Lots of people have been asking me about the new bookstore that’s opening up in town. There’s a backstory you should probably know.
A few years ago a local reader would come into my bookstore to look around a bit before picking up her son from preschool. She became a regular. We’d chat about books. She was very personable and friendly. We shared some political leanings.
Eventually, my family discovered that, much to our surprise, she was signed up to teach our daughter at the local montessori school the following year. We were very excited to work more closely with her. She did well in teaching.
After a year, she decided she didn’t want to teach anymore. What she really wanted was to come work for us at the bookstore. It was her lifelong dream. I jumped at this chance. She was, for a while, a great employee. Very curious. Eager to learn. Eager to try new things. She asked for us to pay for her to take some book-buying certification classes. We obliged. I mentored her and taught her what I knew about the book business.
My kids went over to her house and swam in her pool. My wife was good friends with her. To a person, everyone in our family considered her to be a good friend. My parents, my kids, my wife, my grandfather. Me, too.
Eventually she indicated that she was interested in buying our bookstore from us. I put together a proposal with all of our financials.
After a long weekend she came back with a decision. After years of working together, teaching her, mentoring her, paying for classes for her, and showing her the inner-workings of our business, she decided she would not be buying our store. Instead, she had decided to take that information and open up a competing bookstore two blocks away.
It was shocking, to be honest. We felt pretty betrayed. Still do, in fact. One person I told about it described this move as, “Supervillain backstabbing shit.”
To be clear, I don’t have the exclusive right to own or operate a bookstore in my town. If she wants to open a store right next to mine there’s nothing illegal about that per se. But we aren’t talking about legality, are we?
It’s a violation of trust. It’s the good ol’ public contract smacked around a bit once more, this time on a personal level. This isn’t what you do to your friends.
Perhaps it was naive of me not to protect my business better. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so open or trusting. Perhaps I should have had her sign a non-compete agreement. It was on me, I guess, for not imagining she could be so morally bereft that any of that would be necessary.
But alas. Here we are.
It is, on the one hand, a nice thing to have multiple bookstores in a town as small as ours. More variety. More options for the reading public. In a perfect world her decision, however selfish, would redound to public benefit regardless.
If only we lived in a perfect world.
I’m not recommending a boycott by my friends and family or anything. God knows it’s hard enough to make it in the book business under the best of circumstances. It would be in poor taste for me to wish her ill or try to stamp out her bookstore as it’s just getting started. Several people who have known bits of the story have asked me what was going on. I thought I would put it here (rather than on the store’s official page) so folks would know.
I wish her well. I just wish she had gone about this differently.
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About Joshua Rigsby
Joshua Rigsby runs an independent bookstore in a small southern town. His writing has been featured on Thrillist, Atlas Obscura, Southern California Public Radio, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Atlantic.
