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Costco plans to stop selling regular books, mainly because of the labor required, four publishing executives said, asking not to be named. The New York Times.
Warehouse giant Costco will stop routinely stocking books starting in January, instead selling books for the holiday season from September through December and possibly sporadically at other times of the year, company executives said.
Costco did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for comment, made outside normal US business hours.
Executives told The Times that the decision was largely due to a lack of manpower: Inventory management is labor-intensive because workers must sort books by hand, rather than placing them on pallets and replacing them frequently, they said.
The Times reported that Costco has already stopped selling the books in some locations, including Alaska and Hawaii.
Reddit user Many have lamented the decision, with many arguing that Costco should at least continue selling children’s books.
“Stopping selling children’s books is like stopping hot dogs at a food court,” one Reddit user commented.
Book sales at non-bookstores like Costco are largely impulse buys, when shoppers go to a local warehouse to stock up on groceries and then secretly deposit any books that catch their eye into their own accounts. As the Times noted, not all of these sales are transferred to other retailers.
According to the market research firm, U.S. print book sales are expected to fall 3% year-over-year in 2023, with children’s books seeing the biggest decline. CircanaThat included declines in sales of fantasy, magic, humor and non-fiction for children, but sales of adult fiction grew, led by fantasy, romance, coming-of-age and historical novels, Circana said.
Booktok is credited with boosting sales of print books in the age of the Kindle and other e-readers. Publisher Bloomsbury reported record sales in the year to Feb. 29, driven in large part by fantasy author Sarah J. Maas, whose “A Court of Thorns and Roses” series has been a Booktok favorite.