Employees at four Half Price Books locations in Minnesota are the latest hoping to join a growing number of bookstore employees unionizing across the country. On Wednesday morning, Workers for Half Price Books Union announced that the company “agreed to our terms” and an election will be held on November 24. Votes will be counted on December 16. The unionization effort began in mid-October, when employees from HPB’s St. Paul location announced they would join United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 1189. Since then, employees from three additional Minnesota stores also signed on (from Roseville, Coon Rapids and St. Louis Park). […]
Bookstores
Newspaper Hates Portland, Loves Powell’s: Irreconciliable Differences?
In the great tradition of NYT stories asking if a given place can possibly be saved, the business section offers a bizarre piece about the Fox News hellscape that is Portland, OR — where smoke from forest fires “pervad[ed] a near-biblical sense of doom.” With efforts to recover at Powell’s Books the vague focus, the story suggests that they are talking broadly about life and bookstores in America: “How will brick-and-mortar stores fare in a time of continued fear over a deadly, airborne plague? What happens to city life when sidewalks are strewn with the rain-soaked belongings of people who […]
Bookselling: Barnes & Noble In Skokie, IL to Close As Landlord Redevelops
A BN store in Skokie, IL’s Old Orchard Mall will close Christmas Eve after 27 years there, as the landlord is redeveloping the site and declined to renew the lease. The bookseller says, “We are doing everything we can to find a new store in this area and are very close to announcing a new location.”
Ann Arbor’s Crazy Wisdom Bookstore Owners to Move On
Crazy Wisdom Bookstore in Ann Arbor announced yesterday that they will either “be selling or closing” their doors come February 15, 2022, after 40 years in business. Owners Bill Zirinsky and Ruth Schekter, who are in their 60s, said that they are “ready to look out upon a new and different horizon.” Though many independent bookstores struggled financially during the pandemic, Zirinsky and Schekter were clear that this was not the case for Crazy Wisdom. “The bookstore had a very profitable year (due to having closed the tea room at the onset of the pandemic), and that’s not a bad […]
Brechner Resigns From ABA Board Citing Free Speech Concerns
Kenny Brechner, owner of DDG Booksellers in Farmington, ME, resigned from the ABA board following a change in the organization’s free speech policy. Brechner asserted in ShelfTalker (his column for Publishers Weekly) that the ABA’s September change in its ends policies would “restrict its active support and defense of free expression.” Citing new language that pledges to ensure “members have the resources in support of their right to freedom of expression,” Brechner charges, “This nebulous statement undermined ABA’s long established role as a defender of free expression in the literary world. Pointedly it constricted ABFE’s [American Booksellers For Free Expression] […]
Bookselling: Greenlight’s Stockton-Bagnulo Buys Out Fitting
Rebecca Fitting, co-owner of Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn, has sold her share to Jessica Stockton-Bagnulo, who is now the sole owner. The two founded the store in 2009. In an email letter, Fitting wrote: “Owning a small business has always been deeply rewarding, but also incredibly challenging, and running Greenlight while parenting through a pandemic has caused me to rethink my personal priorities. It’s been well chronicled in the media that the pandemic – the lack of access to childcare and the havoc this wreaked – has failed working parents, in particular working mothers, and I am a great example […]