How the Strand Lost Its Workers
Trouble at the city’s most iconic bookstore
When robyn smith started working as a bookseller at the Strand in 2019, she felt as though she’d found her people. She loved having coworkers who were almost too passionate about books. She loved how, when she later joined the events team, she got to pose questions to famous authors, like what animal they would ride into battle. (André Aciman opted for a chameleon.)
“I saw the Strand as a place of comfort within the city,” Smith says. “Being a part of that team is really special. I felt special coming to work every day.”
The Strand, with its flagship on Broadway at East 12th Street, is the city’s most iconic bookstore. For a certain kind of New Yorker, it’s an equally iconic place to work—one where job applicants have to take a literature quiz that involves matching book titles with their corresponding authors’ names to prove their chops. Luc Sante worked there. Patti Smith did too, for a hot minute. (She found it unfriendly.) Strand employees are expected to have opinions. One former manager, Theresa Buchheister, recounted what happened when a friend of hers asked a staffer for help finding a copy of John Updike’s collected Rabbit novels. The staffer groaned. “You don’t like Updike?” the customer asked. “I don’t like … collections,” the staffer replied. Pretentious, sure, sometimes; but these are people who take pride in what they read and recommend. The job comes with its own set of problems, such as working long hours in a creaky, quirky old building rife with creakyquirky-old-building problems and the usual conflicts between employees and the boss. Still, employees say the actual work of bookselling and the community around the store has mostly outweighed the bad. That precarious balance came undone last year as the pandemic ravaged the retail industry. When the state closed all nonessential businesses in late March 2020, a week after the Strand had shuttered its doors as a precaution, Smith and 187 of her colleagues were laid off. The store remained in hibernation until the end of June, when management brought back a skeleton crew. Since then, the Strand and its unionized workers have been locked in a struggle over money, priorities, and safety. Strand employees say they recognize bookstores are struggling right now, but many still don’t think the Strand’s owner, Nancy Bass Wyden, is taking their well-being into account. They have accused her of flouting
covid safety precautions and of taking a PPP loan meant to help people keep their jobs but not rehiring enough of them or explaining where the money went.
The Strand disputes many of its employees’ claims. A spokesperson says the store has taken all the necessary precautions for covid safety and been responsive to employee feedback. It would “literally be impossible” to rehire everyone, the spokesperson says. “The limited sales we make now plus the PPP loan are the only things keeping our staff paid. Until instore sales bounce back, this is the best we can do.” Despite a recent arbitration meeting and months of conversations, nothing has been resolved. At the beginning of this month, the union organized a demonstration outside the Broadway store’s entrance; employees marched and hoisted signs. On Instagram, union members circulated a post urging customers to call the Strand and “tell Nancy Bass Wyden that you will not support union busting.” Will Bobrowski, a union shop steward who has worked at the Strand for 18 years, says the arbitration is a first for him; in the past, he says, “we would argue, and somebody would be unhappy coming out of it … but we would settle our shit.”
With its four retail floors and vaunted “18 miles of books,” the Strand is a collector’s paradise, a nerd’s sanctuary. The past year, though, has laid bare just how perilous a job you like, or even love, can be when you’re working without the most basic of safety nets. This fragility is something Strand employees have always been aware of—they work in retail, after all. Before, however, the job had just enough perks, just enough meaning, to make it worth the struggle. Working at the Strand was like a microcosm of living in New York, a city that absolutely does not need you. Without the good, the bad takes on new weight.
nancy bass wyden represents the third generation of her family to run the Strand, which her grandfather Benjamin Bass founded in 1927 in a pocket of Manhattan then known as Book Row, which stretched along Fourth Avenue between 8th and 14th Streets. Bass was known to sleep on a cot in the store during the early, lean years. His son, Fred, got his start in the family business young, joining his father at age 13. Fred bought the Strand’s current Broadway building for $8.2 million in 1996. The store has historically rented various floors to other tenants as a revenue stream; otherwise, it stays afloat by buying and selling new and used books, hosting events, and, of course, hawking its branded tote bags—a product much maligned by the store’s bookish staff. The building was landmarked in 2019 against Bass Wyden’s wishes; she describes the designation as a “bureaucratic straitjacket.”
Clashes between employees and the
store’s management aren’t a uniquely 2020 problem. Stories of struggles between the Basses and their staff have circulated for years. The union—which represents all employees, save for managers, part-timers, and workers on probation—was founded in the 1970s and has been active ever since. There was even a blog called I Hate the Strand in the midaughts, apparently maintained by a disgruntled employee. Bobrowski remembers the late Fred Bass as equally “generous” and “a pain in the ass at the bargaining table.” Still, employees mostly respected him for his deep, borderline obsessive love of books and of his business. “He knew his people,” Bobrowski says. “If you’d been there for a year, he knew your name. He knew what you did.”
By contrast, there’s a story current and former Strand employees like to tell about Bass Wyden, one I heard versions of over and over again (and which the Strand
spokesperson denies): 20-odd years ago, a hotshot actor was walking around the Strand. Bass Wyden, who was then a coowner with her father, clocked him as someone and started asking her employees if they could identify him. “Holden Caulfield,” a staff member with a dry sense of humor told her. Bass Wyden then turned around and told everyone she could find that the one and only Holden Caulfield was shopping in her store.
It’s not clear if any of this happened (although it’s safe to say a Salinger character has never shown up at the Strand), yet the anecdote distills the way many employees feel about Bass Wyden: She’s not one of them. It likely wouldn’t matter if her apparent lack of bibliophilia weren’t coupled with her being, as one former employee describes it, “deeply out of touch.”
Past and current workers recall Bass Wyden as the kind of boss who would arbitrarily move books and merchandise from
table to table, making it difficult to locate items in the Strand’s computer system and actually sell them—or who would come to check on the Strand’s booth at an outdoor holiday market in Bryant Park but leave after ten minutes, announcing she was cold. (Also cold: the employee working in the booth for hours.) The Strand spokesperson pushes back against these claims, saying the booths were heated and disputing that there was anything unusual about the way Bass Wyden has organized the merchandise.
And then there was the thing with the sprinklers. In 2013, the shop was reported to be weaponizing its sprinkler system to forcibly disperse people sleeping outside the store by dousing them with cold water. A manager at the time said they were just trying to clean the sidewalks; Bass Wyden, then a co-owner of the store, said only that she was “not sure” why the sprinklers were being used. Whether the strategy was hers or not, it has become a part of her reputation among employees.
The other side of this, of course, is that Bass Wyden has thus far been able to do the near impossible: She has kept a relatively large, independent, unionized bookstore alive in the age of Amazon. Part of that could be a result of the Strand’s enduring mythos. It’s the kind of place that lures employees who will work their damnedest to make sure it remains open, some of whom feel the store succeeds despite its owner. But in the end, it is still Bass Wyden’s business, about which she says it’s “honestly a miracle we’re still operating” during the pandemic. Last spring, a few weeks after the mass layoffs, the Strand was approved for between $1 million and $2 million as part of the federal government’s Paycheck Protection Program and reported 212 employees (a 2019 figure) on its loan application. This loan would come to frustrate some recently laid-off Strand employees—not because the company collected PPP money, which Bobrowski notes was a good thing, but because so few people were rehired when the store reopened. Since then, the store has never employed more than around 100 people, and Bobrowski says staff requests for more clarity about how exactly the loan was used have gone mostly unanswered aside from “vague statements about ‘Well, it’s going to payroll.’” (The Strand says it also went toward rent.) When the Strand opened a smaller location on the Upper West Side in July, laid-off union members protested outside the store, holding signs that read let nancy eat cake!
More frustrating to past and present employees were their boss’s personal stock purchases during this time. Bass Wyden is married to Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, who helped author the Act and cosponsored legislation demanding more transparency from businesses receiving PPP loans. Wyden’s job requires the couple’s investments to be made public, and Strand employees discovered that between April and September 2020, Bass Wyden had personally spent millions of dollars investing in businesses including Google, Apple, Microsoft, and, most notably, Amazon, though she had previously denounced the enticing subsidies the last company received in a January 2019 op-ed. “I have a message for politicians everywhere,” wrote Bass Wyden. “It’s time to stop bending over backwards for Big Tech and time to start listening to local businesses, which have been critical to growing our cities.” Exactly how much she invested in Amazon in 2020 is unclear because U.S. Senate financial disclosures provide dollar ranges, not exact sums, but last year, she made 11 stock purchases totaling between $235,011 and $650,000. (“As a small-business owner trying to maintain operations during difficult times, it was
“Nancy led customers through the back so they wouldn’t be picked up by the occupancy counter.”
necessary for [Bass Wyden] to diversify her investments,” a Strand spokesperson says.)
In October, these tensions rose to the surface. Late that month, Bass Wyden used the Strand’s Twitter account to put out a call for help. “Because of the impact of we cannot survive the huge decline in foottraffic, a near complete loss of tourism, and zero in-store events,” she wrote. She said the Strand’s revenue—which includes that of both the Broadway store and the new uptown location—had dropped 70 percent compared to 2019 and asked Strand lovers to bolster its dwindling coffers: “Shop Early and Shop Local!” Former Strand employees quickly started counter-messaging. “Please help me close down this awful, unethical institution by forgoing any assistance to them whatsoever,” tweeted Joseph McNamara Hefner, who worked at the store in 2015, signing off, “Sincerely, A Former Strand Employee Who Used To Cry In The Bathroom.” Another former employee, Rivka Holler, tweeted a lengthy thread of scenarios she alleged she and her colleagues faced: a roach-filled break room, a rotting rat lodged in a heating pipe, a flood, and an (accidental) manhole explosion. She said employees had to clean up the last two without adequate protective equipment.
This didn’t stop Bass Wyden’s “Save the Strand” message from going viral. The next day, people lined up down the block on East 12th Street so they could shop in-store, spilling out from under the Strand’s bright-red awnings down to Fourth Avenue. Brett Bates, a union shop steward with Bobrowski, says he and other workers struggled to control store occupancy by stopping customers at the door—a covid precaution—while Bass Wyden was hustling them in. “At one point,” he says, “Nancy led customers through the back freight entrance so that they would not be picked up by the occupancy counter.”
Bass Wyden would later tell the Washington Post that on a typical day, the Strand might get 300 online orders. The weekend after she posted the letter, the store got 25,000. The website crashed. Customers spent $170,550 in two days, enough to cover a little more than half of the losses Bass Wyden said the store had posted in September. To help handle the increase, Strand employees scrapped vacations and came in on their off days, she told the New York Times in an optimistic story headlined “The Strand Calls for Help, and Book Lovers Answer.” She never addressed the complaints from former employees. It took weeks to get through all those internet orders, which overwhelmed the now small staff; Bates says some union workers were brought back explicitly to help tackle them.
In the months since then, employees say the situation has not improved. Spirits at the Strand are crushingly low. Most of the staffers who were rehired to handle the holiday rush once again had no jobs after Christmas—a common retail practice, albeit one that feels especially painful now. A year after the layoffs, the bookstore still has only 68 employees, around one-third of the total before the pandemic. “If I could bring back a staff 212 strong I would,” wrote Bass Wyden in a statement. “But as the pandemic rages on we have to be strategic about our staffing levels and resource allocation so we survive in the long run.” By the beginning of the year, rumors had begun to circulate that the store would soon close. Robyn Smith says the Strand’s HR department reached out to her in the fall with an offer to rehire her to work for the holiday season—and a warning that the store might not survive past February. Another staffer says that toward the end of 2020, Bass Wyden mused to them that the store
might not make it to March. (Bass Wyden said she doesn’t remember saying this; the store’s spokesperson says the Strand had communicated to Smith only that its future was unpredictable.)
Meanwhile, many businesses’ PPP loans have dried up. Bookstores across the country have been forced to turn to crowdfunding to stay afloat, and there’s a growing list of ones that didn’t make it. The Strand’s spokesperson says the store’s business is “still down 70 to 80 percent, depending on the month.” The stakes are high: The Strand’s longevity is part of what makes it so important. “There’s a point at which the scale of it, that quantitative difference, becomes a qualitative difference, knowing that you could go in there and probably find something by any poet that you’re looking for,” says Benjamin Friedman, a bookseller who co-owns the independent bookstores Aeon and Topos. Without the Strand, just about your only option around what was once the literary center of New York would be Barnes & Noble.
For the Strand’s employees, the point of speaking out about the bookstore’s management isn’t to run the business into the ground but to try to make the place even just marginally better. “During the ‘Save the Strand’ campaign, I worked the registers. People were genuinely emotional. They would say, ‘I’m buying everything I can. Please tell me you guys aren’t going to close,’” says one employee, Jody, who asked that we not use her real name. “It can be painful to live inside the contradiction of being treated badly by such a beloved place of business.” She says she never tells anybody not to shop at the Strand, “but I don’t have a lot of hope for the future of the store under [Bass Wyden’s] stewardship.”
In February, Jody quit. She doesn’t have another job lined up. A self-described former Strand die-hard, she’d had enough. Enough of feeling she was more worried about her safety than her boss was. Enough of seeing a daily staff schedule with so few names on it that going to the bathroom during work was like a “national emergency.” She told me hers isn’t the only recent departure motivated by longbrewing frustration. Even though she no longer works at the Strand, Jody attended this month’s demonstration in solidarity. There, she says, she saw an unidentified man in a cowboy hat yelling at the staffers on the street: “You’re making it harder for her [Bass Wyden]! You’re making it impossible to run this business!”
“We all just started laughing. We were like, ‘Man, it’s the opposite,’ ” Jody says. “We want people to be able to work there.”