Costco Plans To Stop Selling Books Year-Round (nytimes.com) 60
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: In a blow to publishers and authors, Costco plans to stop selling books regularly at stores around the United States, four publishing executives who had been informed of the warehouse retailer's plans said on Wednesday. Beginning in January 2025, the company will stop stocking books regularly, and will instead sell them only during the holiday shopping period, from September through December. During the rest of the year, some books may be sold at Costco stores from time to time, but not in a consistent manner, according to the executives, who spoke anonymously in order to discuss a confidential business matter that has not yet been publicly announced.
Costco's shift away from books came largely because of the labor required to stock books, the executives said. Copies have to be laid out by hand, rather than just rolled out on a pallet as other products often are at Costco. The constant turnaround of books -- new ones come out every Tuesday and the ones that have not sold need to be returned -- also created more work. The decision could be a significant setback for publishers at a moment when the industry is facing stagnant print sales and publishing houses are struggling to find ways to reach customers who have migrated online. Costco had already stopped selling books in some markets, including Alaska and Hawaii. While Costco may not be as critical of an outlet as a bookstore like Barnes & Noble, its influence is also evident in the large quantities it orders. When Costco chose to carry a book, "it often went big, ordering tens of thousands of copies at a minimum," says the report. "For major blockbusters, they might stock hundreds of thousands of copies of a single title."
"The change may also impact Costco customers, particularly those who live in areas without a bookstore. And because many books at Costco were impulse buys, some of those sales may not shift over to Amazon or Barnes & Noble. Instead, they might not happen at all."
Costco's shift away from books came largely because of the labor required to stock books, the executives said. Copies have to be laid out by hand, rather than just rolled out on a pallet as other products often are at Costco. The constant turnaround of books -- new ones come out every Tuesday and the ones that have not sold need to be returned -- also created more work. The decision could be a significant setback for publishers at a moment when the industry is facing stagnant print sales and publishing houses are struggling to find ways to reach customers who have migrated online. Costco had already stopped selling books in some markets, including Alaska and Hawaii. While Costco may not be as critical of an outlet as a bookstore like Barnes & Noble, its influence is also evident in the large quantities it orders. When Costco chose to carry a book, "it often went big, ordering tens of thousands of copies at a minimum," says the report. "For major blockbusters, they might stock hundreds of thousands of copies of a single title."
"The change may also impact Costco customers, particularly those who live in areas without a bookstore. And because many books at Costco were impulse buys, some of those sales may not shift over to Amazon or Barnes & Noble. Instead, they might not happen at all."
Dr Phil (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Dr Phil (Score:5, Funny)
My favorite was Dr. Phil and the Prisoner of Azkaban.
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Only one thing comes to mind. "Welcome to Costco, I love you."
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Heh, what comes to mind for me is, "WE DON'T SPEAK ILL OF COSTCO!!! [youtube.com] ;)
Can CostCo customers read then? (Score:1)
Or are there other uses for these printed matters that I don't know of besides using them to throw at your kids?
The customers of the Japanese Costco are illiterate idiots who don't understand that they are actually paying more for the same product at Costco than at a regular supermarket.
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Not too surprised (Score:3)
The market for printed books is almost certainly shrinking significantly, year after year. It doesn't really seem like a product line you expect Costco to deal in.
Re:Not too surprised (Score:4, Informative)
"The market for printed books is almost certainly shrinking significantly, year after year."
Try again. 2023 US sales, while a bit off from their all-time peak in 2021, still ranks fifth among the past 20 years. https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
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"The market for printed books is almost certainly shrinking significantly, year after year."
Try again. 2023 US sales, while a bit off from their all-time peak in 2021, still ranks fifth among the past 20 years. https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
The decline is inevitable, though. Those sales are driven by Boomer and X'r and Millenial readers. Boomers most of all. Each succeeding generation reads fewer print books than the previous one, and even with the move to electronic publishing, fewer books overall. There's just too much competition for time from the Internet, which promotes short attention span entertainment. I get several general interest book catalogs, and all of them focus overwhelmingly on Boomer and X'r books, CD's, and DVD's.
Every gener
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"The decline is inevitable, though."
Yep. Any day, now. No sign of it yet, but it's gonna happen, you bet.
"Each succeeding generation reads fewer print books than the previous one, and even with the move to electronic publishing, fewer books overall."
Assertion unsupported by any evidence. Evidence, please. Your impressions of what must appeal to the latest generation does not constitute evidence. I am willing to be convinced of this, but your unsupported assertion is not going to do it.
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It would be more telling to look at the trends for the past 50-100 years - not just the past 20.
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"The market for printed books is almost certainly shrinking significantly, year after year."
Try again. 2023 US sales, while a bit off from their all-time peak in 2021, still ranks fifth among the past 20 years. https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
It's more the fact that B&M stores can't compete with the prices and range of online retailers. Amazon specifically.
I like a good dead tree based novel, but why should I limit myself to the few dozen titles that Costco will bother stocking when I could have any one of thousands from any genre you care to mention shipped to me overnight?
Do a "book drop"... (Score:3)
Do a "book drop" like the grocery stores that get the books that cannot be sold...
Just put them in a large gaylord box, and let the customers rummage. Then have a section of the store the "book pile" where there is a large pastiche of books.
JoshK.
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Costco doesn't want customers to be "rummaging." Fill your cart, eat your samples, and get the hell out.
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Hmm, point taken. Fast food to fast shopping.
Of course, it could be dump books into the cart, choose and take a dump of books. I always avoid eating samples...of course I don't shop much at Costco. :-) But some marketing and industrial engineering guru could create a way to pump the books and then dump them in the cart. Books a billion...??
JoshK.
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That would be against the standard contract most book-selling stores have with publishers. Publishers don't want to get in the habit of giving away books, because then people stop paying for what they can get for free. Book sellers are required to reduce unsold books to an unusable condition and send the removed front covers back to the publisher as evidence of their destruction.
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Interesting...although I did not say give away, still selling just avoid having to stock shelves. :) If publishes gave away books, there would be no publishing industry. ;-)
JoshK.
It sucks, but it's not unexpected (Score:2)
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I haven't bought a new book for years. I would, but not at the prices that publishers think are appropriate, and especially when you find out how much the author gets.
I've exhausted all the local 2nd-hand bookstores - there's not much left. And those won't give a decent credit/exchange rate. $5 credit for a hardback that was on a best-seller list and cost me nearly $50. Yes, there's a *lot* of them, but OTOH they're not difficult to sell. That was the last new book I bought.
Even some of the excellent graphi
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I have a mountain of books by my bed. I hate "ebooks" for the most part. If it's something technical you want to reference easily, whatever, but for basically anything else I vastly prefer a real copy - you know, one that doesn't require electricity to work among many other benefits.
Re:It sucks, but it's not unexpected (Score:5, Informative)
Re:It sucks, but it's not unexpected (Score:5, Interesting)
I have two kids, one just going into junior high and one in high school currently, and it is amazing the crap they teach these days. The fact that a D is considered a passing grade in this midwest state is mind boggling. There are a couple of good instructors, but they are absolutely swamped with idiots who belong in an asylum rather than a school system.
When I was in school I knew my teacher by last name, they never even referred to each other casually around students, and discipline was harped on equal to academics. My kids know everything about their teachers, first and last names, their dogs names, their super special pronouns that make them unique and super special, and my daughter knows about one of her teacher's preference for Victoria's Secret panties and bras because she dresses inappropriately to class. None of the teachers have any level of professionalism anymore at all, yet they are all, on paper, far more academically qualified than the teachers I had 30 years ago. They are also paid, even adjusting for inflation, more than they were when I was a kid, yet the quality of the education is absolutely execrable. The level of rigor in the classes my kids are taking is at least 2 grade levels below what it was when I was in school, maybe more. The school is even operated more like a prison than an educational institution.
All those masters degrees and P.hD hours were a waste of time, and since a lot of them chose public education to get their university paid for, some of my tax dollars went to miseducating these people, the whole thing makes me incredibly salty.
My kids are some of the very few in their schools who are respectful and behave properly in class and in public, and my wife and I get compliments about it all the time, but when I was little it wasn't some exception but the baseline expectation. We need to bring back judging people and heaping scorn, honestly.
Lots of Assumptions There (Score:3)
discipline was harped on equal to academics... school is even operated more like a prison than an educational institution.
Has it occurred to you that these two things are related? That perhaps your demand for "discipline" is exactly what is pushing schools to become prison pipelines more than places for developing critical thinking skills?
None of the teachers have any level of professionalism anymore
What do you define as "professionalism"? Teachers of old that often were not credentialed to teach the subjects they were assigned to teach, and could be verbally abusive if not even physically abusive (hitting with rulers or spanking was at one time common!) to enforce "discipline"? Maybe th
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You had me on everything up until cursive which is the only point you don't elaborate on. Why on earth is cursive something kids need to know anymore?
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Reading and writing in cursive teaches more then just reading and writing. Being able to read it should be obvious, especially if you start looking at older source material that was hand written. Some kids literally cannot read it. The real benefits though come from writing. Writing is a physical skill. It teaches the base motor skills, helps with concentration and focus. It also require practice for it to be legible. These are all good things.
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Apparently taking NOTES in cursive is a key element in retention during learning - the brain is just so involved in listening/watching, processing, compressing and synthesizing the information into note form, then having to cursively basically engages the last bit of the brain to crystallize it.
Printing doesn't accomplish it as much, and typing even lesser still. The fact that most people are inherently slower at cursive means the brain has to do a lot more thinking to condense and keep up. And generally sp
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That's pretty interesting. I've never heard that but it definitely makes sense. Good response!
Re: It sucks, but it's not unexpected (Score:2)
Is teaching cursive *really* all that much of a burden? From what I remember, it was maybe an hour per week in first or second grade as an explicit *topic*, then just taken for granted going forward.
The only problem *I* had was getting punished by my third-grade teacher (after moving from Ohio to Florida mid-year) for calling a classmate who couldn't read cursive "stupid" (he was, in fact, honest-to-god stupid, and most of the other kids could read it just fine).
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I agree with your overall post but it doesn't take highly educated parents or lots of resources to teach children the way you and your spouse did. My mother did the exact same thing as you did for your children and she doesn't even have an associates. We were always working class or worse off, so no huge access to resources either.
What it takes is parents that value their children's education and want them to do well. My mom was always an avid reader so it made sense she would teach me to be an avid reader
Well (Score:1)
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If we have a nuclear war or a carrington event you're going to be too busy to read a book, what with the collapse of society.
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Society will eventually recover and it will recover faster with physical books still in existence. If we ever go 100% digital and all the physical stuff goes away, we will indeed be putting all our eggs in one basket. Just asking for a Miyake event.
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In other news, Costco sells books? (Score:4, Insightful)
I never noticed. I'm not a member but have been with people who are, and it's always mind-blowing in scale that... for the most part I'm not set up to take advantage of; but it kind of makes you want to get married and not use birth control just to justify it. When I think CostCo I think restaurant sized everything--sacks of flour, sugar and rice you have to carry on your shoulder, appliances, alcohol, meat, anything that's legal and likely to be consumed in bulk. Appliances, computers, mattresses, whole beds, but for the love of God I've never noticed the books. It just doesn't seem to fit in my mind. Where? What? Former guy's memoir next to the toilet paper?
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Costco can be excessive if you try to use it as a replacement for a normal grocery store. But if you know what you have room to store and you know how quickly you'll eat through perishables and yo9u can refrain from impulse purchases; you can easily make it work out and save a good deal on both consumables and big-ticket items.
Hell, for the price of the membership, you only really need to save a little money to make it worth it. I buy my car insurance through Costco. And the lower rates I get makes up th
Costco in Australia (Score:2)
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In the USA there's usually frozen slushee coffee but not fresh coffee at the in house eatery.
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Shocked (Score:2)
2024 and books are still a thing :O
They are everywhere. I'm always noticing how books have somehow survived but if I simply spin a DVD or a CD I'm considered to be one of these:
- A luddite
- A dinosaur
- A weird idiot who has been living under a rock
All the things I used to think when on a train 15 years ago and noticing people still reading off dead trees.
Opportunity to improve? (Score:4, Interesting)
If Costco's labor is the issue and packaging is a concern, it seems like an obvious opportunity for a book distributor to figure out how to meet Costco's needs on their end.
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The Infomocracy series by Malka Older was good, so is the Whitespace series by Elizabeth Bear but unfortunately my library doesn't have the latest book in the series (published just this year). I tend to be a little unsatisfied by book endings in series, even the last books, but they were enjoyable reads, nonetheless.
On the non-fiction side, Good Arguments by Bo Seo was good.
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While that may sound like a troll, it's true that the woke mind virus has infiltrated publishing, and the bulk of new books are trying to exploit liberal political leanings.
Not being American (Score:3)
But apart from that, let's address the real problem of the publishers: lack of actual bookstores in small towns. And that can only be blamed on Amazon - but the publishers can't dare say that because Amazon dominates book distribution and selling. IOW they have monopoly power.
scaremongering (Score:1)
Book Desert (Score:2)
"The change may also impact Costco customers, particularly those who live in areas without a bookstore."
There's so many things wrong with this sentence that it's difficult to know where to start. It's as though the author, publishing on the internet, isn't aware that the majority of book sales happen online. Or that Costco only locates stores in urban/suburban areas. There's no rural community without a library or a bookstore that has a Costco next to their single traffic light.
Already noticing significant drop in Canada (Score:2)
The book reduction hit my local Costco during COVID - at first they reduced the "book bench" to about half the size and removed most of the book extras (puzzles, kids' boxed sets and such), presumably to be able to stock more essential items during lockdown (bottled water, toilet paper, etc.)
As of last week, there is only a very small book table left with maybe 10-12 bestsellers and couple of children's' picture books, tucked away in dead zone corner that is easy to miss.
It's too bad to see this disappear,
Welcome to Costco (Score:2)
Costco's business plans (Score:2)
In comparison, you've got Sam's Club, who let anyone shop with a valid card and treat ID at the food court as a non issue.
My guess is Sam's Club, who are really keen on draining Costco market share, will begin advertising that they still have books.
False argument (Score:2)
There are no Costco's where are are not also book stores, particularly B&N. Costco is big market only, with only recently moving to medium-size markets, where there are also B&N, etc.
Who bought them? (Score:2)
Their books are shit-tier.