Shop activity in Ramsgate from the 5p book up and some thoughts on competing with internet booksellers.

With the recession biting more severely by the week one of the more active sections in my bookshop is the recession section where all of the paperbacks are 5p and all of the hardbacks 10p, the very low prices in this section cause some rather unusual reactions from some customers.

When I first started in secondhand bookselling most secondhand bookshops had a section something like this and most customers used them without comment.

I have just been up Ramsgate High Street where the old Woolworth shop is due to reopen as a 99p shop tomorrow and all things considered Ramsgate doesn’t seem to be faring too badly at the moment.

Interesting as Woolworth’s started out as a shop where everything was 6d 2½p in new money and in value probably fairly similar to 99p today, things seem to have come full circle.

Very cheap prices are not always what they seem particularly online.

Most popular paperbacks are available secondhand on Amazon priced a 1p, this is because of the fixed price postage charge of £2.75 that Amazon has for secondhand books that third parties sell through their site, as it costs the seller about £1 to post an average paperback if they sell it for 1p they receive £2.76 less the cost of listing on Amazon leaving them with about £1.50 so there is still a profit to be made from the sale.

This also means that about the cheapest you can buy a paperback online is £2.76 in the bookshop I overcome this competition by pricing most popular paperbacks at £2.50 or less. The same usually applies with Ebay where the staring bid and postage usually come to at least £2.50.

It also has the advantage that any title that is always in short supply I can price above the Amazon price to improve the range and quality of the shop stock.

Walking back along King Street with the camera I took some pictures of some of the shops that have opened recently click here for them I did a post about this recently and am surprised that it is still going on.

Ramsgate Regeneration

Having just posted the press release about the opening of Harvey’s Fish Market & Oyster Bar on Ramsgate’s Royal Harbour at http://thanetpress.blogspot.com/2009/06/kent-hotel-restaurant-operator-bucks.html Richard Martin also intends to develop the Royal Victoria Pavilion which is very good news.

I am pretty sure this isn’t a new press release, as I believe I read it somewhere else the other day but I only just received it and put it up as it is illustrative of the revival that is going on here in Ramsgate.

Here in King Street we have seen a quite a few new shops opening recently the latest being a small supermarket due to open next door to my bookshop on Sunday.

Quite why Ramsgate is bucking the trend at the moment is beyond me, I am not talking about the plethora of middle of the road eateries and gift shops that are replacing the real shops in Broadstairs and Canterbury at the moment.

These are real quality shops in king street alone a fishmonger who catches his own fish, a cycle shop that does repairs, a domestic appliance shop that also does repairs.

Then today I heard a rumour, from a usually reliable source, that Tesco are considering returning to the town.

Congratulations to TDC planning department

Many thanks to the planning department for turning down the plans for the hideous extension to the restoration of the Granville Marina Restaurant in Ramsgate, the application number is L/TH/08/1197 click here to go to the government planning website.

Restoration work on this grade 2 listed building got off to a bad start, as you can see from the picture click here for more pictures of the restoration work in progress.

Goody goes bananas

This is just an update on yesterdays post with some photos of how it looks now, apparently cracks appeared mysteriously overnight in two of the turrets, this was after the high winds had subsided.

I gather from my enquiries that TDC officers were on site to supervise before the demolition started, so what went wrong one can only guess, I think Goody demolition may have got a bit over excited, I will have to have a word with them.
One of my children who took some interest in this demolition, having been told the building was listed and therefore protected and that the men from the council were there to protect it, rather poignantly said “am I protected daddy” but the big question that I couldn’t answer was. “Why is it eating the castle daddy”?