It's Predatory Pricing, Charlie Brown!
In which we invite you to speculate and scheme with us, but mostly scratch our collective heads.
Following last week’s hunt for book recommendations in which our Bookshop.org storefront can offer competitive pricing against the Bezosian Beast, we found another indie press, Secret Acres, to join Silver Sprocket in having most of their books be closely priced across platforms.
One of their latest is the excellent Shadow Hills by Sean Ford, a combo of the “misfit kids get up to hijinks in a go-nowhere town” and psychedelic body horror genres.
For now, from a pure book price POV (shipping and handling is another calculation altogether), it’s below cover compared to Amazon’s full price.
Great! But does this mean all the offerings from sufficiently indie presses are immune from the Amazon dropkick in pricing? Readers, it does not. Ford’s previous book, also from Secret Acres, is currently “afflicted” with a coupon button, dropping the price a good percentage below what our storefront offers. We’re really at a loss to figure out how The Beast decides these things.
But that pricing disparity doesn’t hold a candle to the paperback slipcased collection of the Complete Calvin & Hobbes.
At the time of this posting, it’s not only 50% off, but there’s a coupon to click to bring the price down even more. Basically, it’s cheaper for you to get it from Amazon than it is for us to get it from our distributor. For small retailers to match that kind of pricing is a non-starter.
On some level, we have to believe Amazon is losing money on this, and it is especially tempting to take advantage by buying up all their copies and flipping them when their pricing algorithm stops fighting Target for end-of-year booksale supremacy and goes into gouge-mode, but unfortunately, big, gifty books like this tend sit and take up room, which we just had a big blow-out sale ourselves to remedy!
So we (and our landlord who gets a commission off purchases with this link) won’t be mad if you instead decide to take a chance on punishing them for possibly below-cost pricing, but given Amazon’s deep negotiating power, who knows just what this costs them, if anything?
But what about Brick & Mortar?
As far as most trade paperbacks and hardcovers go, let’s face it: from a pricing POV it’s largely a losing battle against an Amazon, or even our own online storefront, but there’s one category where we have a dubious but real advantage:
OUT OF PRINT OVERSIZED ART BOOKS
Most visitors to our store never see this, but just behind the door is a shelf full of big, brassy art books, including some odd Street Fighter volumes, Chris Ware’s Monograph…
…and continuing the theme of disaffected teens and infection (that’s what the holidays are all about!), we have one boxed copy left of Black Hole in a beautiful oversized studio edition… and what does Amazon have to say about that?
“Currently Unavailable” — no two sweeter words from Amazon’s lips to a retailer’s ears!
December is still time for ThanksGiving
Thanks to everyone who made it to our big sale last week, and everyone who got something online for/from us as well — shoutout to JF, our first auction-preloader! — it takes a while to organize, but we’ve got plenty more books where we definitely can Beat the Bezos Beast for 2024. To tide you over, here’s Days of Future Gizmo:
Do you still have the Burns Studio Edition?