Less than 72 hours after my doctoral graduation ceremony, I stood in one of the last locations of the nation's third-largest bookseller. Within weeks, the most contentious election of my lifetime would end in a two-million vote landslide, with the winner of the electoral college becoming the definitive President-elect before the sun rose. But the light was bright in Hastings on that mid-October Monday afternoon in suburban Kansas City, Kansas, where a team of youthful workers cordoned off empty sections of the store, and prepared shelving and racks for liquidation. There was still a variety of products available: outmoded iPods, undesirable video games for a host of platforms, racks of strategy guides for long-forgotten PC games, and only a few hundred or so books left. Many of them were political; many were flash-in-the-pan, ghostwritten autobiographies, no longer useful to the celebrities that wrote them. The selling of their book was no longer useful, either. The empty walls of the store, still ordained by larger-than-life faces, each captivated by the former store's product, loomed with anti-intellectual foreboding. There were plenty of CDs-- Hastings took in used product from customers-- so among the dozens of specific, highly-promoted mainstream titles (Scott Weiland's "Happy" and Triumph The Insult Comic Dog's "Come Poop With Me" are two examples I'll never forget), I found interesting, off-label re-releases, some neat jazz CDs by unknown players, and plenty more. Most were 90% off their labeled price; reflecting that discount and all others, my receipt claimed I "saved over $450.00" by shopping at Hastings.
Why did this bookstore-- diversified into a bookstore, media store, novelty gifts, coffee bar, whatever works-- why did this national chain fail? A few years back, I used this blog to say goodbye to Borders Books and Music, a similar chain that was an integral part of my growing up. I was unfamiliar with Hastings, but as I stood among the empty CD racks and array of empty bookshelves, I felt like I understood the business they had been trying to operate. One blogger discussed Hastings' decision to, within months of what would be their final bankruptcy declaration, increase their selection of graphic novels; whether or not Hastings carried indie, and not just mainstream graphic novels, would have made little difference (that blogger did post an interesting PDF, of Hastings' indebtedness in June, 2016). Hastings became defunct on October 31, 2016.
I want to think people are still reading, as much as they were back when erecting such a supermarket-sized bookstore was not just feasible but profitable. I don't know if looking at one's smartphone screen counts as reading; I don't think that activity asks the same from the brain's wiring as the action of reading a book. I do know that browsing on Amazon or other sites is nothing like the experience of wandering about in a physical space, allowing for the surprising and/or the unexpected to appear before us, and maybe change our lives. Will we, as a culture, find something to fill this now-empty space?
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