Independent Bookstores on Remainder
Nowak, Mark
Independent Bookstores on Remainder By Mark Nowak Illustration by Christiane Grauert From where I sit in a bookstore caf?, I can see an Olive Garden through the floor-to-ceiling glass...
...I suspect I've occupied this table in suburban Buffalo for an unprofitable amount of time for the Borders business model...
...national consensus...
...In the end, Indies Under Fire deals with a subject that is central to so many of our current political debates: local participation vs...
...One of the most telling quotes in the entire film comes from Joe Tosney, a regional director at Borders, as he discusses the differences between corporate and independent models: "As a company, I'm not going to put a sign up and take a political stand because I'm going to offend some of my customers who may have a different feeling about it," he says...
...And as the big-box stores deliver, in the words of one bookseller, "a market crash course . . . in homogenization," communities from coast to coast seek some way to get their voices heard before their neighborhoods are utterly transformed by the purveyors of drive-thru democracy...
...This is precisely the subject of Jacob Bricca's moving new documentary, Indies Under Fire: The Battle for the American Bookstore...
...I grew up here during the economic crises of the Reagan years, when the Bethlehem steel plant where my grandfather worked closed, as did the Westing-house factory where my dad put in forty-one years...
...But I'm actually in a Borders in suburban Buffalo, New York...
...Next door, last minute morning commuters file into and out of Krispy Kreme as the K-Mart directly behind it opens its doors...
...The question remains, however: How are citizens-be they the local independent booksellers, the employees of Borders, or book-buyers like you and me-supposed to react to the incursion...
...I recently returned to western New York for an event at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center around my essay, " 'To commit suicide in Buffalo is redundant': Music and death in Zero City, 1982-1984," that was published in Goth: Undead Subculture...
...Seventeen months after the ratification of their contract, these workers were informed that the corporation would be closing their store...
...The event is co-sponsored by the longstanding Buffalo independent bookstore, Talking Leaves, that will be selling books at the event, advertised at the top of the store's webpage...
...We also repeatedly questioned the organizing tactics of prototypical people's coalitions such as those present in Bricca's film-inordinately white, middle-aged movements that too often employ conservative vocabulary like "preserving the character" of their neighborhoods (one might expect many in these coalitions might spout the same vocabulary to protest transitional housing in their neighborhoods, too...
...And presumably the Gap and the Urban Outfitters one could see from the now-defunct Borders window might have been hiring, as well...
...It seems that all these square feet of Harry Potter and Veranda magazine just aren't enough for the starved populace of western New York...
...Acquired by Kmart in 1992, and then spun off three years later, it has grown to more than 500 stores...
...Borders needs to rigorously defend its 25,000-square-foot colonies in myriad ways...
...Using the organizing drive at the Resource Center of the Americas bookstore and caf...
...from writer of Prison Break and Law & Order" obscures one corner of my view...
...If you answered America to the first question, anywhere in America, chances are you'd be right...
...He is currently editing a book of workers' stories of union organizing drives at bookstores across the USA and Canada...
...Those with Internet access are frequenting the territories of e-commerce bookstore giant Amazon.com...
...The storyline tracks the rise of a people's coalition to fight alongside independent bookstores in Palo Alto (Printer's Inc), Santa Cruz (Bookshop Santa Cruz), and Capitola, California (Capitola Bookshop Caf...
...Welcome home...
...Where am I? And, more importantly, does it matter...
...against the incursion of big-box stores, particularly Borders...
...Independent Bookstores on Remainder By Mark Nowak Illustration by Christiane Grauert From where I sit in a bookstore caf?, I can see an Olive Garden through the floor-to-ceiling glass windows-though a large vinyl poster advertising "Riveting Thriller...
...One can't help but imagine how far this "nonoffensive" thinking extends into the corporate bookstores' display shelves, inventory practices, and treatment of workers seeking a voice in the workplace...
...in Minneapolis as a model, we also highlighted the segregation within the retail sector (such as the starkly different racial compositions of the workforces behind the counters at Borders and Taco Bell, for example...
...Across the street from this Borders outpost, on the fa?ade of the new addition to the massive Walden Galleria Mall, a veil covers the construction site with the brand of one of its enemies: Barnes & Noble Booksellers...
...In the shadow of these once-thriving independents, Bricca's film outlines the rise of Borders, once a 500-square-foot bookstore founded by Tom and Louis Borders in Ann Arbor, Michigan...
...But here at Borders in my former hometown, just a mile or so from where my dad's old West-inghouse plant once stood, the self-serve computer informs me that Goth isn't in stock in the 25,000-square-foot store...
...Half the independent bookstores in America have closed their doors in the last decade, as Borders has become a Leviathan...
...After several years of organizing effort and contract discussions, employees of the Minneapolis Borders store voted in the company's first union contract in November 2004...
...The family restaurants, like the independent bookstores, are almost all gone...
...And even the populace here in suburban Buffalo, this tiny corner of the bookselling universe, has alternatives...
...But other than Krispy Kreme and Olive Garden, the only choices I can see are Fuddruckers, TGI Friday's, and Applebee's...
...Several of the Borders workers and I immediately established the Union of Radical Workers and Writers, a forum for "working class civil society" to participate in boycotts, store pickets, political education classes, and related work, including what we believe to have been the first national bookstore workers' organizing conference ("Resist Retail Nihilism") in January 2004...
...Mark Nowak is author of "Shut Up Shut Down...
...Plus it's nearly lunchtime...
...And it should matter...
...Indies Under Fire succinctly catches viewers up on the battle for our book-buying dollars, including such topics as the "display allowances" through which the megapublishers secure prime shelf space in the corporate stores, the rise of e-commerce booksellers such as Amazon.com, the loss of worker and community involvement inside the bookstores themselves, and the sense of the severely narrowing and often eliminated democratic and independent voices in our national bookstore culture...
...Some workers were offered transfers to nonunionized Borders stores across the region...
...In my adopted home of Minnesota during the first term of George W. Bush, workers at a Borders store in Minneapolis announced an organizing drive at the annual AFL-CIO-sponsored Labor Day picnic in 2002...
Vol. 71 • July 2007 • No. 7
