The manager of Eason‘s flagship store on O’Connell Street in Dublin has spoken this morning about the book trade following the closure of Hughes & Hughes on Friday.
Speaking on RTE Radio 1′s The Marian Finucane Show, Martin Black said: ‘I’ve been in the bookselling business for over 30 years and certainly everyone agrees that 2009 was the worst year we’ve ever experienced.’
As part of a panel, which included former supermarket retailer Feargal Quinn, Mr Black talked about rents, book selling and how the recession has affected the Irish market.
Mr Black Said: ‘Bookselling is a very difficult business. It’s different to other retailers in the sense that in the drapery business you can get stock in, hold it there for a few months, but on a daily basis there are new titles coming in. One never knows how they are going to go, it’s like throwing wet cement on a wall you don’t know what is going to stick, what the bestseller is going to be and you’ve got to buy in the hope of what you think will appeal.’
Turning to Hughes ad Hughes, Mr Black said he believed that the airport shops were still ‘profitable’.
Addressing the issue of rent, which was a factor Hughes and Hughes cited as a cause for its collapse, Mr Black said: ‘if a company is in a rental situation and you’ve got upward demands of rent of nearly 100%, it’s very hard to cope with that’. However he said Eason, like many ‘established companies’ is ‘luckily’ in a freehold situation with many of its properties.
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