So, Ruminator Books, aka The Hungry Mind, is closing, after having years of financial difficulties. It's depressing, but not terribly surprising. I was in there not too long ago and they'd more than halved their inventory & space. To anyone who'd been there in the past, it was obviously dying. I was saddened.
But what I really want to write about is my take on the inevitable raging at The Soulless Corporatization Of Bookselling We're Looking At You Barnes & Noble that'll be going on for the next month or so.
While, yes, big chains like B&N did play a part, I'd say that Ruminator is more a victim of the Internet Boom of the late 90's. After being paid some amazing sum of money for the "Hungry Mind" name by a now-failed dot-com, rather than reinvest in the current store, the store gave in to Irrational Exuberance and the noble cause of promoting literacy across the Twin Cities and opened their Minneapolis location.
It was a beautiful space, but in a terrible location in the Warehouse District, north of downtown Minneapolis. The only thing it was all that convenient to was Grumpy's Bar. Not surprisingly, when given a choice between several bookstores in Downtown and Uptown (some of which are soulless chains) and a beautiful independent bookstore stuck in a crummy part of the warehouse District, 90% of Minneapolis book-readers are lazy & go for convenience over social activism. As they always say: Location, Location, Location.
So, the huge wad of cash they got (and probably more) got sunk into that money pit and the rest, as they say, is history. It was, as with so many things in the late 90's, a great idea, but a rather unreasonable one.
This wasn't a store being crushed by market pressures from larger companies--it was a store being fatally over-extended by an ambitious plan. This situation seems like it was completely avoidable, in hindsight. And that's what depresses me the most about this whole mess. Ah, well.