Meeting Minutes 120720
Annual Community Meeting
Seminary Co-op Bookstore
December 7, 2020
MINUTES
Introduction: Clancey D’Isa, Marketing Director
Remarks: Ken Warren, Outgoing President
On behalf of the Board it’s my great pleasure to welcome you, and to be with you all tonight, even if only virtually. Although no longer a legal cooperative, the Seminary Co-op, as a not-for-profit corporation operating in the public interest, continues to depend upon the support and goodwill of our readers and members. The annual meeting, which is a carryover from our former existence as a Co-op, is just one of the many ways that the board and the director strive to keep you informed of the bookstores’ operations, challenges, and achievements, and to hear your thoughts and ideas for our future success.
This past year, as we all faced the unprecedented crisis created by the Covid-19 pandemic, we were gratified that our members and readers—through book purchases, direct contributions, and participation in our many virtual events—enabled us to stay in business and to continue to serve the needs of the book-buying community. Last spring, as we first became aware of the dramatic economic impact the pandemic would have on our operations and finances, we appealed to our readers and members through a GoFundMe campaign with a target of raising $250,000 to help get us through this year. The response was immediate and sustained. I am thrilled to report that to date, the combined totals we have received through our website, through the mail, and through our GoFundMe site has reached $270,660. We cannot thank you enough. We still face challenges, but with your ongoing support and the continued backing of the University of Chicago, we remain confident in our future.
Among the other ways that the Bookstores seek to be responsive to our members and readers is through the constitution of the Board of Directors. In accordance with our bylaws, the Board of Directors consists of 18 elected voting Directors plus the manager of the Corporation. The elected Directors are divided into three classes based on the year they are elected, the size of each class being as equal as possible to create continuity of leadership. Elected Directors serve a term of three years, ending at the Annual Meeting of the Board three years from when they were first elected. Typically, Board members are considered for reelection at the end of their terms, although no member may serve more than three terms consecutively.
Accordingly, in the fall of this year, the chair of the board’s personnel committee, Natalie Moore, circulated to our members and to the community at large a call for nominations to the board. As has been the case in each of the years since we began this process, we received a great number of talented nominees (this year there were 17 candidates), which made our task extremely difficult. I am pleased to report, though, that at its October meeting the Board approved the Nominating Committee’s recommendation to welcome four new members to the Board of Directors. Our new directors, in alphabetical order, are:
Christie Henry, who is Director of Princeton University Press and was, prior to that the Co-editorial Director at the University of Chicago Press. Formerly a Lab parent, Christie maintains ties throughout the community and University. In addition to her work with Princeton University Press. Christie is also on the boards of the Association of American Publishers and the Association of University Presses
Ydalmi Noriega, Director of Community and Foundation Relations for Poetry Foundation. Ydalmi, was the 2019 recipient of the Adam Morgan Literary Citizen Award, named for the founding editor of the Chicago Review of books, which is given to a person who has made outstanding contributions to Chicago’s literary scene. In being selected for the Adam Morgan award, Ydalmi was cited for making the city “a more welcoming, more inclusive, and more exciting place for poets, writers, and readers.” We are thrilled to have her on the board.
Darren Reisberg, Vice President, Programs and Strategy, Joyce Foundation. Before that Darren was the Vice President for Strategic Initiatives and Deputy Provost at the University of Chicago where he managed the Office’s budget and operations, supported faculty governance, and led the coordination of the University’s initiatives in K-12 education. He was also the first Executive Director of the University’s Institute of Politics, where he currently serves on the Institute’s Board of Advisors. He currently serves as chair of the Illinois State Board of Education and on the Board of Directors of Center on Halsted.
Ayoka Samuels, Director, Serve Illinois Commission. Ayoka previously served for 14 years as the Director of the Gary Comer Youth Center in Chicago’s Grand Crossing community. She has been an active member of the Illinois non-profit community since 1993 and has also worked at the Boys & Girls Clubs of Chicago, the Boys and Girls Clubs of America, BR&R Communications, Muntu Dance Theatre of Chicago, New Concept Development Center, and as a consultant for Malcolm X College’s Kwanzaa Committee.
Please join me in welcoming our new board members.
The Board also approved the Nominations Committee recommendation to approve current Board Members, Erin Adams, Robert Scales, and Ken Warren for an new term.
Finally, the Board accepted the Nominations Committee recommendation for a new slate of officers whose terms begin with this evening. They are Katie Parsons, President, Erin Adams, Vice President, Will Howell, Secretary, and Robert Scales as Treasurer. We are grateful for the willingness of the new leadership team
Before turning the floor over to our new President, Katie Parson, I’d also like to use this time to say a special word thank you to Jeff and his leadership team, Clancey D’Isa and Jenny Clines, as well as to the 30 booksellers for their work and devotion to Seminary Co Op bookstores.
Remarks: Katie Parsons, Incoming President
Thank you, Ken. I am so grateful for your leadership and example since I joined the board. I have big shoes to fill!
I am so proud to stand alongside this community in support of this place we all love. I graduated from the College in 2004, and worked as a bookseller for several of those years. Since graduating, I’ve been an avid supporter and patron of the bookstore, and have been so thrilled to work with Jeff and the rest of the board for the last couple of years. Most importantly, I am so grateful to be a part of this community and grateful that you continue to support the bookstores, too.
I am excited to welcome Ydalmi, Darren, Ayoka, and Christie. That also means that several folks are leaving us this year. Deborah Epstein, James Schwinn, Bill Sewell, and Kate Hannigan - thank you so much for your service to the bookstores as board members, donors, and patrons.
Report: Jeff Deutsch, Director
Thank you for tuning in. This is our first annual meeting that we have held remotely and, while I know we would all prefer to meet in person, I must say, I find it heartening that so many of you have taken the time to tune in. It speaks to just how much these stores mean to our community.
One of the benefits of a remote meeting, is that we can welcome a wide audience, including many of you who are dialing in from what we call the diaspora. That means, for many of you, this is your first annual meeting, or perhaps your first annual meeting in years. Welcome.
For those of you I haven’t met, my name is Jeff Deutsch and I became the director of the Co-op in 2014. The last six years have provided me with the most meaningful and fulfilling work I can imagine. Getting to know so many of you has been one of the great unanticipated perks of the job.
Overview
During my report, I will share some high-level thoughts about the state of the stores and the industry and then share some details about our finances, our initiatives, and the ways in which you can help us survive the existential threat we, and so many like us, including so many of you, are facing.
Lest I bury the lede, I’ll say at the outset, we are doing better than most independent bookstores and we have measured hope that we can survive the pandemic. The only reason we are in this position is because of you and the wellspring of support you have provided.
As Ken noted, we have received over $270k worth of gifts from you. Many of you have also gifted your member credit back to the store. Our conservative estimate of that gift is $10k.
You have continued to order from us. Even during the incredibly slow and complicated spring months, you ordered from us. I would like to pause to thank you for your patience and generosity and describe what was happening behind the scenes – and what is continuing behind the scenes – that I might give you a better sense of the profundity of our gratitude for said patience and generosity.
As you know, our work is physical. Our mission is built around the physical book, and we wouldn’t have it any other way. So, while others’ work can happen remotely or virtually, the lion’s share of our work is physical, as is the work of all of our partners along the supply chain.
Since mid-March, we have been working in the store. Up to four dozen of your favorite booksellers, doing physical work indoors, while trying to keep up with the conflicting and confusing reports dispatched from local, state, federal, and international sources. Our publisher partners, suppliers, and delivery services, were all facing the same challenges.
In addition, we went from 7% online sales to 100% online sales. We had to develop completely new protocols and operations that kept safety at the forefront, ensured our service levels were no more compromised than necessary, and do all of it in a way that wouldn’t bankrupt us and put us out of business.
I’d like to pause for a moment of gratitude. You stayed with us. You understood when we made the decision to focus on our web order business rather than try to open the stores in a diminished capacity. You accepted our (many) apologies, when we couldn’t live up to the high standards of service you and we had grown accustomed to.
I want to acknowledge the unbelievable accomplishments of our staff. Like many job descriptions, ours include a point referencing “other duties, as assigned.” We exercised that clause more than at any other time in our history. In mid-March, all of us, including me, threw our job descriptions out the window, and rolled up our sleeves to do what needed to be done to keep this thing going.
Alena Jones, Alex Houston, Clancey D’Isa, Jenny Clines, Bryce Lucas, Marina Malazoniya, Mark Loeffler, Sonja Coates, Stéphanie D’Hubert, and Freddie Lippmann, alongside a few dozen of the best booksellers in the world, built and rebuilt our systems in order to maximize efficiency, communication, and a warm touch, all while keeping each other, and you, safe.
It is a remarkable thing – you can all knock on wood with me, if you’re superstitious – that, as we round our ninth month of doing this work together, no one on staff has contracted COVID.
Financials
The pandemic arrested our incredible trajectory. “Between 2014 and 2019, our sales increased by 27%. American bookstore sales over the same period decreased by 7%. Since 2014, we have programmed and supported over 2,500 author events. In our last non-pandemic fiscal year we realized $3.4 million in sales.
It’s been exceedingly difficult. On the day we closed, for the fiscal year, we were up 4.4% ($110,000) to last year. We ended the fiscal year down 10% ($350,000) to FY19.
We canceled 150 author events in the Spring and have ceased in-person programming until further notice.
In the nearly nine months since we last opened our doors to the public, our sales were down 47.6% ($1,230,000).
During that timespan, our profitability was down 36.9% ($308,000).
Continuing our work during COVID
From the day we shut our doors in March, we have been clear that our focus must be on our long-term survival. Even if we disappointed some of our customers by, for instance, not opening, or not keeping a larger inventory on hand in order to expedite service, we knew that it would be not just disappointing, but devastating, if we were myopic, focusing on the immediate needs to the detriment of the long-term reality.
But we also remain committed to serving you well from a distance. To that end, we redoubled our commitment to our existing programs and introduced new initiatives to help serve you better now, and in the long term.
Our website, while not particularly good by the standards set by multi-billion-dollar companies, is at least as good as any independent bookstores. We have continued to invest time and money into improving browsability and the reader’s experience. You responded!
In the last nine months, we have:
Fulfilled over 24,000 orders
Sold over 57,000 books
Shipped books to all 50 states and three U.S. territories
While we are proud of these numbers, and the service we are providing, our already thin margins are further depleted by the increased labor required to fulfil these orders and the increased expense of shipping and materials.
Recognizing that browsing is one of our most cherished offerings, and that clicking on thumbnail photos of covers isn’t a good substitute for browing, our crack marketing director, Clancey D’Isa, developed a Front Table Catalog: Armchair Browsing for the Socially Distant. Built to resemble the catalogs we published in the 80s and 90s, these vast selections of carefully chosen titles are meant to replicate the browse as much as possible.
We are currently distributing print copies of our adult and children’s holiday guide, but the digital versions are readily available for your perusal.
We also launched our new Front Table Subscription Box this Fall. For $199, we will send a bi-monthly selection to you or your chosen recipient. We currently have nine options: Literature, Arts and Criticism, Social Sciences, Religion, Philosophy, History, Science and Mathematics, UChicago Faculty, and a Generalist box.
While we had to cancel 150 author events, and have ceased programming in-person events, we have had the pleasure of supporting 96 online events since the shutdown, and have continued to work with authors to safely sign their books for you. You can see Kathleen Rooney on the left, and Sara Paretsky and our friend Chiara on the right, signing copies of their new books.
While we know how foolhardy it is to speculate about the unknowable future, we also know it is foolhardy to completely relinquish control to the Fates.
We are hoping to re-open in the Spring in some capacity, but will make decisions based on safety and our financial health.
We are projecting at least a 50% decrease in sales as the economy continues to contract.
Book sales will not provide enough revenue to sustain us through the crisis, regardless of the volume.
But book sales remain our core business, and we are grateful for the continued book purchasing.
We are in relatively good shape compared to other bookstore – we have already lost some great bookstores and are hoping beyond hope that 2021 won’t begin with bookstore closures, but we are not confident that our hope is warranted
I would like to reiterate a couple of points that I shared in my annual letter to our community, which is published to coincide with our June member sale.
We will continue to be nimble and we will continue to find ways to serve you from a distance. We will do everything we can, within our character, to ensure that we might serve you again in person, deliberately, with a great browse and an abundance of community.
But we know not to be too proud to ask for help or too confident in our ability to endure by wit and innovation alone. Along with the rest of the book industry, many cultural institutions, and so much else we have taken for granted, our very existence is threatened. We must, then, examine our mode of existence deeply. “Whenever anyone begins to think about arts advocacy,” Toni Morrison writes in The Source of Self-Regard, “a complex obstacle presents itself at once: artists have a very bad habit of being resilient, and it is that resilience that deceives us into believing that the best of it sort of gets done anyhow – and the ‘great’ of that ‘best’ sort of lasts anyhow.” Morrison, writing about artists and arts organizations, could have been writing about so many treasured institutions, including ours.
Indeed, we already lost two of the country's last remaining academic bookstores just last month: the 46-year-old University Press Books in Berkeley and the 58-year-old Penn Book Center in Philadelphia both announced that they were permanently closing. Our bookstore, nearing 60, is subject to the same threats and challenges that finally brought down these two esteemed shops. The best does not sort of last anyhow. In light of the current crisis, it is clear that it will be ever more difficult for stores like ours to endure, for there to remain a space where we might simply browse alongside each other, bound together in the act of reading.
We are hopeful, however, that we will find a way to make it, as a direct result of your support, but the threat is great and your ongoing support is needed.
And so we continue to ask for your support.
Buy books and be patient with us as we fulfill your orders safely.
Give a financial gift: www.semcoop.com/give.
Buy gift cards, Front Table subscriptions, Children’s Starter Stacks, and bookstore merchandise.
Listen to our Open Stacks podcast and subscribe through our Patreon account.
Act as ambassadors on our behalf within your communities.
We have so much to be proud of and so much to preserve. Thank you. I will now take your questions.
V. Questions and Answers
Q: It seems counterintuitive to stay closed. Why is it more expensive?
The cost of filling the shelves for browsing is immense; we have $400k less in inventory than we did a year ago, and we don’t have the funds to fill the space; in order to do work efficiently and safely, we’ve taken over all space available to us to fulfill your orders as quickly as possible. Giving resources or space over to browsing would slow us down. We hope to reopen in the spring, but we are watching closely with long-term viability as the guiding factor.
Q: You’ve been successful in moving to online orders and no-contact delivery. In addition to those initiatives, what are you thinking about in delivering other co-op “signature” services—such as author events—in an online environment?
Clancey and her team have been doing a great job booking our own events as well as working with our partners to host authors. All but one of these events have resulted in no sales; the only one to result in any sales was a Jeff Tweedy event with a book/ticket bundle, where we sold 1200 books. Events are an expense, a cultural endeavor, and with virtual events that li all we can expect -- not sales. We’ll continue to do these. We’ll continue with front table catalogues and subscriptions too.
Q: Can you tell us about a typical day now? How is staff morale? How can we help?
It’s a difficult time for everyone. We’re grateful for the work, but no bookseller got into this to pack boxes. Typical days include packing, picking, and correspondence. We can’t overstate how much your presence brings these stores to life; we miss you, and the space is not the same. That said, we have quite a bit of community in our stores. Morale in the world now is rough, but we’re grateful to have each other, and grateful to have you. Your feedback is a balm for the soul -- we have morning shift meetings every day and share these communications of joy. You can help by ordering books, sending kind notes, and being patient with us.
Q: Aside from encouraging contributions and purchases from members what other ideas are being discussed to meet what seems to be a long term revenue gap?
This pandemic revealed some existing seams in the bookselling industry; we’ve known the bookselling model has been broken for a long time. It’s a big part of why we moved from a co-op to a not-for-profit. We are trying to figure out and build a new model alongside the rest of the industry. It’s a miserable thing to say that we are doing better than most bookstores, and we fear a mass closure of bookstores in 2021. We will make it for now, but long-term we need a different model, which recognizes that the margin of the books is not enough to sustain us, and even when it was, it was sustaining us well below our value. Our staff deserves pay above minimum wage, and we need a model that elevates this work. We don’t have an answer to what this model is, and the ability to raise funds right now is compromised by the current situation. It remains an open question.
Q: What other funding are you seeking beside donations?
We received a PPP, which about equaled what we received from you. Without this, we would be shut down, and we need another one, as so many others do. We received over $20,000 of other grants and forms of support, including through BINC (Book Industry Charitable Fund) and the City of Chicago. We apply for any grant we can, and have received a handful.
Q: How are indie bookstores committed to e-books and getting a piece of electronic publishing?
Short answer is that we’re not. It’s not ideological, though we are most committed to the physical book. We do offer Redshelf, which is meant for students but has broader applications, but there’s no way for us to compete in a meaningful way. There is an independent bookstore equivalent of Kindle called Kobo, and Libro.fm for audiobooks, but it’s not competitive with other retailers.
Q: Has there been any thought given lately to instituting annual membership dues?
We are open to this, and everything is on the table. The subscription pilot will likely lead to another form of subscription which will allow people to give to us on a recurring basis.
Q: Considering the lower margins you describe, is it better to buy books from you or support you in other ways?
Buy books from us, please. Margins are our problem, not yours, but you are part of solving the problem. We care deeply about the entire infrastructure of publishing, and how it’s been disrupted this year. The only way to support our industry is selling books, and that is our way of supporting our community -- getting books to our community. If you need a book very quickly, go elsewhere, make an exception. And please spread the love with other bookstores.
Q: What are you reading right now?
I’m reading a personal manuscript that I can’t yet talk about. I’m getting ready to read Absalom, Absalom, which has intimidated me for years and years but I look forward to reading it with colleagues. My big winter book is Divine Days by Leon Forrest.
Q: Are you planning to keep doing curbside pickup over the winter, and does picking up our books (vs. having them shipped) save you on margins?
Yes, we’ll continue as long as it’s safe, and it does help us with margins. We’re also doing local delivery around the neighborhood, including Bronzeville and South Shore. We’ve been excited to support the USPS, but there have been difficulties there with timeliness.
Q: How do we buy Christmas gift cards?
Gift cards can be purchased online. We have electronic delivery, so timing should be no problem.