Word: chaining
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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America's retailers have precious little to cheer about these days. Many of the best-known U.S. department-store chains are up for sale. Garment sales have been stagnant, and profits are squeezed. But then there is Donna Karan, a women's-clothing designer whose creations send department-store executives into fits of giddy optimism. The Queen of Seventh Avenue, as the fashion press calls her, Karan is chief executive officer and head designer of a five-year- old company that expects to rake in $115 million in revenues this year. Her sportswear line arrived in stores eight months...
What seems to satisfy mom-and-pop customers most is a quality that the chains, with their reliance on self-service, rarely provide: the warm ambiance of the hometown library. Buyers prefer to talk to booksellers, not to supermarket-style check-out clerks. They like to attend readings by authors or slip off their shoes in a homey shop, settle into an armchair and browse for an hour. Many of these stores provide coffee and other refreshments; Atlanta's Oxford Books (115,000 titles) has a lunch counter and stays open until 2 a.m. on weekends. Says owner Rupert LeCraw...
...simply speedy service and knowledgeable staff that have brought on such robust health. Variety of stock is another major factor. For example, a reader can find John Irving's latest novel, A Prayer for Owen Meany, among the 15,000 or so titles typically carried by a chain store, but in all likelihood will not locate Irving's earlier books. Chain stores need fast turnover; they have little space for backlisted books. By contrast, a shop like Manhattan's Shakespeare & Co., which carries 64,000 titles, will stock practically the entire Irving oeuvre...
...customer at Politics & Prose, a busy bookstore in Chevy Chase, Md., is mightily perplexed. There is this book, she tells the manager, something about the impending economic disaster, written by a Chinese. At most chain bookstores, the personnel might be equally baffled. But the staffer at Politics & Prose thinks for a moment, and then, from among the shop's 20,000 titles, quickly produces a copy of The Great Depression of 1990 by Ravi Batra -- not a Chinese, to be sure, but the right book nonetheless. Sold...
There's no reason why video chains like Blockbuster or Videosmith couldn't be a target. It won't be long before an FBI agent nonchalantly waltzes in to rent a couple of dirty movies and waltzes in a few days later with orders to seize not just that store, but every one in the chain. That kind of multi-million dollar ante doesn't exactly encourage store managers to vigorously assert their free speech rights by testing what does and doesn't violate community standards...