Powell's Books: The Store That Survived Amazon

Michael Powell was a graduate student at the University of Chicago in nineteen seventy when he opened a small used bookstore near campus. It was not especially successful. It closed within the decade. His father, Walter, had opened a bookstore on Burnside Street in Portland, Oregon, the following year, in nineteen seventy-one.

Michael joined his father's operation in Portland in nineteen seventy-nine, after the Chicago store lost its lease. They had an idea that the industry considered eccentric: sell new and used books on the same shelves, side by side. Used bookstores sold used books. New bookstores sold new books. Mixing them violated the orderly economics of both, and required building relationships with publishers who did not particularly want their new titles shelved next to cheaper secondhand copies of the same book.

The Powells built it anyway. They eventually bought a former automobile dealership at the corner of Northwest Tenth Avenue and Burnside, knocked out walls, added rooms, added a second floor, added a third. Today Powell's City of Books occupies an entire city block, holds several million books across its three floors, and employs a staff large enough to maintain a color-coded map system so customers can navigate between subject rooms.

The nineteen nineties brought Amazon. The two thousands brought the Kindle. Dozens of independent bookstores that had operated for generations closed. Powell's did not close. The model that had seemed eccentric, the mix of new and used, turned out to be exactly the kind of thing a loyal customer base would sustain against a cheaper but less interesting alternative.

It is the largest independent bookstore in the United States. The corner it occupies at Northwest Tenth and Burnside is one of the more improbable successes in twentieth-century American retail.