It is a difficult time for any business, particularly local independent outlets, such as The Children’s Book Shop in Hereford.
In an emotional post on Facebook, the owners of The Children’s Bookshop in Hereford admitted that things need to change in order for them to be able to continue to trade from their shop in Maylord Orchards.
A post on Facebook said:
“This is a very difficult post for us to write, and we have tried everything we can not to have to write it.
“But this is a last ditch attempt to try and drum up some trade in the shop. Because the reality is as it stands the business is no longer viable in its current state.
“We wrote a post in April asking your opinions on the future of “The Children’s Bookshelf” and how you would like to see the business moving forward.
“Since then we have been busy building a website which should be live soon. This is something we want to run along side the shop. As we absolutely love the shop and love being in town. And given the choice this is where we want to stay.
“But if more people don’t start coming in a supporting within the next couple of weeks we’ll just have no choice but to hand our notice in and close our physical shop and run the business online and run events.
“This would be so sad, we would lose that daily face to face interaction with our customers. We wouldn’t be able to help and advise in the same way. The business will lose that personal touch. It’s just not the same as being able to pop in and ask a question.
“Over the years we have helped so many children and adults along the way with their reading journeys and we feel immensely proud and privileged to have been part of that.
“We have come to know many of you as friends, and have enjoyed this journey as bookshop owners with you, we really want to carry on doing this, but if the shop moves online it just won’t be possible to do it in the same way.
“We know and appreciate that the times we are in are difficult, but when you are buying a book if you could consider buying from us rather than buying online it would really help so much.
“And schools…we used to supply lots of schools with books Pre-Covid, and now we hardly get asked by any schools to supply books. We can guarantee you that we are almost always cheaper than you can buy elsewhere, if we’re not then we’ll let you know. We can supply large quantities. But if you don’t ask you’ll never know.
“If you are not buying at the moment but you see a post of ours, please share it, this really helps others to see our posts. We would really appreciate it.
“School pop ups, our bookings for Pop Ups this year are way down. We’re not sure why.
“We know the cost of living is biting hard, but we do sell the books for just £2 each in schools. We are pretty confident that there is nobody in the UK who sells them cheaper in schools. We really should put the price up, but we keep it this low because each time we do a Pop Up we want as many children as possible to be able to take a book home.
“We’re not sure what else we can say, we’re not sure if this post will make any difference. But we feel it’s only right as you are our followers and customers to let you know where we are at.
“And hope that maybe we may have time to turn things around.
“Thank you for taking the time to read this post.”
