Host: Jamie Fiocco
Participants: Eileen Dengler, NAIBA; Nina Bennett, Bookends Beginnings, Timothy Daudelin, Pendragon Books, Jim Bean, Anthology, Rebecca Fitting, Greenlight Bookstores
Notes:
How do we create living wages with pre-priced merch and slim margins? No consensus among booksellers on pricing books themselves. Stores: time / effort to price every book. What do they price it at? Art book and collector book market does price over MSP. We would need consensus from booksellers and publishers. But we aren’t paying the same price because of all the promos, our own buying power, etc; so many different discount rates. Increase nonbook items in stock.
? if you priced books yourself, how would it change your own view of the books / pricing
? If you could choose your own pricing, would you raise or lower?
We’d need to get 75% of bookstores to go with this.
Start with the expense of staff at livable wages and then decide what the inventory should sell at
That is the business model of other retail and industries.
Bookstore of the future – price our own books.
We are pricing merch now, so can do this. Buyer sets price at the buy and puts it in the POS
When we return, do we have to remove the labels?
Do we buy nonreturnable? Not really because we take a risk, but that could be an extra discount on wholesale pricing.
Books have a short shelf life, we could discount throughout the life of the book and avoid returns
What benefit to publishers to have retail price on book? Why would they want to continue?
Reimagining Bookstores 