When people ask me what I did for a living before I started working for Strong Towns, sometimes I tell them that I had a job where, on any given day, I might talk to a neighbor about their rent getting raised, a tourist about how hard it was to find a place to buy Asprin within walking distance of their hotel, and a national journalist about the neighborhood segregation line that ran just a few blocks from my workplace. Other times, I tell them only that I worked a job that gave me the best training in many aspects of community development and social work that I could have gotten outside of a master’s program. Or I might say that I probably met a more diverse cross-section of my home city of St. Louis in my daily work than most local politicians do—and in some ways, I got to know many of these people better than many of their leaders ever could.

Sometimes, I mention that this workplace was an independent bookstore. Sometimes I don’t.

Recently, Commonwealth Magazine ran an article speculating on the economic role that independent bookstores play in our downtowns, particularly in small and mid-sized city neighborhoods. The author, Amy Dain, is a public policy researcher who was “studying zoning for multi-family housing in 100 cities and towns in Greater Boston” when she noticed a strange phenomenon: that “many of [the] region’s little downtowns—and not just those in the most affluent communities—boast independent bookstores, even in this age of online shopping.” As a researcher, Dain could only offer confident speculation based on these observations, but as someone who had spent an enormous amount of time spending cities, it certainly seemed to her that these stores were functioning as economic mainstays in their communities, riding out the rise and fall of the chain bookstore and the shopping malls in which many cities placed their faith (not to mention their tax incentives) over the course of the last generation. Anecdotal or not, what she observed was compelling. Dain said, “I am happy to find that, for the moment, independent bookstores are anchoring our charming, antique village centers and other places, too.”

Unlike Dain, I’m not a researcher. But what I am is a former bookseller who now spends my days talking about what it takes to make our communities financially stronger. As someone who’s been a student of cities for years—as well as someone who’s spent a thirteen hour day managing a signing line for Chuck Palahniuk—the longer I study, the more I believe that independent bookstores have a lot to teach us. They are a case study in the power of small, incrementally-built retail to anchor our local economies and social communities. And in my years since stepping out from behind the counter, I’ve come to believe something even more radical: if we want our places to be strong, third places like independent bookstores are exactly the kind of investment that our towns should be making. And we should be making them way more often.

The Resilience and Staying Power of a Local Bookstore

First, to address those of you who think I’m crazy: I know how nuts it sounds to say that a corner bookshop will make your city richer. If the way you measure community wealth is on volume of sales alone, the Walmarts of the world will beat the Women and Children Firsts of the world every time. I have sat in bookstore staff meetings worrying over spreadsheets, watching the 40-46% profit margins on $27 hardcovers get eaten up by rent, salary, utilities, and kibble for the adorable but not particularly hard-working bookstore cat. Booksellers are in one of the only industries on earth that can’t adjust prices upward in the face of consumer demand: publishers set the prices, so that Michelle Obama memoir will cost you the same amount in San Francisco or Skokie, whether or not it’s backordered at the printer and the customer would gladly pay a premium to have it today. Between that lack of market plasticity, an inability to leverage other profit streams to offer much in the way of discounts on other items (sidelines like greeting cards and literary-themed socks are cute, but they’re not often a huge part of the business model,) and the intentional inefficiency of employing human beings to dust shelves and offer better recommendations than an algorithm, most bookstores can’t expect to do better than a 5% margin, even in an excellent year. That’s not exactly the kind of money that draws out the venture capitalists.

But when you shift the conversation to economic resilience—a business’s power to endure, to gradually grow, and to continue creating long-term prosperity for a region, across generations—indies win every time. The last bookstore I worked for, Left Bank Books in St. Louis, will be celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2019, and I don’t think it’s coincidental that both their original location in the Delmar Loop neighborhood of St. Louis and their current long-time home in the Central West End have grown to be among the city’s most vibrant retail neighborhoods.

So why have small stores like Left Bank outlasted larger retailers that often seem like more of a sure bet to the municipalities, despite the advantages of hefty tax breaks and multiple locations? And why do indies, so often, seem to inspire adjacent development that make neighborhoods richer, both in culture and in terms of the proverbial bottom line?

As a Strong Towns advocate, I can’t help but look back on my years as a bookseller through the lens of an economic development approach that is incremental, ultra community-responsive, and constantly making small bets.