Powell’s Books Survived Amazon. Can He Reintroduce Himself Later?


PORTLAND, Cevher. —For more than half a century in the heart of Portland, Powell’s Books has survived an unending series of fundamental threats — the often-anticipated demise of reading, the rise of the Amazon, the supposedly irreversible abandonment of the American downtown.

None of this provided preparation for the turmoil of the past two years.

The pandemic has closed its stores for several months, making the city center a place to be avoided. Black Lives Matter protests It attracted opportunist anarchists who were causing turmoil. severe pressure from law enforcement. A growing number of homeless people have set up camps in front of shop windows, which are blinded by sheets of protective plywood. Wildfires choked the air and spread to a near-Biblical sense of apocalypse.

A quirky, old-school venture, Powell’s stands as a hero in a now-known American tale of urban rejuvenation, while preserving its traditional aura into the digital age. A massive book store that fills a former car dealership, the flagship store anchors a once-risk neighborhood whose warehouses have been swapped for glass-fronted condos and furniture boutiques.

The latest plot, however, heralded a potentially unhappy ending. Like the rest of Portland’s urban core—and city centers in the United States—Powell’s struggles with surprising uncertainty. What will brick-and-mortar stores look like at a time when the fear of a deadly airborne plague persists? What happens to city life when the sidewalks are filled with rain-soaked things from people who can no longer afford the rent?

“People are not coming to the city center the way they are used to the epidemic,” he said. Emily PowellAt 42, he is the owner and president of Powell’s Books, founded by his grandfather in 1971.

At the age of 6, she helped her father with the cash register during the Christmas shopping grind. After college, she went to San Francisco, worked in a wedding cake business, and then worked in real estate before returning home to join the family business. Now he’s busy with how to update Powell in a city facing serious challenges.

“10 years later, ‘Oh my God, what happened to Portland? He never came back,'” said Mrs. Powell. “But I don’t think it will be the same. I guess there will have to be some creative adaptations that happen and I’m not really sure what that looks like.”

I’m not really sure It’s a phrase that’s currently being heavily exercised in Portland and in communities around the world.

Consumption patterns have been reshaped by the pandemic and online merchants have taken a larger share of the spending. While experts discuss the lasting power of a weak economic recovery, global supply chain extended beyond the breaking point. Urban planners, employers, and families facing the complexity of life are re-evaluating the benefits of commuting to and from offices.

In Portland, the uncertainty is particularly poignant given the signs of enduring turmoil. Many downtown businesses remain reminders of the chaos surrounding last year’s protests. one of America’s most segregated cities.

The rows of tents lining the sidewalks expanded at Steinbeck’s proportions, with duffel bags filled with clothing piled next to the camp stoves. It is the product of decades of rising property prices, falling wages for many workers, and sustained cuts to social services in the face of unemployment, addiction and despair.

None of this attracts customers to downtown businesses.

“The protests intimidated a lot of people,” said James Louie, whose family has controlled Huber’s – a restaurant with elegant mahogany dining rooms – for 70 years. “Although they are mostly harmless, they are also intimidated by the homeless.”

Still, Mr. Louie added, “I’m optimistic that the city center will eventually return.”

Given Portland’s earlier famous success in revitalizing its downtown, this view is pervasive and incites the American trend against suburban sprawl.

Beginning in the 1970s, local governments limited development to preserve green spaces outside the city while investing heavily in public transport and bike lanes.

The question is whether the pandemic and social yeast have come together to undermine this trajectory, or whether it will instead accelerate the next resurgence by forcing city leaders to address the legacies of systemic racism and the shortage of affordable housing.

Among the people who oversee Powell, the gnawing concerns about the city center coincide with the eagerness to seize the opportunity to reinvent.

When the shutdowns began, the company focused on online sales, which traditionally accounted for only a fifth of its revenue. Powell’s is reshaping a cumbersome system for managing inventory while updating what appears to be a monument to the age of dial-up internet.

“This is a terrible website and hasn’t changed in nearly 20 years,” Ms. Powell said. “If we can’t fix our internet problems, we’re probably dead in the water.”

There are plans for whiskey tasting in the rare books room. A new cafe is set up on a corner facing the street and replaces the coffee shop that was closed during the quarantine.

“We are immediately changing the nervous system and the brain of the organization,” said Patrick Bassett, Powell’s CEO. “We are starting to think about what we want to be post-pandemic.”

But ordinary people are worried about how Powell handled the shutdown. The company laid off more than 90 percent of its workforce. When operations resumed, it forced employees to reapply to their old jobs.

Ms. Powell alleges that her company only complied with the terms of her contract with the union, which states that dismissed workers waive their seniority if they are recalled after 180 days.

“Not following the language of the contract would be breaking that contract,” said Ms. Powell.

The union mocks this description.

“‘Oh, the contract says I have to be bad,'” said union president Ryan Van Winkle as he hovered over a ring of fire on a clear night in his backyard. “’The contract just says I have to do the wrong thing. I guess I have to do the wrong thing.’ That’s not the way to live your life.”

Carole Reichstein shook her head bitterly. A 51-year-old single mother has worked at Powell’s for 25 years.

“Many older workers, including myself, do not work there for money,” said Ms. Reichstein. “We work there because we are book nerds. We love Powell’s culture. We love helping clients with books.”

He and his colleagues realized the need to close stores in March 2020, and this resulted in the layoffs of nearly 400 people, although they were surprised at how they received the news via a mass email.

The biggest shock came seven months later, when Ms. Reichstein was finally recalled. He would be treated like a new employee, with his seniority wiped out and two of his six-week vacations eliminated.

He sensed in his treatment an attack on worker solidarity. “They want to break the union,” he said.

Mrs. Powell said she was winged in a crisis. Initially, the company thought every part of its business should be shut down, but then quickly realized it could continue operating the warehouse, he said.

Powell’s is focused on its original store on Burnside Avenue. Its 70,000-square-foot retail space is larger than the warehouse that feeds it. Inside its spacious rooms, it shares the exhibition space with the usual bestsellers, collections of ancient Greek novels, meditations on the ultimate Frisbee, and guides on how to overhaul a Volkswagen engine – used and new titles shelved side by side.

In a world of tastes increasingly governed by algorithms and shaped by corporate forces that use data, Powell’s calls it a shrine to coincidences.

“I am not interested in being an Amazon,” said Ms. Powell. “I believe in the power of walking down a hallway and discovering something you didn’t expect.”

However, this power was extinguished with the first wave of the pandemic. Sales fell by two-thirds through the summer and fall of 2020 as Portlanders stayed home and the city emptied of tourists. The only channel for business was online.

Thus began a frenzied effort to re-engineer Powell.

Before Covid-19, the company’s warehouse was supplying its stores. The pandemic reversed the relationship, turning the warehouse into a distribution center for online sales while reducing stores to storage for inventory.

The warehouse floor was quickly clogged with carts full of books loaded by trucks from stores waiting to be shipped to customers across the country. Management struggled to bring back enough workers.

According to the company, online sales increased more than tenfold between March and May 2020, bolstering hopes that the business will return to pre-pandemic sales next year.

But the surge in web business has suffocated infrastructure in the warehouse, resulting in backlogs that took months to clean up.

“We had to do everything on the fly,” said Laura Ziegler, retail distribution center manager. “We were attracting people by trying to educate people on how to train.”

A handwritten sign taped to a concrete block wall attesting to the spirit of the enterprise. “BOOKS MUST FLOW.”

Work on an updated website – still in its early stages – aims to add personality to online shopping by adding book recommendations from real people. Powell’s positions itself as a local bookstore run by people with distinctive tastes and now available online.

Still, even with its most optimistic forecasts, the company predicts that online sales will not reach more than a third of its total business volume.

For better or worse, his fate depends on Portland.

Caryn and Mike Nelson count on the better. They are building the new coffee shop inside the Burnside store and expanding from their popular cafe and coffee roasting business Guilder.

“We couldn’t turn down the opportunity at Powell’s,” said Ms. Nelson. “We see the city center as a very active part of our city where the community will still come together.”



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