疫情下的书店: Source Booksellers (NPR, The Indicator)

Source Booksellers is a bookstore located in Detroit's Midtown and has been in its current location for 8 years. In this episode, the owner of the bookstore,Alyson Jones Turner, and with her daughter, talks about how they survived the pandemic and how they turned from an in-store sales exclusive store into an online business.

Source booksellers is a small store that's under 900 feet. The bookstore utilizes the space very efficiently with wall shelves. And they also have some movable trees shaped shelves that can be moved out of space when they hold events. The owner believes that books and reading had a human part to it, that people want to talk to each other, so long before this year, they had decided not to do online business. So their major income relies on in-store sales.

When going into the pandemic, the shutdown order came alone from the Detroit government. They lost all the sales because of the absence of the customers.

However, even in the shaky time, they never thought of closing their business. They have had times in the past when they've had to change and do things differently and become better businesses. And this time, they did it again. Jones started scrambling to find funds and grants and her daughter tried to move the store onto an online platform.

There were organizations and local funding places around the area to offer grants. At the same time, the customers responded to their online sales so much that they stay alive.

Their words of advice and inspirations for other small-business owners:

• business, in general, is a thing that we do where we take risks, and we don't know what our risk tolerance is until things happen. So, don't give up easily.
• Being resilient, finding out what's needed and try to meet that
• Take our courage and move on, use the opportunities that we have that have come to us from people to serve them as they need to be served and just keep on going

Reference:

Podcast URL: https://www.npr.org/2020/12/14/946411427/pandemic-adaptation-bookstore-edition

Source Booksellers: http://www.sourcebooksellers.com/