Word: kroch
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...Survival. Americans now buy books from some 165,000 retail outlets, ranging from Chicago's giant Kroch's & Brentano's, which lists 150,000 titles, to the corner drugstores with their paperback racks. Of these outlets, 2,062 are traditional bookshops that sell both hardbacks and paperbacks, 352 are quality paperback stores (which do an $18 million-a-year business) and 882 are discount houses, department stores and supermarkets ($52 million annually). In addition, some 130 book clubs run up sales of $145 million a year, a trifling $3,000,000 below the general booksellers. Total...
...occurring in the suburbs; of 149 stores opened last year, 60% were in the suburbs. "The real success stories," says Scribner's Kropotkin, "are found in the shopping centers, where stores are having to double their size overnight to accommodate the demand." Doubleday, Brentano's, and Kroch's have located most of their recent additions in suburban areas. Booksellers estimate that 40% of the population lives outside the range of present bookstores, feel that this is the area of unlimited expansion...
Most book-business insiders blame the shop owner himself for his plight. His chief drawback: no business sense. Among those who think so is Chicago's Carl Kroch, president of the largest independent bookstore in the U.S. Says Bookseller Kroch, who has just spent $500,000 on refurbishing his own flourishing Chicago store on Wabash Avenue: "Too many people-little old ladies-think bookselling is a nice thing, so they start off with too little capital and a tiny stock...
...Peck. Kroch, whose famous father Adolph retired in 1952 after 45 years as a successful independent book dealer, is making no such mistake. The store has a stock of 600,000 volumes. The extras are there, from poker chips to toy Liberace pianos, but the book's the thing. In the store's 40,000 sq. ft., modern design and display are geared to catch the customer's attention. No sentimentalist, young Kroch has introduced supermarket methods in a special self-service department for paperbacks and reprints, provides gaily colored baskets to encourage customers to buy them...
Bookmen all over the U.S. hope that Chicago's big Kroch store will show how bookselling can be kept alive and profitable. Papa Kroch, who got started in a store the size of a closet and once said that "a bookseller without a soul is but a ribbon clerk," is convinced that son Carl has the right idea: "It is a fairy tale that books will disappear. Books will remain and books will be read...