Supermarkets get a very bad press; blamed for killing the high street, for squeezing the profit margins of small suppliers, making us all obese … and so the list of accusations rolls on. But I confess I like the democratising effect they’ve had on many areas of life, including what they’ve done for bookselling. They only exist because we all secretly, and guiltily, like what they do for us. We show our approval by shopping there and all they do is give us more and more of what we want, when and where we want it.
The book trade has historically been one of the most vociferous of their critics, accusing the supermarkets of undercutting their prices and catering to the lowest common denominator. But I have to confess that were it not for the supermarkets many of the books I have been involved with, from celebrity autobiographies to misery memoirs, would never have seen the light of day. I’m sure there are many in the literary world who would think that was no bad thing, but I would contend that these books, which the more traditional booksellers never wanted to stock and publishers consequently didn’t want to publish, are amongst the most accurate reflections available of our current times and our current obsessions.
If a time traveller arrived back at the beginning of the twenty-first century from some place far in the future, I would contend that he would learn more about the way most of us live from visiting a large supermarket than he would from visiting a bookshop or an art gallery or an opera house.
Supermarkets have created thousands of new book buyers who would never have stepped inside a traditional bookshop. (Many in the bookselling trade seem to be blissfully ignorant of just how intimidating bookshops can be to anyone who is unused to them.) They have brought pleasure to many tens of thousands of readers and opened the eyes of many thousands more to elements of life that were previously brushed under the carpet.
Led by the supermarkets, the traditional bookshops eventually started to stock the books that they had previously abhorred, even to the point of creating entire sections for them – or maybe ghettoes would be a better description.
By restricting the number of titles on offer the supermarkets made their shelves less intimidating to those who know and care little about the finer points of the literary world, and with clever merchandising and competitive pricing they made it easier for a customer to pick up a book and drop it into the trolley along with all their other purchases. Some would say that by doing so they ‘devalued’ the book as an object, but I would suggest that by making it more accessible they increased the potential market for authors. The sort of books beloved of the more traditional readers will never make it onto the supermarket shelves and will be able to keep their prices higher for a little longer – but I am not sure that is necessarily a good thing. The people who decry the falling prices of books are often the same people who champion the provision of free books through libraries. It is hard to see why one source of cheap reading is a good thing while another is bad. I think books should be accessible to as many people as possible, both in terms of content and price and availability, which makes the supermarkets an ideal place to sell them.
With the arrival of Amazon and the self-publishing boom the supermarkets are no longer seen as the leading threat to the way things were. The trade always has to have someone to fear, someone to accuse of destroying what has gone before. Publishers mocked both Oprah in the States and Richard & Judy in the UK when they started their book clubs, until they realised that viewers of these shows could make or break some of their best authors.
I remember the independent bookshops complaining when Tim Waterstone first created his chain of bookstores at the beginning of the eighties, accusing him of trying to put them out of business. Many of the accusations they levelled against him were much the same as the ones they levelled at the supermarkets and then at Amazon. Now the Waterstones chain that once looked like Goliath to the smaller shops has come to resemble David in comparison to the new giants.
Reading an interview with Tim Waterstone I discovered that as a boy his first experience of book-buying was in a small retail outlet in the Sussex town of Crowborough, where I was born.
I was being taken to the same shop as a boy (about 15 years after him), and I don’t think much can have changed in that time because my memories are almost identical to the ones he described to the journalist. Few provincial bookshops were good in those days, offering little choice and long waits if you ordered anything that wasn’t already in stock. Things are a great deal better today and much of the improvement is due to the business models created by Tim Waterstone, the supermarkets and Amazon.