In the Bloomsbury, central London, branch of the UK bookshop chain Waterstone’s, I am trying to find a quiet seat to read Tacitus’ account of Seneca’s suicide when I come across something more diverting. A customer is asking an assistant to explain the baffling price deal on Hilary Mantel’s Booker-winning novel Wolf Hall.
“I’m confused,” she says. “It says here that if I spend more than £10 [US$16.60] I can have the book for £8.99.”
That would be a good deal: The recommended retail price for the hardback is £18.99. But there is a problem.
“I only want to buy this book and nothing else. Does that mean I’ll have to pay the full price, £18.99?” she asks.
“I wish they wouldn’t do that,” the assistant says. “They shouldn’t have deals that are so confusing it takes more than a minute to explain.”
But Waterstone’s does. The sticker on Wolf Hall’s dust jacket offers a half-price discount only if you buy something else too. The assistant explains that if the customer only buys the Mantel today, she would get £5 off the recommended price (ie, she would pay £13.99).
“But there’s nothing on the book to tell you that,” the customer says.
“That’s right,” the assistant says, with a disarming I-only-work-here-and-the-bosses-need-shooting tone.
“Oh,” the customer says. “I don’t know what to do now.”
I tell the customer, a lecturer from London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies, she could have bought Wolf Hall from Amazon or from Waterstone’s Web site for £8.45.
“Yes,” she replies, “but two words: postal strike. And even if I had ordered it online, I’d have had to pay postage and I don’t know how much that is.”
Exasperated, she decides to leave without the book.
Such — or so you might think — is the nature of late capitalism. It makes buying the most straightforward item such a nightmare that you leave the shop having saved yourself a tenner, but in the process a nice lunchtime excursion has become a frustrating fiasco.
Waterstone’s has embraced capitalism’s logic firmly. Even in this branch, with its 8km of bookshelves at the heart of London’s university quarter and in an area denser with literary heritage than perhaps any in the world, discounted piles of Leona Lewis biographies and Frankie Boyle’s My Shit Life So Far sit on the tables with the latest JM Coetzee. This lunchtime, the three-for-two tables are ringed by shoppers clutching two books and wondering if they can find a freebie worth reading. Here on the ground floor, the discounting of book prices is so ferocious that if you leave having paid the recommended retail price you feel a right mug.
“They simply treat books as a commodity,” says Nicholas Spice, publisher of the London Review of Books and one of the chain’s sternest critics. “There’s no sentiment to it. If it’s celebrity biographies that are going to sell, then that’s what they’ll focus on. They’re not looking at it from a cultural perspective.”
Is that a problem? After all, I am the one who brings sentiment and culture to the book-buying experience. Spice’s thought, though, is that Waterstone’s has lost its literary soul in stooping to compete with supermarkets and stationery retailers.
“A big retail business will inevitably move to the lowest common denominator position. Their commitment to book quality has to wane,” he says.
Why? “Because once companies get big they draw in business management that doesn’t have any sensitivity to the product. That’s certainly the case with Waterstone’s: The books knowledge of the people who run it is relatively small. Staff aren’t paid well, so turnover is high and knowledge of what they’re selling falls,” he says.
RSS