I have a habit that’s uncontrollable. I can’t walk past a bookshop without going in. My local town centre has an Ottakers, a WH Smith and a British Bookshops and Sussex Stationers (great name). But there have been some quite noticeable changes in the retailing landscape of bookshops of late.
First of all, they all have permament sales on. Waterstones always has a 3 for 2 going on, and Ottakers has the same. British Bookshops is just cut price permamently, albeit with a somewhat cut-range. But it’s WH Smiths which falls into the middle.
Today the press has been full of stories about a possible WH Smith buyout, and there’s a lot of comment about the shop losing its way (Five Live had a phone in during the breakfast to establish exactly why people do go to WH Smiths).
I don’t normally hold with those people who are forever suggesting stores expand ranges and move into new areas, but I do think that in some areas WH Smiths has lost its way. They should be a primary bookseller, but the supermarkets have taken a pretty firm grasp of the paperback bestseller market. And the Ottakers and Waterstones of this world offer a fuller selection of books. WH Smiths somehow falls between the two, neither offering a slim range of the top 30 paperbacks, nor a broader range of titles that even a small Ottakers manages. But I think that I was most depressed by their biography section. Which has in fact become “biography, politics and journalists” or something very similar. Once you start inventing bookshop subject areas, contracting several sections into one, you’re on the start of a slippery slope.