PCA Magazine Fall 2019

56 PCA The Magazine | SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2019 PREMIUMCIGARS.ORG community, curation and convening. In essence, customers still highly value community and personal contact. Here’s what Raffaelli found: COMMUNITY : Independent booksellers were some of the first to champion the idea of localism; bookstore owners across the nation promoted the idea of consumers supporting their local communities by shopping at neighborhood businesses. Articulating and emphasizing a store’s place and participating in the local community—i.e., “your friendly neighborhood tobacconist”—was proven to win customers back fromAmazon and even Borders, before it closed. CURATION : Independent booksellers began to focus on curating inventory that allowed them to provide amore personal and specialized customer experience. Rather than only recommending bestsellers, they developed personal relationships with customers by helping themdiscover up- and-coming authors and unexpected titles. No algorithmwill ever take the place of human connection. As a customer, I always look at my cigar stores as tasting centers to introduceme to new experiences. One of the best things about cigars and pipes is sharing the experience with your friends, especially when it entails 995. The year of “No Soup For You!” and “Houston, we have a problem.” The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame opened in Cleveland, the George Forman Grill was introduced, and Toy Story, Jumanji and Braveheart dominated the box office. This was also the year Amazon launched an online bookstore and with it came prognostications of the impending doomof bookstores everywhere. For a time, those prognostications seemed to be right. From 1995– 2000, the number of independent bookstores plummeted by 43 percent, according to the American Booksellers Association (ABA). But then something happened that no one saw coming. While pressure fromAmazon forced bookstore behemoth Borders out of business in 2011, independent, mom-and- pop bookstores staged an unexpected comeback. Between 2009 and 2015, the ABA reported a 35 percent growth in the number of independent booksellers, from 1,651 stores to 2,227. The successful resurgence of indie bookstores piqued the interest of Ryan Raffaelli, an assistant professor in the organizational behavior unit at Harvard Business School. Some of his key findings so far, based on what he has found to be the “3 C’s” of independent bookselling’s resurgence: Outside the 1 Cigar box BY SCOTT PEARCE RESURGENCE: How Independent Bookstores Have Roared Back in the Age of Amazon “I can understand perfectly how the report of my illness got about, I have even heard on good authority that I was dead … The report of my deathwas an exaggeration .” –Mark Twain ILLUSTRATION BY Joe DeLeon