A Strategic Plan for the 21st Century

Here at Greyhound’s Books we are unabashedly an Upper Middle-Class (UMC) Bookstore. We come by it naturally, because it is, and has been, our life position thanks to our parents who worked so hard to help their children climb into the educated, professional ranks of society. In many ways, we’ve acquired our educations the hard way - school yes, life-learning, apprenticeships, and hard work combined with rote memorization. In other words, we’re authorized to be snobs because we’ve demonstrated our professional credentials, good taste, and discriminating eyes.

Our stock is designed to appeal to the UMC: we sell quality books, don’t bother with what I generally call “crap,” - either in condition or content -and require a certain level of knowledge and taste from our customer base. If you have no idea of what you want to buy, you generally get short shrift from us. If you vaguely know what you want, we have all the time in the world to work with you. If you look like a freak, you’re usually not welcome. Cell phones are anathema.

Our model has worked very well for us - we aren’t constantly churning low-cost books, our average book price is $ 18.00, and the average customer usually buys two or three books in an order. To us, that’s the ideal.

Remember Walden Books ? How about B. Dalton and Crown Books ? Borders the Bankrupt ? Barnes soon to be IgNoble ?  Stupid business models invoke Darwin.  The death rattles of these operations leads us to a plan for opening a new bricks & mortar store, or re-evaluating a current business model.

The age-old business model for used book stores still obtains: paperbacks pay the rent, hardbounds buy the jam. We generally oppose this model, but I think it’s a great way to go for the future, with certain conditions. A general bookstore tries to be all things to all people. We also tend to think that genres that sold very well in the past will continue to sell well in the future. This isn’t necessarily the case. The Hippy Dippys are dying off, thank God. So much for hemp, grass, gunny sacks, LSD, indiscriminate sex, and toe-foo. Yuk !  If we make buying reading matter - not books, per se - easy and fun, we’ll grow and prosper because we’ll be local outlet alternatives to buying on the internet.