HOW MIGHTY IS AMAZON?

I’ve always had this back-of-the-mind worry about Amazon. It’s a huge success, of course, and what would we all do without it? All those late night purchases of books which we forgot to buy at Waterstones but now, refreshed by red wine, we joyfully order another selection to join the piles of the unread when they arrive the next day.

So what’s not to like? Their attitude to people for one. Amazon is an HR nightmare. It’s also breaks all the rules we learnt when small. That profit was king. At 4% or less, profit on sales Amazon sweeps all before it; with Third World man management and price-cutting to destroy smaller, more circumspect competitors. And tax? Last year they paid £220 million on UK sales of just under £11 billion. Go figure.

Yet it provides an essential service to the lazy or forgetful. But I’ve started to detect a few cracks. During lockdown it’s taking longer to deliver and it’s not always so cheap now.

Its secret of success was that its competitors were so dire. Bookshops were expensive, slow and often rude. You sometimes felt they were there for the staff and that customers somehow got in their way.
Suddenly we have entered a new world of home-delivery by bookshops, restaurants, butchers,  greengrocers and wine merchants.

One of the great comic writers – our own version of P.J. O’Rourke – is Rod Liddle. Here’s what he wrote last week about one of the most beautiful sounds in the world – no, not birdsong….
“The growl of a diesel engine, the crunch of wheels on gravel and the squeal of brakes”
This signifying the arrival of a Majestic wine delivery.

I have the same feeling – less growling, crunching and squealing – with a Sussex Peasant delivery of asparagus and other locally-grown delights.

But here’s my story of how the game seemed stuck in the past but then was shown to be totally changed. On March 29th I sent an order worth just over £100 to the Royal Horticultural Society at Wisley in response to their heavy catalogue drops. Silence. When we at last put on some pressure we got a slightly aggrieved … “it’s all very difficult and we’re very busy.” More silence. Followed by a cheque returned and a slip of paper saying “we are unable to fulfil you order at this time…we’re sorry for any inconvince (sic) this has caused”…

More than “inconvince” matey. Our garden was naked, drab and forlorn.

I wondered if Leonardslee Lakes and Gardens could help albeit from their small nursery. They could. Hurrah! I sent off an order. Next day they made the 20 mile journey and because they’d been unable to fulfil all the order they’d made intelligent substitutions and bunged in a free bag of compost to say “sorry”. The business is South African owned with people who understand customer service. 

So, I believe in buying from small, local businesses from people we know and who care. Amazon beware.

WHEN DOES A TREND STOP BEING TRENDY?

This week I was reading that we publish more books in the UK per capita than anywhere else in the world. Everyone has a book in them they say. Rather a lot of those books are getting out, it would seem.

But until recently book sales were declining and this year PWC predicted that e-books would overtake the sales of real books by 2018. That’s been the trend for sure but last year sales of e-books actually went backwards. And now I keep on coming across early adopters of Kindle who’ve renounced the e-theology. Too few fonts, too ordinary and everything dressed in the same clothes.

The same sort of experts as those guys at PWC were arguing the case for out of town shopping and deriding the potential of the high street, Here’s what one Harpreet Johal, the former managing director of the online retail chain Clothing Direct, said in the Financial Times a few years ago:
“It is time for the local high street to die. The case for its death is simple: people no longer shop there.”

Mark Price of Waitrose is now saying that as in all markets there’s been a splintering of consumer activity. We have shopping online, in the high street and out of town, a bit of store-choice-promiscuity, and frequent shopping for what we want tonight. The concept of the once-a-week monster-family-shop is over.

As is the alleged demise of books.

Have a look at these two pieces of film, respectively an ad for Ikea and a skit from a Norwegian comedy show.

 

Another problem I keep hearing about is the death of bookshops and libraries. The Jubilee Library in Brighton seems to be doing pretty well as does the library in nearby Lewes. And the new library in Birmingham is being raved about and won the Royal Institute of British Architects award and narrowly missed winning the prestigious Stirling Prize.

Bookshops? Well like bad restaurants, yes, they keep on closing. I heard of one recently at which, when a friend asked if they had a certain book, she was told “No. Why don’t you try Amazon?”
They will have wished they hadn’t said that. She berated them and said she’d never shop there again. Bookshops open when they want - people who work find them closed when they get home and on Sunday, they don’t serve refreshment, they don’t look very nice and the standard of customer service is generally shocking.

But there are exceptions.

Daunts in Marylebone is wonderful and doing really well. And now a small Waterstones has opened in a beautiful Grade 1 building in Lewes. It has an exciting layout and in just over 2000 square feet is an enthusiastic champion of books. Like actor Daniel Radcliffe I want to buy more and more of them.

And if Waterstones’ new store is a sign of the times, real bookshops are on the way back. Good bookshops, Michelin star bookshops.

THE WISDOM OF CROWDS AND OTHER MYTHS

This week I was on a train to Brighton that braked sharply at Gatwick where we sat waiting for 45 minutes with no announcement. Eventually the driver said: “I’m so sorry about the delay. The reason is someone forced open a carriage door on the wrong side of the train and then ran off. We had to fix the door. We’ve done so now and we’ll leave very shortly. Thanks for your patience.” A guy behind me said “he’s lying”. I asked why he thought that and he replied he’d been on Twitter and “someone” had tweeted that a person had opened the door on the “right side” and run off down the platform. “So there you are. The driver is a liar”. Let me get this straight. The driver (who also wanted to get home) told his story - credentials? A trained, experienced employee into whose hands we’d trusted our lives. But he was worsted by someone we don’t know and can’t see yet whose credibility is he tweets and claims to be an eye-witness. Imagine if Twitter had existed when Kennedy was shot or when Princess Diana’s car crashed. Caroline Flint MP said recently that she “lived on Twitter.” Why would you? What makes Twitter better than real people and real conversation? In a week where Dianne Abbott was incautious and nearly lost her job by tweeting with a “racial bias”….what a palaver that was….and in which Ed Miliband who on Twitter (a bit like a mini-Tesco at present because Ed can’t put a foot right) described the late Bob Holness’ show as “Blackbusters” we need to examine what this medium is doing to us all. Ed says he’s on it to show people the “real Ed”. The trouble is it makes him look a bit boring, trivial and self-obsessed. It would be far better for him to spend the time on his presentational skills instead. We live in a strange world where the use of e-mail is rapidly reducing, where I’ve seen it claimed that “no-one reads anymore” and where Waterstone’s (for whom such an assertion is bad news) changes its name to Waterstones because “in a digital world of URLs and e-mail addresses, a more versatile and practical spelling (is needed)” … viz. no apostrophe.

In fact it’s, anyway, a long hard word which could be better abbreviated to WastoBosto – ie. Waterstone’s Book Stores. I must tweet someone about that and say James Daunt (CEO) is seriously thinking of doing this. After all, everyone would believe me, the tweeter, and not him, the man in charge, and his denials.

SETTLING DOWN WITH A GOOD BOOK

And before we go on further can I say I am obviously unable to comment on those allegations in Twitter that I have served a superinjunction so can we move on please?

I love books. We even have a small but beautifully fitted out 2500 book library at home. I spend more money on books than anything else. Barely an evening passes without me buying a book on Amazon and barely a week passes that I don’t go into Waterstones and come out of it  grumpy. And yet I used to love the place.
And today, Saturday, I see the Russian oligarch Alexander Mamut has bought it from HMV (no surprise that…it’s been well trailed for ages) and put in James Daunt to run it (huge surprise that.) Daunts Books (there are seven branches but I only know the one in Marylebone High Street) is the delicatessen, the very Dean and Deluca of books. I always find books in there that I’ve never heard of but desperately want to read, books that I feel I really need.

Will James succeed with big W – the place that has become the shame of the High Street…the place where a friend was told a recent publication was not in stock and given the friendly advice by their staff “why don’t you try a real bookshop mate, like Foyles?”

The omens are not good. Book sales were down by 3% or so last year. Luke Johnson, owner of failed Borders and Books etc said book retailing was finished and his involvement had been a stupid error. Amazon say e-books now outsell paper books. Barnes and Noble are being kept alive by their e-commerce division the Nook and are currently considering a $1 billion bid by Liberty Media, the QVC shopping channel people.
And yet…and yet. Shops that sell great brands and give great service thrive. Farmers Markets burgeon. Organic and quality food blooms. New restaurants keep on opening. Literary Festivals flourish. And nothing beats a comfortable chair, good light, a glass of wine and the feel of a real book, the smell of fresh print and beautiful paper, the clunk of a hard cover and that certainty that it’s all there in your hands, typeset in Dutch 801 by MacGuru and printed by Clays in Bungay, Suffolk.

Our Kindle gathers dust from neglect. Our library just gathers dust, the dust of knowledge and turned pages, that fragrant dust of words.

I love books. I need books. Good luck James. Turn back the pages.