Sold out or under the counter?
Waterstones says it’s not true it’s not it’s not it’s NOT.
Waterstones has
refuted[rejected] accusations made on social media this week that it is failing to stock certain titles about gender, saying the claims are “of course… untrue”.Twitter users had claimed that Waterstones branches were refusing to stock Hannah Barnes’ Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children (Swift Press), with similar suggestions made about Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women by Victoria Smith (Fleet).
Not so much refusing to as failing to. I saw no claims that Watersones staff were stupid enough to say “We refuse to stock it!” when asked. The claims are that it’s extremely difficult to find at branch after branch after branch – that it’s “sold out” or there’s one copy remaining and it’s in a special place somewhere.
A spokesperson confirmed that the retailer was stocking Time to Think, and that the book had performed well in sales. They told The Bookseller: “Quite simply, many of our shops sold out temporarily and we are expecting a fresh delivery which will land on our shelves very soon. Of course, this does happen from time to time with books that sell well. We stock the book sensibly and refute the misrepresentation implicit to these tweets.”
That could of course be true – but the tweets I’ve seen don’t say the staff say it’s sold out and a large new shipment is on the way. They say staff are evasive or unhelpful.
Brick-and-mortar booksellers have been beating the use-it-or-lose-it drum ever since Amazon first started shipping, with increasingly sentimental and teary-eyed simpering pleas to Support Your High Street Bookshop…OR ELSE. Sure, we all know that Jeff Bezos is a jerk, but I got Time To Think on my Kindle for twelve quid at the touch of a button, with no BSing about “supply chain problems”.
Piglet, that’s the thing isn’t it. I love the touch and feel of a real book, but a typical high quality paperback in NZ retails for $35-40 and is also large format. As a result, I tend to prefer buying the smaller and cheaper mass market paperback format. Every single time I’ve asked a retailer to order my titles in that format they have refused. The result is that my shelves are 80% full of titles bought from Amazon. I feel kind of dirty doing that, but them’s the breaks.
We have no place to buy books in this town since our used bookstore and our other bookstore both closed. Both were run by older women who were ready to retire, and no one wanted to pick up the business. I suppose I could buy books at WalMart, but the selection is limited, and I don’t shop at WalMart. I do visit booksellers in Lincoln, but have quit using the one Indie bookseller I used to frequent when they removed everything feminist from their shelves in favor of trans. Two used bookstores that are great, but of course you don’t necessarily find what you want. So Amazon becomes the go to – and for other things, as well, since we have no department stores in town anymore – except WalMart. So far, we have two grocery stores that aren’t WalMart (we had six when I moved here), but they are both owned by the same person. There was no one else interested in buying the fully local store when the heirs wanted to sell, so it went to a local (Nebraska only) chain that ran the only other non-WalMart in town.
If it weren’t for online shopping, much of it at Amazon, my life would be as limited as most of the other people in this town. No books except the stupid stuff that is standard fare at our library, no foods that aren’t stocked by our local stores, nothing to keep me from going off my rocker living in this godforsaken place. Soon to be iknklast forsaken, too, as soon as I retire and we find a house somewhere else.
I don’t hesitate to buy things from Amazon. They provide good products and good service at good prices.
Do they have some shitty labor practices? Yup, absolutely. But you know who else does? A lot of the small, “mom and pop” businesses that I’m supposed to patronize instead. It’s just that they’re usually too small a target to attract the attention of journalists, activists, labor organizers, and class action attorneys, so their shitty practices go unnoticed unless you personally know an employee.
Don’t get me wrong — there are good small local businesses who I love to give my business to. I consider it unethical to go to a small local store and browse, get some assistance from a knowledgeable staff member, and then order it online to save a few dollars. But there are also places where the owner is surly and acts like it’s a burden to answer a simple question, who don’t provide anything to justify paying the higher prices they charge.
iknklast, try Powell’s Books (powells.com), a bookseller with a huge selection. On the rare occasions when I buy fiction online, I check there first. I also sometimes order directly from a publisher, or (for specialized academic books) from a book distributor (isdistribution.com).