Wild Hare Books, one of the mountain’s longest-running businesses, is closing its doors at the end of April.Wild Hare Books, one of the mountain’s longest-running businesses, is closing its doors at the end of April.
“Walk-in sales have just diminished,” said Linda Wyatt, owner of the bookstore, which has outlasted many other mountain establishments in its 20-25 years. “So many people have electronic books or are purchasing books from Amazon or Wal-Mart.”
She said several other stores on the mountain also sell books – including Mountain Top Toys, CVS and Accents – in addition to other items, and the demand for books is too small to support a store in which they make up almost the entirety of the inventory.
Recently, said Wyatt, her store has been seeing just two or three customers a day.
“People can find books on Amazon for less than I am able to sell them,” she said, as to why she believes the store is getting so little traffic. “By the time I cover the overhead costs, there is very little money left to take home.”
While sales have been decreasing over the eight years she has owned the store, Wyatt said in the past she could balance the low sales by selling a lot of books to the Hamilton County Department of Education, and sales would also pick up when kids came in to pick up summer reading books. But now that schools are increasingly replacing traditional books with technology in the classroom and many students are opting for e-books for summer reading, she said everything has been adding up and she felt the best decision was to close the store.
Sales have decreased by 40 percent in the years since she purchased the store, she said.
“For eight years I enjoyed it, and would have kept it up if I had been able to make a profit,” said Wyatt, a self-described avid reader who always has two or three books going at once.
January was her lowest month in terms of sales since she purchased the bookstore, and 2015 her lowest year.
“I never lost money, but never made significant dollars,” she said, adding that out of every dollar a book costs, she makes 42 cents. “Now, people come in the store so they can look at a book, hold it in their hands, flip through the pages and read the synopsis, and then go home and order it from Amazon.”
But she does have some loyal customers who come in the store at least once a month to purchase or order books.
“Their faithfulness to the store is one reason I hesitated in making the decision to close the store,” said Wyatt. “But, after talking to family and friends, the economics of running the bookstore became the factor which confirmed my decision that it was time to close.”
She said she always waited to pay her own salary – which was never a large amount – until the end of the year when everything else had been taken care of. That amount steadily diminished, and was so small last year that she would have had to get rid of her staff in order to stay open, she said. Wyatt said she was personally already spending about 35 hours a week on store business, and did not feel it was worth it to spend 40 more when there was no guarantee she would make a profit.
Wyatt said she plans to be out of the building by the time her lease is up April 30. She said she has known for about a year that she needed to close the store, which is why all gift certificates sold since last May expire May 1 of this year.
“I still have quite a bit out in gift certificates, and I want everyone to get what they would like from the store’s inventory,” said Wyatt, who plans to then discount everything by 25 percent and go from there. “There are 8,000 items in the store, so I have a lot to find a home for.”
Any items unsold will be donated to schools, charities or organizations that want to sell them as a fundraisers, she said.