‘It’s patently unfair’ ... bookstore owners’ harsh words for Stormont
BOOKSTORE owner John Junk is almost lost for words even though he is surrounded by millions of them.
His shelves are packed with publications he is struggling to pass on to his customers during the lockdown because his wares are deemed ‘non-essential’.
What is frustrating Mr Junk, who is also a lawyer and who has been running his tiny Belfast Books shop on York Road for six years, is that while he has been forced to close, he has also been banned from operating a ‘click and collect’ service like he did in the first shutdown.
Yet just up the road people can buy the same books in supermarkets, and some newsagents are also selling books.
The anomaly is an ‘absurdity’ according to TUV MLA Jim Allister, and it has had a huge impact on what he calls the life and soul of the High Streets — bookshops across Northern Ireland which were already trying to compete with Amazon pre-pandemic.
The irony has been that during lockdown, when people have had more time on their hands to read, they have had to explore new ways of finding the books they wanted, causing a surge in sales via the internet.
But smaller independent bookshops are fighting back.
Mr Junk who has gained a reputation for stocking books about the Troubles — from both sides’ perspectives — said the absence of click and collect has been a ‘devastating’ blow yet the financial support from the government has been the same as the last lockdown tranches.
“It’s been patently unfair,” he said. “We are not just a bookshop, we are at the heart of a community which is an area of massive disadvantage. We are also working with the schools and we supply the library at Hydebank prisons. But we can’t balance the books.
“And remember we’re taking on Amazon and often our prices are lower than theirs. So here we are, a huxter of a bookshop on the York Road competing directly with Jeff Bezos (the founder of Amazon) and we are paying
Facebook hundreds of pounds a month to run ads online. Yet at the same time as we are closed, you can go to the nearby Tesco or Asda to buy the books that we have behind our shutters.”
Across the city in south Belfast David Torrens opened his No Alibis book store on Botanic Avenue 23 years ago. He concurred that the removal of the click and collect option from bookshops had been hard to take.
He said: “We know 100 per cent that you have to be responsible but there’s a strangeness to it all when I am driving home and see 50 people queuing outside a chip shop and I can’t understand the rationale that I can’t let one person come very carefully to my door and pass them a book.
“And we’re all aware that many people don’t socially distance in supermarkets but we would make sure that limited numbers in our shop would not endanger members of staff or anyone else.”
Mr Torrens said he was grateful for the support from the government and local bodies which meant ‘we are hopefully going to be okay’.