My friend Nina Barrett, owner of Evanston's Bookends and Beginnings, has an excellent column in the Chicago Tribune, explaining the current difficulties of small businesses, especially bookstores. Here is the gist:
We, the Shopkeepers Who Have Survived So Far, are trying not to panic. Pluckily, we are trying to make ourselves over for the new reality. The frame shop next door to me will do a customized Zoom consultation to help you finally hang that artwork that’s been leaning up against a closet wall for years while you were too busy living your old normal life.
As for us, like indie bookstores all across the country, we are frantically reinventing ourselves as the very thing we never wanted to be: an online bookstore.
Our previous deadly virus escaped from a Seattle laboratory 25 years ago, racing first through the book-selling world, weakening its financial mechanisms and threatening its survival. Known as Amazon.com, it spread across the country, replicating ferociously in tax-exempted warehouses, eating away the foundations of bricks-and-mortar retail on Main Streets, and in shopping malls everywhere in the U.S. and abroad.
You can read the entire essay here.
More importantly, I strongly encourage you to order books from Bookends and Beginnings here. In times of social distancing, books are more important than ever. Please buy them from a local, independent bookstore, even if it takes a little longer and costs slightly more.