Word: rossing
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...telling that to Andy Ross. The 59-year-old Californian has placed a $3.7 million bet--his house, his entire life savings and hefty loans from the bank and his brother--on conventional wisdom's being wrong. The owner since 1977 of Cody's Books, a Berkeley, Calif., institution that was tear-gassed in the '60s and bombed in 1989 in response to its commitment to sell Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses, Ross has spent the past three years in the red. Rather than follow the Meg Ryan route (in the 1998 movie You've Got Mail, Ryan's character...
...weapon? San Francisco's Union Square district--home to Armani, Bulgari, Cartier and now Cody's. This month Ross has expanded across the bay from Berkeley into a two-story, 22,000-sq.-ft. space next to a Virgin Megastore and opposite an Apple Store. A garish $35,000 yellow sign outside can be seen all the way from Macy's--crucial, Ross says, to luring the shopaholics who frequent the district into the store (and away from the nearby Borders...
...take the risk? Efforts to shrink Cody's two Berkeley locations into profitability had failed, so Ross decided that to make money, one must spend money. Together with an accountant friend, Ross projected that sales from a San Francisco store would make the business profitable. "Even if we're off by 20%," Ross says, "we still break even and we pay back the loan." That loan wasn't easy to come by. Ross says he was rejected by six banks before an independent lender, Summit Bank in Oakland, agreed to put up $1.9 million. "I had to get help from...
Statistics from the American Booksellers Association bolster his--and Ross's --argument that there is still room for small independents among Barnes & Noble, Borders, Amazon and even Wal-Mart and Costco. The group's membership is down from 4,700 a decade ago but has remained stable at 2,000 for the past three years. And while book sales overall have remained static for the past two years, Ipsos BookTrends reports slight growth for independent bookstores--just over 2% since...
...instance, in one memorable scene a “modern” young black man (James R. Hairston ’07) struggles physically and emotionally with his 70’s self (Christian I.C. Strong ’09) over a Diana Ross album. Should we leave our worst experiences of trauma and pain in the past? Does the rage of a history and a culture ever exhaust itself? The play raises these questions pointedly...