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Sometimes the human capacity for ignoring things amazes me. Usually it just disgusts me. Statistics have shown the number of men who never get married has steadily risen over the last half century. This means there are more and more men every year with no wife, mother, girlfriend or whoever to do their shopping for them. Studies have also shown the number of that more men are staying home and raising the family while the woman in the relationship works outside the house. And yet, the grocery stores haven’t really changed too much in the last two and half decades. Nor have the people making the cleaners and the laundry soap or the fixtures responded well. Most men want a cleaner to either not smell or smell like cleaner "Evergreen Forest Glade Heavenly Aroma" dish soap doesn’t appeal to most of the male gender too much. And given that on average men are a bit taller than women, having checkout counters where there are no impulse items at that higher level seems a bit foolish. The floor space is still costing the store the same amount, and wasting three or four feet of shelf space per checkout lane doesn't make dollars or sense.
Something else baffling is the fact that the book matrix hasn't really changed in these stores in nearly forever. There are bright kids books, the same mix of big name writers as every other supermarket and convenience store with a liberal mix of romance novels. But, despite the demographic shifts mentioned above, and the increased number of men who go shopping with their significant female other, the number of books aimed at men, has dropped. When a decade or two back I'd at least see the occasional western, or maybe a war or car themed non fiction book. Sometimes there would be the biography of a famous athlete or president and that's about it. I find it odd that there are less and less independent book stores, and more concentration of business niches that were formerly boutique focused into the larger stores, and yet the publishing industry has been slow to respond. Wal-Mart, whatever there other faults has proven it can sell music at a solid pace and is now the largest music retailer in the country. The book store section in the two or three Wal-Mart's I occasionally visit are no larger than they were when they opened, likewise for Target, Kmart, or any of the supermarket chains.
The question to me becomes, do writers, and editors really care who is selling the books that much? With one of the two largest chains in the country on shaky financial footing, and the steady drop in independent book stores, doesn’t it make sense to better penetrate the non traditional markets? Even if Target never amounts to more than five percent of Pyr or Roc's sales it would be one more market to put books in front of potential buyers. It would also be one more market to leverage Barnes and Noble and Borders into distribution deals that are more favorable to the publisher and writer. Maybe the younger generations of men and women who aren't reading as much could be tempted back into the light.
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Preach it, brother preach it!
I do look at what books are on shelves at Wally-World, Target...
It would be nice if publishing houses pushed their books to these stores, however I am of the mindset it will likely fall on my shoulders to attempt to contact whomever makes the choices of what goes on the bookshelves at Wal-Mart and Target.
If that would work, if that person or dept. would give me the time of day, or would they simply give me a stat answer.
Robert
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My personal favourite moment was having bought a Douglas Adams novel, one of the Freer/Flint collaborations and Sinon Haynes first Hal Spacejock novel in the one spree, the female assistant looked at the covers and said, "Oh, I can never get into science fiction - it's all too serious."
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Yes, I can see where she'd get that idea from those titles.
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I've never had that kind of assumption directed at me. I've had both men and women at bookstores say they couldn't get into (insert genre here), but no one has ever thought I was buying SF/F for anyone but me. Occasionally, they thought I was buying a YA book for a kid, but that's not a surprise.
*boggles some more*
Of course, I tend to spout author connections and information at any minor excuse, so I don't think they get the chance to even consider the possibility that I'm buying for anyone but me.
Now, when I run into young teen males in the SF/F section, they tend to look at me askance...
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As for the teenage males, I quite like asking them if their mothers know what they're reading. Just to watch them blush, and get out of my way so I can get to the shelves. *g*
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Barnes & Noble
I'm trying to find a David Freer book... He searches their computer, "Cannot find anything by that author."
"Try Dave Freer, that's spelled F R E E R."
The guy's an idiot, "nothing by any under that name."
I've seen Dave Freer books in the store before. You can find the at online site, but not him, he's an idiot.
Tommorrow, driving accross town and look there.
Robert
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ah....
If the door does not open, maybe there's a window open.
Robert
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One of the problems with the supermarket/superstore (the latter meaning Costco/Walmart, not Borders/B&N) book distribution chain is that it's not actually managed by publishers, but by a network of IDs (aka Independent Distributors) that has -- like much of New York publishing -- consolidated itself from a lot of small players into a handful of big players in recent years. Tom Doherty of Tor has, I'm told, a long spiel about this; Ray Feist has also been known to discuss the matter at length. [These are also the IDs through which virtually all newsstand magazine distribution runs, including magazine distribution into the book chains; many people will tell you that magazine distribution nowadays is even more broken than ID distribution of mass market paperbacks. But we digress.]
Anyhow. This is indeed the major reason why you no longer see paperback spinners in most small convenience stores, as you once did, and why the book displays in most supermarkets look so much like each other.
OTOH, some of the larger IDs occasionally display a degree of cluefulness. Here in the Pacific Northwest, for example, a number of the larger Fred Meyer stores have sizeable paperback sections, and those continue to have decent proportions of SF/F, though the displays tend to reflect a high degree of cluster-marketing -- a number of mixed new and backlist titles by a particular author, a number of titles from a particular tie-in franchise, and so forth. And at one point, our regional ID was actually put together annual "author fair" events with groups of top-tier genre authors doing joint signing tours in those same Fred Meyer stores. (I think it's gone through one more buyout/merger in the last couple of years, because those seem to have stopped. Darnit.)
Also, I note that Target's book section has evolved somewhat -- there is now a much stronger YA book presence than there once was, albeit strongly focused on best-selling fantasy (and to a lesser degree, teen romance).
Again, though: the Target/Costco/supermarket book distribution chain (aka the "ID" channel) exists almost totally separate from the "mainstream" distribution chain that feeds books into actual bookstores, and publishers have very little influence over the ID decision-making processes.
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Look at their garden department, for instance. They have Real Plants [tm], not just a few flats of generic annuals.
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That said, some years back Fred Meyer -- which had itself bought out a number of smaller Western regional grocery chains -- was itself bought by Kroger, and so is now part of a very sizeable national empire. Interestingly, Kroger's made very few visible changes in the Fred Meyer operating model, though on the flip side it's hard to tell how much influence the Fred Meyer generalist sensibility has had on Kroger's other divisions....
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I used to live in Ohio, and I got very nervous about Kroger's buying out Fred's (mostly because I wasn't all that impressed by Kroger's when I lived there), but I do have to credit Kroger's with the sense not to mess with something that works as well as Fred's does.
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That's interesting about the books; I'm surprised Target carries books, but apparently they do.