I run two small independent bookstores in New York City. I have been in this business for about 10 years, and we have usually about between 14 and 16 employees on staff. I run the business with a partner, my husband also works in the business, and my business partner’s son also works for the store. It’s a family business.
In the last few years we’ve started doing large scale public events and this last year we invested heavily in the infrastructure to be able to do that. We have an extra freelance staff member who just works solely on ticketed offsite events, and these events are a big part of our income. We had a very robust calendar for March, April, and May — but once March came along, everything started to change. We weren’t sure whether it was safe to host events anymore.
First, we started to downscale certain parts of the events, such as in-person signings; then we started to implement more procedures around interactions with talent or with the public. As we got into the week of March 10, we canceled all events for the rest of March.
We also worried about whether it was safe to be in the store. We implemented additional sanitizing measures and started to have more strict guidelines about sick staff members being quarantined. We had at-risk staff stay home. For instance, we have somebody who has a newborn baby at home. He was the first to stay home. I have respiratory issues and my son developed a cough, so I stayed home. Several staff members stayed home with coughs.
The week of March 16, we closed the store to browsing and only fulfilled web and phone orders for pickup. That week was very stressful. It became clear that none of the staff should be interacting with the public and that everyone should be at home. On the evening of March 22, the Governor’s pause measures came into effect, and we closed up the bookshop.
We’re in a fortunate circumstance for a bookstore. We sell a lot of books and we’re in a high traffic area in Brooklyn, so our usual ups and downs are seasonal and predictable. We tend to run our business organically and look one, three, and six months ahead at what books we’re ordering and how much staff we have. Like most small businesses we’re finding we didn’t do enough disaster planning. That said, we’re not heavily indebted. We were on pretty good footing coming into the beginning of the year so that helped our position significantly. We received some rent relief for April from both of our landlords, which is incredibly appreciated.
We’re hoping to keep our staff on as much as possible. Most of our staff is working remotely, processing online orders; we’ve been fortunate enough to have a substantial amount of online orders come in every day since it closed. We have people working in shifts to process those online orders, which is a time-consuming process. Right now all of our staff is still employed and being paid as usual.
If we didn’t get the Payroll Protection loan and our cash flow dwindled, I think the first thing we would do is ask for voluntary furloughs before we did anything drastic. Bookselling is not a very lucrative pursuit; most of our staff relies on each paycheck.
When I heard about the Paycheck Protection Program loan, my first instinct was skepticism. It sounded too good to be true. It’s designed to keep your staff on payroll. Although you can use a small proportion for other expenses, the loan is calculated based on your monthly payroll. Because it’s a forgivable loan, this is a steep incentive to keep your payroll stable and your staff from going onto unemployment. There is a lot of concern about whether these loans will have the intended effect on the economy, but this is exactly the kind of program that could help small businesses like ours.
I read as much as I could about the loan. Our accountant called to encourage us and gave us some guidelines. I read everything I could find about what the loan paperwork might ask for. Also, the Small Business Association released at least two sample applications; even though it was clear that banks would have their own applications. I read through both and filled them out as an exercise just to make sure I had all the information on all the paperwork. When my bank, Chase, announced the loans were going to go live on April 3, they never said what time the loan would go live. So that morning I got up at seven, logged into my bank’s website, and looked at the news trying to figure out when the loan might go live.
At around 10:30am, Chase posted a notice which said they would not be accepting loan applications that day. Sometime later, they posted a form that allowed you to apply to receive information about when the loan application might be live. I spent all of Friday in limbo, reloading and reloading.
The next day, at some point in the afternoon, I reloaded the page and the application was there. I never received a notice back from Chase, I just happened to reload the page. I immediately shut myself into a room and got to work on the application.
Even though there were gray areas on the application, the principle of the loan is very easy to understand. You can apply for up to two and a half times your average monthly payroll costs from the previous year. Our payroll service rolled out a series of reports to help us apply for this loan. I used the numbers from these reports when I filled out the sample application. By the time I went to apply the reports and the calculations had changed, because the SBA had rolled out new guidelines for how to calculate all these numbers. Then the day after I submitted my Chase application, there were even newer guidelines. All to say, there was a lot of confusion.
I have friends across the country who fully intended to apply to these programs but were never able to because their banks stopped accepting applications, or they were only available on the weekend when their local branch was closed. It’s been over a week, and I have not heard anything about my application. It’s unclear whether we’re going to get this money, if anyone’s going to get this money, or if we filled out the paperwork correctly. Who knows? It’s out of our control.
We’re somewhat optimistic that we’ll be able to recover at some point. But I guess you have to be somewhat of an optimist to own an independent bookstore. Most bookstores are operating at very, very minimal profit margins; we’re used to operating in a realm in which there isn’t a lot of available capital. I think we are somewhat adapted to being thrifty and working under difficult circumstances. That said, our store is in a very privileged situation in that we’re in a market where people buy books. You don’t really have to work too hard to convince them of the value of reading.