Basement Office, Annie Bloom's Books, Portland, Oregon
The physical size of our store may turn out to be a blessing, whereas people may have thought it was a curse in the ‘90s when the big-box chain stores were proliferating. Now I think they can’t pay the rents for that big of space with their sales.
We’ve got a really good regional wholesaler … I’m going to order in some things that people asked for today, and I’ll have [them] tomorrow. … We still can maintain a breadth of titles without spending inventory dollars stocking up on specific titles in big quantities, because we know we can continue to get them pretty quickly as we need them.
Still, there are hot titles that we need to have a lot of, like the Cheryl Strayed book Wild, which we sell really quickly, a local author like that.
–Will Peters
manager, Annie Bloom's Books, Portland, OR