Book Organization

[superthriftcity]

Hi, I'll be opening a thrift store in South Floida in the next few months and I have a few questions about books.

1. How do we best organize our books?

2. Which types of books sell and which should we get rid of?

[mark]

Hi, I'll be opening a thrift store in South Floida in the next few months and I have a few questions about books.

I'm a dealer who shops at thrift stores so any of my recommendations are from the customers perspective.

1. How do we best organize our books?

It depends on how many you have.  Unless it is in the thousands I wouldn't bother sorting them at all.

2. Which types of books sell and which should we get rid of?

Get rid of all textbooks, Readers' Digest condensed books, magazines.  Pretty much anything that is updated annually (they will usually have a year in the title).

Computer books are almost always out of date by the time people are willing to give them up.    The only reliable exception is the O'Reily animal cover books.

Now for some unsolicited advice.

Dealers can be your friends.  The plural there is important.  Many Thrifts will try to save some labor by selling all to one dealer out the back door.   This is a mistake.  Very few will give you full wholesale for them and other dealers will not even show up once it is known.

Your best strategy is to keep the stock moving.  What you should do is have a three tiered pricing structure where books spend one week on the top tier.  They then are moved to the second tier where they stay until they need to move to the third tier in order to make room for books coming in from above.

Tier one pricing should be standard used book wholesale, which is 1/8 to 1/6 of cover price.  Or, to make things easy $3.00-$4.00 for hard cover, $1.50-$2.50 for trade sized paperbacks, $1.00 for mass market (pocket sized) paperbacks.

Tier two should be priced at half the tier one price.

Tier three is also known as a dumpster.

Please don't mar the books.  The easiest way is to just use the easy pricing structure above.  If you must mark them stickers are tolerable (but some of the stickers I've run into use glue that would be good for space shuttle tiles) but a graphite stamp is best.

Are you going to miss out on some collectible books?  Yes.  But these are 1 in multiple thousands.  I can't count the number of times I've seen books worth nothing to $5.00 marked for 20 to 30 times what they were worth.  I've seen Harry Potters with torn jackets and board edges worn all the way to the cardboard prided at $10.00.   Even with the internet you need a lot of experience to know what the valuable books are.  You could easily waste more time in labor looking up every book than you make finding the collectible ones.  

Hope this helps.

[tmitchel]

We break our books down in to kids, adult paper back, adult hard back, then we do reference books, cookbooks (good seller), self-help, computer and school books (which we sell lots of they are high price at the local college) we seperate our autobiographies and our spiritual books (we are a religious organization.  We have a basic price of .25 for paper backs, .50 for hardbacks, magazines are .10 we of course price higher on known authors and better books.  You just learn - we sell an @ of $200 in books a day - we also take the battered but still readable and put them in a crate that sells 6 for $1.00 which we stock an average of 3 times a day.

[Good Buddy]

I'd love for somebody to post a breakdown of the categories that books should be organized into..

[TripleRThrift]

We sell our paper backs for 50 Cents for Paper Backs, 1.00 for hard backs and 25 cents for magazines or mini periodicals or instructional booklets ( like crochet books ) People seem to like the prices, they comment often about other stores charging too much. It i simple and easy to remember. Also, since we are privately owned and it is just myself and my husband if someone comes up to us with an armload, we'll give them a price break. They like that too.

[jasmine]

Hi there,
I just joined this forum and I'm excited to talk thrift with other thrift workers and shoppers!  I manage a thrift store in Boston for a local non-profit.  We have a very large book section that we organize into the following categories:fiction is semi-alphabetized by author, non-fiction sections include cookbooks, spiritual/religious, memior/biography, history/social issues, GBLT, self-help, music, travel, childrens and a few shelves of general non-fiction to catch whatever doesn't fall into those categories.   We do not take periodicals or encyclopedias because they are quickly outdated and do not sell well.  We donate all textbooks to a prison book program.

Since we are in an urban area surrounded by universities, we get LOTS of great books.  We charge $2 for soft covers and $3 for hard covers.  Our prices are more expensive than some suburban thrifts, but in line with other city thrifts and much cheaper than the local used bookstores.  We often do half off sales, but actually limit sales to 20 books per person to discourage dealers.  Our regular customers appreciate that we don't cater to dealers.