this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2024
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Hey, remember when they sold book and not throw pillows, "Live Laugh Love" mugs and vibrators?
Good times...
Indigo is going to go down in history along with Eatons, Sears and Consumers Distributing as examples of "How to fuck up in retail despite yourself". They had all the advantages that Amazon did, but threw it away because Heather is nowhere near as good at business as she thinks she is.
Given the fact that other book stores have been going under left right and center for a decade I would expect that the niknak section is one of the few things keeping them a float.
Hard to compete with Amazon when you have to pay for retail locations and staff and still sell at the same price.
Here's the thing: you don't need to stay exclusively in retail.
Indigo had Kobo, they have the distribution network, purchasing contacts and, importantly, cash. They could have spent on the back-end infrastructure. They weren't necessarily going to be able to pull off, eg, AWS, but the path to sustainable retail that combined both bricks-and-mortar and online was there. They, like Sears, chose cheap quarterly returns and protecting their exclusively-retail model
Reismann and Schwartz have, like, Eddie Lampert levels of vision. I'm sure that some sort of real-estate-based financial chicanery is their next big plan.
Sears is the one that really gets me. In addition to full stores in big enough centres, they had depots everywhere and their own trucking network. And I mean everywhere. Suburbs, towns, villages: if there wasn't enough business to support a standalone depot, anyone could apply to set up a depot as part of another business. I even saw one once that was basically run out of someone's house. They moved into the top floors of an old boarding house and set up the main floor with a small museum, craft and thrift store, a bit of a cafe, and a Sears depot. I think they were also the bus depot. Any gaps in the trucking network were filled by sending stuff out on the train or bus, in the post, or with a small trucking company.
The logistics were handled and a very large fraction of their business was already mail order. All they needed was the online presence, and it's not like they didn't have customers practically begging them to do it.
Sears in Canada actually had a very good online service for the era, but the US firm didn't want to do it, in favour of playing she'll games with real estate.