Shop! Mary Portas urges Waterstones to turn over a new leaf
Waterstones at 82 Gower Street, London WC1 Photo: Philip Bannister
The Telegraph - 16 Mar 2012
Rating 7/10
Good for a wide range, brilliantly sold
Bad for the coffee – get rid
Bookshops, like travel agents, music stores, dating agencies and insurance brokers, are right at the sharp end when it comes to the downside of the digital revolution. Profits at Britain’s biggest bookseller, Waterstones (it dropped the apostrophe in January), peaked in 2005 but have gradually shrunk in a world where ebook sales have soared and online players such as Amazon have pushed price competition in this sector to new extremes. For me, Waterstones always stood apart from the competition with its brighter, modern stores and clever handwritten staff recommendations (yes, I know Books etc did them too), but even these couldn’t stem the decline. Ten months ago, in a commotion of publicity, the troubled chain was sold to the Russian oligarch Alexander Mamut for £50 million. His masterstroke was to recruit James Daunt, the owner of the celebrated London mini-chain of bookshops, as managing director. I’ve reviewed Daunt’s shop in Marylebone before and despite the occasional mealy-mouthed sales assistant, it remains one of the best bookshops in the country. Mamut’s next step, or so I read recently, is to open a Russian-language bookshop in Piccadilly (Slova – Russian for 'words’) with Russian-speaking assistants selling the classics of Russian literature – Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov – as well as commercial writers such as Boris Akunin and Polina Dashkova, Russia’s most successful crime author. I’m an avid reader and the Waterstones closest to my office, in Gower Street, London, is one of the largest in the empire. I’m off to see how Mr Mamut’s rescue plan is going so far.
The windows There’s a strong academic focus to this branch (University College London is across the road) and that has always given its windows a scholarly feel, which I like. There’s also a window dedicated to Dickens’s 200th birthday, a special promotion of Waterstones’ 'classic author of the month’ (Hemingway) and another of its 'translated author of the month’ (Jorge Luis Borges). I had expected to see lots of bestseller promos, so was pleasantly surprised.
Mary Portas' full piece at The Telegraph
Mary Portas' full piece at The Telegraph
