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Of Bookselling, Books, and WalMart

Monday, Nov 05, 2007 at 3:48pm

Repricing books at par

WalMart Canada has made a big deal of the fact that they are going to sell books at US prices. Big gesture, small cost. They are of course a general merchandiser, so books are a sliver of their sales. And their head office and supply systems are in the US, so they can readily source their inventory where the real price really is American.

No such luck for Canadian booksellers. Pretty much all we sell is books, and pretty much everything we buy is in Canada.

Unlike Walmart, which tends to sell some dozens of titles comprising what’s new and what’s on Oprah, we have 100,000 titles on the shelf, comprising the whole history of the dollar’s recent rise. We have books printed when the dollar was worth 65 cents, others printed in recent weeks, and everything in between.

Repricing at Par

What we are doing these days is data mining. We’ve dredged our own sales records and compared prices on our most active titles to a database of US prices. This has yielded what I’ll call the prime offenders: books that are the worst of the bestsellers, pricewise.

We’re taking the 1500 prime offenders and re-pricing them at par. This means thousands of books we have to pull and resticker and reshelve. The results are beginning to show up in our stores.

This is not all our inventory: it is a rationally derived selection of the hundreds books that are causing consumers the most pain.

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