An Update From Patrick Bassett, Powell's CEO
Tuesday, April 6, 2021
Dear Powell's community,
Like many businesses, Powell’s has traveled an arduous path since the pandemic forced us to close our stores on March 15, 2020. Later that summer, as safety permitted, we were able to gradually reopen stores with limited hours. This allowed us to honor our labor contract and recall more than 170 employees who were previously laid off due to the economic impact of COVID-19.
I am pleased to share that, now that vaccination rates are increasing, and signs of economic recovery are starting to appear, Powell’s will begin hiring additional employees. These employees are part of our plans to further restore operations at our three retail locations. We are cautiously optimistic that this is another small step towards a wider reopening and, ideally, an eventual recovery from the severe impact the pandemic has had on the company’s financials and retail operations.
Still, in the spirit of transparency, I must acknowledge that the opportunity to bring back additional staff is not as straightforward as we’d hoped. Under the labor contract between Powell’s and ILWU Local 5, seniority and employment rights have expired for laid-off former employees, including any rights under the recall process.
Powell’s has reached out to the Union on two occasions to find solutions that go above and beyond the labor contract, without success. Our most recent proposal would have temporarily extended former employees’ access to the recall process for a period of six months as well as reinstate their previous paid time-off accrual rate, which would be significant to our longer-term former employees. We appreciate the working relationship we have with Local 5 and our joint efforts to creatively find an agreement beyond the contract. Unfortunately, the Union did not accept this offer. This means the original contract language regarding loss of all seniority and employment rights applies, and we will begin to advertise job openings.
Powell’s has adhered to the labor contract at all times and fulfilled our commitments as described in the collective bargaining agreement, including maintaining employee benefits and wage increases during the pandemic without requesting mid-contract relief from the Union. We are proud of this work and our commitment to our employees.
I want to emphasize that any former Powell’s employees whose seniority and employment were lost under the labor contract remain eligible to apply for new positions. Our hope is that many will express interest in these opportunities and secure reemployment with the company. It is also our goal that when former employees are hired for the same or a similar position that they held before, we will return them at their previous wage.
We understand and appreciate the importance of our staff and their role in fostering an environment where people want to visit, shop, and work. The challenges of the past 13 months have strained our Powell’s community – the employees, the business, and the larger Portland community – and that is not lost on us. It is my hope that as Powell’s continues to recover, we can welcome back former employees, customers, readers, and authors to our stores and, in doing so, strengthen relationships with our community.
Sincerely,
Patrick
An Update From Emily Powell
Monday, March 15, 2021
Dear Powell's community,
Happy Spring to you. Here in Portland the flowers are well in bloom, and the sunny days are attempting to outweigh the rainy ones. I feel colder than I did all winter as I attempt to shed my wool layers a little too early. But that's a small price to pay for spring’s arrival.
As we begin to allow ourselves to feel hope for the path ahead, the spring air also reminds us of the very challenging road we have travelled together over the past year. One year ago, on March 15, we closed our stores in the middle of a bustling Sunday. In the midst of what would have been a normal weekend day of book browsing and bookselling, the urgency of a global pandemic arrived at our doorstep. We moved quickly to shutter our business for an indefinite future.
The year since that day has been full of hardship, heartache, stress, fear, gratitude, and also moments of light. We have learned to adapt to constant adaptation. Stasis, predictability, certainty no longer exist. In Portland, grave summer wildfires and dramatic snow and ice storms added to the roller coaster and the heaviness weighing on many of our hearts. And yet. Hearing from so many of you over this past year, receiving your orders, helping your books leave our shelves, welcoming you back to our stores little by little, have brought the lightness of possibility and hope to our work as well. Rising to the challenges we have faced together — all of us here at Powell’s, and together with you — with ingenuity, patience, and fresh perspective each time has brought the reward of survival we could not have counted on.
Bookselling is not always exciting (we joke about having to live by the tyranny of the alphabet), and rarely easy. But it is also a remarkably unique and magical endeavor. As we reflect on the past year at Powell’s, I feel the weight of each moment, each hard decision, each uncertain outcome. I also feel tremendous gratitude: gratitude for each and every person who has travelled this path with us, and gratitude for this very special work we get to do every day. Receiving books into Powell’s every day, books that required many people to commit to a printed page, and sending them back out again to you with the hope that they will leave their mark — that is work worth doing, and work that has buoyed us through this year. We thank you for the opportunity to keep at it, and the opportunity to play a small part in your reading lives.
I hope the road ahead for all of us is easier and easier as the days go by. And I look forward to seeing you back in the stacks, virtual or physical, someday soon.
All of our best wishes to you, our community,
Emily
An Update From Emily Powell
Thursday, December 3, 2020
Dear Powell's community,
Happy December to you! It feels like 2020 has lasted at least a decade. It’s a relief to have made it through 2020 this far, although the weight of the pandemic continues to weigh on all of us and our loved ones.
First, the bad news: It is with a heavy heart that I share the news we have decided to permanently close our Home & Garden store in SE Portland. Powell's Home & Garden store has been an important, and unique, part of our business for many years. Unfortunately it was also an increasingly challenging part of our business as retail continues its evolution. With the onslaught of this year, we simply could not find a way to bring it through 2020 and 2021 and into an unknown future. We are grateful to the customers and employees who made it such a special place for so long, and think with sadness about a Powell’s without Home & Garden. Some of our Home & Garden employees have already moved into jobs elsewhere at Powell’s. We hope to rehire everyone else once the business is able to open more fully again, and we have positions available. Our Hawthorne store remains open seven days a week, 10 a.m.-6 p.m.
Despite this hard decision, we head into December with hope and excitement. We get to do what we love the most and then some. This year is entirely different, and also the same. The carts of books, the shipments arriving daily, and going right back out, the joy of connecting people with books and gifts, and now too all the daily essentials of life in our time of COVID. Like so many businesses we have seen disruptions to our supply chain, delays in shipping, and are all feeling the toll of this heavy year. And yet here we are, delighted to share reading and writing with all of you.
Operating a retail holiday season in a pandemic is interesting to say the least. Safety for our staff, customers, and community is our first and most essential task. We are doing our very best to also make your book shopping time as lovely as possible. That being said, lines, delays, outages, and who knows what else all seem par for the course for 2020. We appreciate your bearing with us and, most importantly, we appreciate your support. 2021 will mark our 50th anniversary. With this particular turning of the calendar, we are more grateful than ever just to be here — the world’s largest, and possibly weirdest, independent bookstore. Thank you.
Happy reading,
Emily
An Update From Emily Powell
Thursday, July 16, 2020
Dear Powell's community,
I hope this message finds you healthy and finding your way through these difficult times. I fear neither is likely true for many of us. We are in a grueling time, and each day is often a new challenge. We all send our wishes for peace, safety, and well-being to our Powell’s community around the world.
I want to update you on the state of the business here at Powell’s. In a nutshell, we continue to take everything one day at a time. We received a loan via the PPP legislation in early May and we have applied those funds exclusively to payroll, payroll-related expenses such as healthcare, rent for our smaller stores only (Beaverton, Hawthorne, and our Home & Garden stores), and utilities. We continue to not pay rent for the vast majority of our spaces. Recent changes to the PPP Act have allowed us to stretch our loan out over a greater period of time and utilize the entirety of the loan on the critical costs I mentioned. We are grateful for the support of this legislation — without it, Powell’s would already look dramatically different. We know that when we have exhausted our loan, we will have to face painful choices.
Our stores remain closed. We want desperately to reopen. Keeping them shuttered feels counter to our instincts as booksellers. Unfortunately, safety — for our employees and our greater community — remains a grave concern. Beyond the not insignificant question of safety, however, lies the financial risk to Powell’s future created by reopening too soon. Reopening our stores is no simple matter. Doing so would require great expense — returning staff to work, bringing in additional inventory, procuring safety equipment, redesigning store operations — well in advance of opening our doors. And we hear from our friends and peers in the book and independent retail industries that in-person shopping remains nearly nonexistent. We cannot take on additional expenses in this dire time without the guarantee of sales that will allow us to pay for those expenses. And so, we find ourselves in the difficult position of having to wait for brick-and-mortar shopping to return, or for some other stroke of luck that might allow us to reopen.
In the meantime, we remain grateful for your online orders. After an initial burst of support in mid-March after we closed our stores, sales have continued to decline, but we are doing everything we can to reverse that trend and to find ways to keep our operations going. I continue to have faith in everyone on our team and our ability to rise to new challenges, and in all of you who believe in us and support us. Thank you for your ongoing kindness and loyalty.
Like many businesses, we have also spent the past several months engaged in deep internal introspection within our management team regarding our previous work, or lack thereof, in the fight for racial justice in this country. While we have engaged in this fight over the years, it was never ever nearly enough. We should have done more, and we should have done better. We allowed ourselves to become distracted by making our way through the difficult landscape of independent bookselling. That will no longer be the case. I have written to everyone at Powell’s many times on this matter over the last weeks, have welcomed and engaged in conversations with staff, and they will continue to hear from me as our work evolves.
We have chosen to focus our efforts in four areas: our community partnerships, internal education opportunities, the evolution of our daily work, and hiring. For example, we have begun several conversations with current and possibly future local partners, to educate ourselves about ways in which Powell’s can support the nuanced and intersectional work of creating positive change in our highly segregated business community. We are exploring the many possibilities for using our voice to further the fight for justice without causing additional harm or simply performing for an audience. We are unpacking the many components of our hiring process, examining our choices, and looking for new ways forward. We are working to understand our internal way of being, and where we need to create change. As we hope to enter our second 50-year stretch of Powell’s life, we commit to the work of racial justice in our community. We are a bookstore, in part, because we believe that knowledge leads to truth, and truth leads to justice.
Nothing I have described above will be easy. I honestly don’t know how we will get to the end of this stretch of road ahead of us. Every day the mountain we’re climbing seems to get steeper, and whenever we reach the top of one incline, we find a far more daunting pass ahead. I feel honored, regardless, to do this work every day with my esteemed peers and coworkers here at Powell’s (as much as we would also be delighted to have the existential crisis of a global pandemic magically disappear). And I know that I speak for all of us when I say we feel tremendous gratitude for the faith and support you place in us. Thank you for staying with us, thank you for buying your books from us, thank you for your love of reading and writing, and thank you for all of the kindness you have shared with us over the past weeks and months. We hope to keep hearing from you, we hope to keep sending you books, and we hope to see you back in the stacks one day soon.
Emily
An Update From Emily Powell
Tuesday, May 19, 2020
Dear Powell's community,
First, thank you from the bottom of our book-loving hearts for your support over these past weeks. Your orders, your kind words of support, and your patience have all made this challenging time a little easier. Thank you.
We are excited to share the news that we are nearly ready to launch store pickup of local orders at our flagship store, and we hope to roll it out to our other stores soon. Stay tuned for our official announcement. We can’t tell you how delighted we are to get books into readers’ hands more quickly.
The question on all of our minds these days is: When will we open our stores again? The unfortunate and only answer we have arrived at is: We don’t know. Most importantly, we want to do everything we can to keep our Powell’s community, and our broader community, safe. Our aisles are meant for browsing, lingering, sharing with friends and family and strangers alike. And our books are meant to be pulled from their shelves, opened, examined, considered, replaced. All of these experiences are hard to imagine in our current reality. And while we know that many of our loyal customers are eager to be back, we cannot compromise on safety.
Like so many other Portland businesses, we struggle to see a business model where we can enact the social distancing and safety measures we feel are necessary while sustaining the work of our operations. We are working hard to find solutions, but we do not want to rush the process and anticipate that it will take quite some time. Finally, we know that Portlanders and Oregonians must also be ready to return to their local stores. As a nearly 50-year-old bookstore, we have to be cautious and open only when we believe enough of our customers will meet us back in our aisles on a regular basis.
So for the time being, we wait. We hope you will continue to wait with us and shop with us online at Powells.com. We need your support and love more than ever.
We will find our way through these stormy seas together, and with the help of a good book (or two) by our sides.
All of our best wishes,
Emily
An Update From Emily Powell
Friday, March 27, 2020
Dear Powell's community,
Thank you, from the bottom of our hearts, for your incredible and unwavering support. Your kind words, messages of encouragement, ideas for perseverance, and orders for books have taken our breath away.
Thanks to your orders on Powells.com, we now have over 100 folks working at Powell’s again – all full time with benefits. Most importantly, we’re working hard to keep everyone safe and healthy. Doing that work means we have to move a little slower as a company than usual. Please bear with us as we take all the necessary precautions to keep everyone healthy, and get your books headed your way.
We’ve made an internal commitment to only pay for expenses that keep folks employed, and the lights on, for the time being. We can’t do that forever – we love our vendors and business partners, and want to support them as well. Right now, however, our focus is on keeping Powell’s moving, keeping our community healthy, taking care of our wonderful customers, and having as many folks working with health insurance as our sales can support.
We don’t know what the future holds – none of us does. We’re going to keep the doors to Powells.com open as long as we can, and we will open the doors to all of our stores as soon as it is safe to do so. In the meantime, we are eternally grateful for your support. We love nothing more than connecting readers and writers, and sending books out the door to their new homes. Your orders allow us to keep working and keep our team of incredible booksellers employed.
If you’d like to help in other ways, we’d love for you to consider donations to the Oregon Community Foundation COVID-19 Fund, to BINC (the Book Industry Charitable Foundation helps booksellers experiencing financial distress), or to the ILWU Local 5.
Thank you, again, for all of the love.
Emily
A Message to Employees From Emily Powell
On Tuesday, March 17, 2020, Powell's Books Owner and CEO Emily Powell shared the following letter with employees.
Dear Powell's,
These are unprecedented and grievous times. Only a few days ago we had reason to hope that we could continue with our meaningful work of bookselling and maintain some small semblance of normalcy. Now we see the path ahead more clearly: it is dark and scary.
I have always described Powell's as resilient: lumbering sometimes, full of quirks and personality, but always resilient. We are having that resilience tested as never before. As you all know, we made the decision, with only a small amount of time to act, to close all of our stores over the weekend. We felt we could not wait a moment longer for the sake of the health of our community. We had hoped to find some way to consider this a short-term closure. Today, only one more day out from that decision, we now understand what we all must face: an extended, difficult period of significant measures to protect public health. We don't expect we will be able to open our doors for at least 8 weeks, and very likely longer. When we do open our stores again, we expect the landscape of Oregon, and all of our abilities to spend money on books and gifts, will have changed dramatically. I wish we could have planned more and prepared you more; the situation simply moved too quickly and our responsibility to act quickly to protect public health felt too dire.
When we closed our doors, we also closed off the vast majority of our business without any prospect of it returning soon. As a result, we have been forced to make the unthinkable decision to lay off the vast majority of you in the coming few days. Many people have spoken publicly demanding we pay our employees and extend health insurance for the duration. No one can possibly know how much I wish I could make that happen. We are simply not that kind of business – we run on duct tape and twine on a daily basis, every day trading funds from one pocket to patch the hole in another. We have worked hard over the years to pay the best possible wages, health care and benefits, to make contributions to our community, to support other non-profits. Unfortunately, none of those choices leave extra money on hand when the doors close. And when the doors close, every possible cost must stop as well.
I am doing everything within my power to keep Powell's alive for the next generation of readers and writers, for the next generation of Portland and Oregon. And yet Powell's is also where I grew up and have spent most of my life, and I cannot imagine attempting to move forward without so many of you, colleagues who feel like family. Please know none of our choices were made lightly, and our slow communication has masked our desperate efforts to find a different possible path.
My heart breaks for all of us. Our stores are meant to be full, our city bustling, our minds at ease. And for a time, none of those will be true. I know for many of you, your lives will be forever altered by our decision to close our stores and you will never think of Powell's the same. For all of that and more, I am deeply sorry. I can only hope we might find a way to come back together on the other side of these terrible times.
Emily