us as anonymous as possible. They had built their business on a house of cards and had all us busy bees out here hustling to fill orders and they were damning us.

The worst part was - we were buying books in the local market and sending them off around the world rather than fully serving the local market and our loyal customers who are effusive in their praise - MISTAKE!

I am thankful it only took three years to correct that mistake.

Our intention is to operate the best brick and mortar stores possible at as many convenient locations as we can manage. Even though our four local stores will soon have all their inventories online on our website - this is being done primarily for the convenience of local customers and customers who are coming into Calgary so they will be sure the book they want is set aside for them when they get to the store.

We encourage all other brick and mortar booksellers to put their local customers first.