An Update From Emily Powell Wednesday, August 26 Hello Powell’s Community, Happy almost Independent Bookstore Day to you! We hope this letter finds you with plenty of good reading material at hand, and the perfect end-of-summer moments to dedicate to your book of choice. Amongst us book lovers, there’s almost a special code when you meet another reader — we talk about our favorite bookstores. This year’s celebration of Independent Bookstore Day on August 29 feels especially weighty, as a result, as so many independent booksellers around the country fight for their survival and wonder what their future may hold. No one goes into the book business expecting an easy path, and each year typically brings its share of surprises and challenges. This year, of course, is like none other in memory. We are all climbing the mountain ahead of us, but the outcome is uncertain. At Powell’s, we have decided to mark this year’s Independent Bookstore Day by announcing that we will no longer sell our books on Amazon’s marketplace. For too long, we have watched the detrimental impact of Amazon’s business on our communities and the independent bookselling world. We understand that in many communities, Amazon — and big box retail chains — have become the only option. And yet when it comes to our local community and the community of independent bookstores around the U.S., we must take a stand. The vitality of our neighbors and neighborhoods depends on the ability of local businesses to thrive. We will not participate in undermining that vitality. We hope you will join us in celebrating this year’s Independent Bookstore Day by buying books at your favorite independent bookstore. Emily

An Update from Emily Powell Announcing the 8/21 Reopening of the Green and Blue Rooms at Powell's City of Books 12 p.m. – 6.pm., Wednesday – Sunday Tuesday, August 18 Dear Powell’s friends, Happy August to you. We hope this message finds you safe and healthy, and enjoying time for summer reading. Thank you for coming out to find your summer reading at our recently reopened Cedar Hills store. Seeing you and the enthusiasm we all share for books and reading has been a true joy for our book-loving hearts. We are delighted to announce that we are going to try a similar experiment with a limited opening of the Green and Blue rooms of our downtown store. We will have the same hours as our Cedar Hills store — Wednesday through Sunday, 12-6 p.m. For now we are just looking forward to a momentary return to our love of in-person bookselling. The challenge of surviving a pandemic as a local, independent, brick-and-mortar retailer in 2020 is no small task. We plan to do so by relying on our unwavering commitment to books and reading. Thank you for helping us get there, for shopping independent, and for your patience as we work to find our way. We hope to see you in our limited stacks very soon. Emily

Powell's at Cedar Hills Crossing is now open with limited hours 12 p.m. – 6.pm., Wednesday – Sunday Powell’s Books CEO Emily Powell explained the rationale behind the reopening: "We believe we can open the store while keeping employees and customers safe. We also believe our Cedar Hills store has the best chance of covering its expenses, and meeting the critical goal of bringing in additional revenue to support Powell’s operations." Through the careful opening of one location, Powell’s is excited to welcome back book lovers while keeping safety as the top priority. Learn more about our Cedar Hills Crossing reopening.

An Update From Emily Powell Thursday, July 16 Dear Powell's community, I hope this message finds you healthy and finding your way through these difficult times. I fear neither is likely true for many of us. We are in a grueling time, and each day is often a new challenge. We all send our wishes for peace, safety, and well-being to our Powell’s community around the world. I want to update you on the state of the business here at Powell’s. In a nutshell, we continue to take everything one day at a time. We received a loan via the PPP legislation in early May and we have applied those funds exclusively to payroll, payroll-related expenses such as healthcare, rent for our smaller stores only (Beaverton, Hawthorne, and our Home & Garden stores), and utilities. We continue to not pay rent for the vast majority of our spaces. Recent changes to the PPP Act have allowed us to stretch our loan out over a greater period of time and utilize the entirety of the loan on the critical costs I mentioned. We are grateful for the support of this legislation — without it, Powell’s would already look dramatically different. We know that when we have exhausted our loan, we will have to face painful choices. Our stores remain closed. We want desperately to reopen. Keeping them shuttered feels counter to our instincts as booksellers. Unfortunately, safety — for our employees and our greater community — remains a grave concern. Beyond the not insignificant question of safety, however, lies the financial risk to Powell’s future created by reopening too soon. Reopening our stores is no simple matter. Doing so would require great expense — returning staff to work, bringing in additional inventory, procuring safety equipment, redesigning store operations — well in advance of opening our doors. And we hear from our friends and peers in the book and independent retail industries that in-person shopping remains nearly nonexistent. We cannot take on additional expenses in this dire time without the guarantee of sales that will allow us to pay for those expenses. And so, we find ourselves in the difficult position of having to wait for brick-and-mortar shopping to return, or for some other stroke of luck that might allow us to reopen. In the meantime, we remain grateful for your online orders. After an initial burst of support in mid-March after we closed our stores, sales have continued to decline, but we are doing everything we can to reverse that trend and to find ways to keep our operations going. I continue to have faith in everyone on our team and our ability to rise to new challenges, and in all of you who believe in us and support us. Thank you for your ongoing kindness and loyalty. Like many businesses, we have also spent the past several months engaged in deep internal introspection within our management team regarding our previous work, or lack thereof, in the fight for racial justice in this country. While we have engaged in this fight over the years, it was never ever nearly enough. We should have done more, and we should have done better. We allowed ourselves to become distracted by making our way through the difficult landscape of independent bookselling. That will no longer be the case. I have written to everyone at Powell’s many times on this matter over the last weeks, have welcomed and engaged in conversations with staff, and they will continue to hear from me as our work evolves. We have chosen to focus our efforts in four areas: our community partnerships, internal education opportunities, the evolution of our daily work, and hiring. For example, we have begun several conversations with current and possibly future local partners, to educate ourselves about ways in which Powell’s can support the nuanced and intersectional work of creating positive change in our highly segregated business community. We are exploring the many possibilities for using our voice to further the fight for justice without causing additional harm or simply performing for an audience. We are unpacking the many components of our hiring process, examining our choices, and looking for new ways forward. We are working to understand our internal way of being, and where we need to create change. As we hope to enter our second 50-year stretch of Powell’s life, we commit to the work of racial justice in our community. We are a bookstore, in part, because we believe that knowledge leads to truth, and truth leads to justice. Nothing I have described above will be easy. I honestly don’t know how we will get to the end of this stretch of road ahead of us. Every day the mountain we’re climbing seems to get steeper, and whenever we reach the top of one incline, we find a far more daunting pass ahead. I feel honored, regardless, to do this work every day with my esteemed peers and coworkers here at Powell’s (as much as we would also be delighted to have the existential crisis of a global pandemic magically disappear). And I know that I speak for all of us when I say we feel tremendous gratitude for the faith and support you place in us. Thank you for staying with us, thank you for buying your books from us, thank you for your love of reading and writing, and thank you for all of the kindness you have shared with us over the past weeks and months. We hope to keep hearing from you, we hope to keep sending you books, and we hope to see you back in the stacks one day soon. Emily

An Update From Emily Powell Tuesday, May 19 Dear Powell's community, First, thank you from the bottom of our book-loving hearts for your support over these past weeks. Your orders, your kind words of support, and your patience have all made this challenging time a little easier. Thank you. We are excited to share the news that we are nearly ready to launch store pickup of local orders at our flagship store, and we hope to roll it out to our other stores soon. Stay tuned for our official announcement. We can’t tell you how delighted we are to get books into readers’ hands more quickly. The question on all of our minds these days is: When will we open our stores again? The unfortunate and only answer we have arrived at is: We don’t know. Most importantly, we want to do everything we can to keep our Powell’s community, and our broader community, safe. Our aisles are meant for browsing, lingering, sharing with friends and family and strangers alike. And our books are meant to be pulled from their shelves, opened, examined, considered, replaced. All of these experiences are hard to imagine in our current reality. And while we know that many of our loyal customers are eager to be back, we cannot compromise on safety. Like so many other Portland businesses, we struggle to see a business model where we can enact the social distancing and safety measures we feel are necessary while sustaining the work of our operations. We are working hard to find solutions, but we do not want to rush the process and anticipate that it will take quite some time. Finally, we know that Portlanders and Oregonians must also be ready to return to their local stores. As a nearly 50-year-old bookstore, we have to be cautious and open only when we believe enough of our customers will meet us back in our aisles on a regular basis. So for the time being, we wait. We hope you will continue to wait with us and shop with us online at Powells.com. We need your support and love more than ever. We will find our way through these stormy seas together, and with the help of a good book (or two) by our sides. All of our best wishes, Emily

An Update From Emily Powell Friday, March 27 Dear Powell's community, Thank you, from the bottom of our hearts, for your incredible and unwavering support. Your kind words, messages of encouragement, ideas for perseverance, and orders for books have taken our breath away. Thanks to your orders on Powells.com, we now have over 100 folks working at Powell’s again – all full time with benefits. Most importantly, we’re working hard to keep everyone safe and healthy. Doing that work means we have to move a little slower as a company than usual. Please bear with us as we take all the necessary precautions to keep everyone healthy, and get your books headed your way. We’ve made an internal commitment to only pay for expenses that keep folks employed, and the lights on, for the time being. We can’t do that forever – we love our vendors and business partners, and want to support them as well. Right now, however, our focus is on keeping Powell’s moving, keeping our community healthy, taking care of our wonderful customers, and having as many folks working with health insurance as our sales can support. We don’t know what the future holds – none of us does. We’re going to keep the doors to Powells.com open as long as we can, and we will open the doors to all of our stores as soon as it is safe to do so. In the meantime, we are eternally grateful for your support. We love nothing more than connecting readers and writers, and sending books out the door to their new homes. Your orders allow us to keep working and keep our team of incredible booksellers employed. If you’d like to help in other ways, we’d love for you to consider donations to the Oregon Community Foundation COVID-19 Fund, to BINC (the Book Industry Charitable Foundation helps booksellers experiencing financial distress), or to the ILWU Local 5. Thank you, again, for all of the love. Emily