AThis morning, I finally made it through again. They said that bookstores receive a 25% discount on their "paperbacks." Shipping is still $3.99 per book, unless the bookstore submits their own UPS account number to be used (which would, of course, be cheaper).
- PA paperback "softcover" price avg about $24.95
- minus 25% ($6.24) = $18.71
- plus $3.99 shipping = $22.70
- net to store = $2.25
- minus cost of lowly wage-slave bookseller earning $8/hour who takes a lightning-quick 10 minutes to process the book (original order, looking up, calling PA, unpacking, logging in, calling customer, retrieving book from storage area, running cash register) for a cost of $1.34 = revised net to store $0.91
- minus overhead (register tape, bag, portion of phone bill/electric bill/rent, non-wage employee costs such as social security & unemployment insurance) = NOT FR*GGING WORTH THE TIME
As you can imagine, if paperback means the $9.95 PAYperback, the store's in the red right after the shipping charge gets added.
Even free shipping wouldn't really make it economically inviting to the bookstore. There's a reason wholesale in most industries is 50% or less of retail price. Books are a bit high on the wholesale scheme, but that's balanced out by their liberal returns policy.
Oh, right. No returns policy.