Bookends & Beginnings calls for help, raises over $40,000 so far

Evanston bookstore Bookends & Beginnings sent out a plea Wednesday evening asking customers to help offset declining sales and foot traffic with contributions or memberships to the store. Contributors had raised over $40,000 by Thursday evening, with a goal of $60,000. “I’m stunned,” owner Nina Barrett told the RoundTable about the response. “I’m on the verge of tears.” Barrett opened the store in Bookman’s Alley in 2014 and moved it to 1620 Orrington Ave. in 2023 following fundraising from the community . Barrett also operates a sister store, Middle Used Books, just down the street from Bookends & Beginnings at 1630 Orrington Ave. “When people ask me how the store is doing, I usually just smile and say ‘fine.’ But it’s time to be honest about it: It’s been a really tough year for Bookends,” Barrett wrote in an email to the Bookends & Beginnings community on Wednesday, announcing the fundraiser. “Sales and foot traffic have declined significantly.” Stormy waters ahead Sales have been slow enough, Barrett said in a Facebook video, that she’s not sure whether Bookends & Beginnings will survive into the new year. “We can’t say exactly why, but catastrophic weather and politics have dampened many people’s enthusiasm for in-person shopping,” Barrett wrote in her email, “and downtown Evanston seems to be struggling more with its post-pandemic recovery than nearby neighborhoods like downtown Wilmette and Andersonville.” The RoundTable reached out to commercial district nonprofit Downtown Evanston for comment, but did not immediately receive a reply. Employee Adrien Sdao has noticed that customers also have different habits in the store. “It doesn’t seem like people browse as much. They come in looking for specific things,” Sdao told the RoundTable. “They want the bestsellers. They want the things they’ve read about in the paper or heard on NPR.” When customer Deb Chernoff heard that the store was struggling, she said, “Unfortunately, it’s not terribly surprising in this day and age.” It’s been a “long struggle” for small bookstores like Bookends & Beginnings against bigger retailers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Anchoring isn’t enough Barrett described Bookends & Beginnings to the RoundTable as an anchor in downtown Evanston, and wrote in her email to customers that she often hears people describe the store as their “Happy Place.” Chernoff spoke similarly. If Bookends & Beginnings ever had to close, Chernoff said, “it wouldn’t just be a loss of a place to go buy a book. It would be a loss of a real community center.” Barrett said, though, that being a destination isn’t enough to survive. The store needs foot traffic. “It’s really hard to go out in public and say we are hurting, but I felt that I didn’t want to just make an announcement that we’re going out of business,” Barrett told the RoundTable. “I felt that our customers do love us; that they would want some kind of notification that that was the situation.” The store already has been charging customers for credit card transaction fees instead of absorbing them, Barrett said in her email to customers. It has also suspended its frequent buyer rewards program. Hope for the future However, the shop launched a membership program in which people pay monthly and receive items from stickers to books. The program soft-launched in the summer, Barrett said, and response has been overwhelmingly positive both initially and when the store promoted it via email Wednesday. Since the store’s call for help, it has also seen an uptick in business. “We came into a huge amount of orders online, and people have just been coming in all day,” Sdao said Thursday. “We’re really, really happy about that.” “I’ve said for a long time, people vote with their dollars,” Barrett said. “People are voting for us. It’s an election, and people are voting for us.” Related Stories