Marketing gimmick helps Popular Bookmall shed its stock
Print Edition
THE owners of a bookstore on Fuzhou Road have come up with a not-so-novel way of making money from their old stock — selling it off at a small discount.
Under normal circumstances the venture might not be financially viable, but the fact that Popular Bookmall relies on the honesty of its customers rather than a shop assistant to collect payments for the aging tomes means it is laughing, or at least smirking, all the way to the bank.
The firm launched the sell-off scheme in Shanghai after a similar effort in its hometown of Nanjing, capital of east China’s Jiangsu Province, proved a success earlier in the year.
Prior to coming up with the idea, the company said it would throw the books away or donate them to charities. Now, it is bolstering its profits instead, though not by much.
According to Yuan Feng, the manager of the Shanghai outlet, since the “honesty bookstore” concept was introduced a couple of months ago, the company has managed to divest itself of between 600 and 800 books, and netted about 3,000 yuan (US$470).
“That’s only about 10 percent less than if we’d sold the books through the normal channels,” he said.
While there are undoubtedly small bargains to be had, literature lovers are unlikely to find any titles from the latest bestseller lists.
“It’s not a bad idea, but it would be better if they had some more recently published books,” an office worker surnamed Huang told Shanghai Daily yesterday.
“The choice is limited, but I found some books published in the 1980s, which are actually quite hard to find,” said a shopper surnamed Li after dropping 15 yuan into the “honesty box” for his three titles.
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