Weller Book Works

Community

Studies show that there is at least 70% greater retention of money in the home town when it is spent in a locally owned business instead of being spent in a non-local chain. Even a local greedy creep will spend more locally than an out-of-state owner.
If your neighbor has no money, your neighbor can’t support your business.
We are already seeing how our economy can be halted when too few persons have too much money and too many have too little. If you don’t blame Wall Street for the disastrous inequity that is plaguing most citizens, you’re either one of the dupes or making more than your fair share from the broken system.

As corporate chain colonists have malled our cities, the individuality of towns and cities has been badly damaged. One-of-a-kind stores create on-of-a-kind experiences
Not only have larger stores not provided better selections, when a big box becomes dominant, it actually truncates selection to gain economic benefit.
Tourism is harmed by homogeneity. As eating and shopping experiences are increasingly similar, travel is simply less interesting than it used to be.
100 differently owned bookstores will naturally stock different selections of books. Chain stores enjoy the increased profitablility of centralized buying so a few buyers have control over what is sold in hundreds of outlets. Even the wisest buyer in the world cannot know everything. Just by the variations in their taste, independently owned bookstores ensure a vast and diverse selection of books.

When the fatwa against Salman Rushdie was issued in 1989 for his novel, The Satanic Verses, chain stores were the first to buckle to extremist threats and remove the book from their shelves.
When Kenneth Starr supoenaded Monica Lewinsky’s bookstore receipts from District of Columbia area bookstores in his effort to prosecute President Bill Clinton, as though her reading could prove anything about what she did or didn’t do with Bill, Barnes & Noble gave him the receipts. Local Kramerbooks resisted.

Local businesses are by definition different wherever one goes. This is part of what gives a community its character and personality. Local citizens should take care of local citizens. Throw out the colonists: They don’t love you, they only want your money.
Taxable sales support Schools, Libraries, Police, Fire Protection, Garbage and snow removal.
Locals are to give far more time and money to local organizations. Even when corporate chains give, in ratio to earnings, locally owned businesses contribute more. Over the last 25 years I have participated on boards of six different business or activist organizations.
Dedication. Maybe we’re just stubborn but locally owned businesses stick it out longer during hard times. We live in the communities where we do business, we are not likely to leave and we take deep interest in the sustainable health of our homes.
Locally owned business are more likely to locate in developed neighborhoods than in newly built fringe-city shopping centers. They cause less infrastructural expense and contribute less to urban sprawl and the traffic congestion and pollution that comes with it.

Studies show that there is at least 70% greater retention of money in the home town when it is spent in a locally owned business instead of being spent in a non-local chain. Even a local greedy creep will spend more locally than an out-of-state owner.
It’s idiot math. If 1000 persons own 1000 bookstores, not one of them will earn what one company that owns 1000 bookstores would earn.
Evidence shows that as companies grow in size, wage gaps get wider. Do you think the Chamber of Commerce resists attempts to raise wages or provide universal health care for the benefit of the workers?
Local businesses employ local professionals for advertising, computer work, accounting, legal work, website design. Have any of you SLC ad firms been hired by Starbucks? Any local accountants working for Wal-Mart?
Recent economic reserch shows that skilled workers and entrepreneurs are more likely to invest in unique cities with character, cities that haven’t be chained to predicability.
Even with the loss of market experienced over the last several years, local businesses are still the largest job creators in the workplace. In many sectors, local businesses provide better wages and benefits than their corporate competitors. Insured workers are less likely to drive up taxes or health insurance costs by their late use of emergency rooms.

Just like so much of Wall Street, publicly traded companies in the book industry and lied, contrived and manipulated every aspect of the marketplace, not to make better books, not to give better prices, not to improve selection, but to make money.
In the 1990s and the early millennium, we were plaintiffs in nine lawsuits against major publishers and bookselling chains Barnes & Noble and Borders. There’s not enough space here for the details but take it from us: market dominance doesn’t come from playing fair.

During the 1990s, the footage dedicated to retail book sales quadrupled as investment funded chains fought for dominance. During the same period, sales grew by only 5%. To fill all the excess display space, publishers began printing more books. In the late 1980’s, publishing statistics showed that between 10% and 15% of books printed were never sold. By the late 1990s, the percentage had grown to 40% to 50%! Consumers were billed some of the losses as the cover prices of books inflated 20% more than other consumer products.

As smaller convenient stores are replaced by larger chain stores, shoppers are increasingly required to use cars to get to stores that are so large they require customers from a huge region to exist. This is exactly backwards: at this environmentally crucial juncture of history, we need businesses that are sustainable without sucking customers from neighboring communities.
Locally owned business are more likely to buy their supplies locally. When you buy locally, you reduce waste and pollution and combat the urban sprawl that is induced by the proliferation of big box malls.

Small business operators are generally passionate about their products and their trades.
At Weller’s, we hire for book affection, friendliness and stability. Our average bookseller has 11 years of experience. That isn’t the case with all locally owned businesses but in general, the locally owned business has more dedicated and knowledgeable help than chain stores.
Independent Booksellers are almost always the first to discover great new books. We discover them, and then the big box goons take over, discounting profitability out of the title. The practices of big box retailers are responsible for the deterioration of the publishing industry.

Owners of locally owned businesses care about the communities in which they do business because they live there. Not only does this mean that locals are more likely to be sensitive to regional concerns, but local businesses are more likely to seek collaborative relationships with other local businesses or organizations. Locals will be more likely to conform their businesses to a historic building than to demolish it.