Waterstones boss Daunt hails 'exceptionally busy' week post-reopening

Waterstones m.d. James Daunt has said the chain was “exceptionally busy” after reopening last week while reiterating that the decision to close bookshops, particularly during the second lockdown, “made no sense”.

Bookshops were finally able to open their doors in England and Wales on 12th April following more than three months of lockdown closures. Waterstones opened all its branches with the exception of stores at Leadenhall Market and Liverpool Street Station in London and Foyles in Birmingham Grand Central, where there has been reduced footfall owing to lockdown.

Daunt told The Bookseller: “It's been fantastic and exceptionally busy pretty much everywhere. Obviously there are still a few of the big city centre tourist-type locations that are a bit down but everywhere else its been wonderful. So we have very happy shops.”

Asked if sales were up for this time of year, he said: “It's clearly substantially better than it would otherwise have been. If you compare it to 2019, you're comparing it to the week leading into Easter so that's always a fairly inflated busy time, so you're not comparing apples with apples. But I would say the first days were dramatically higher and it's settling down to something that's very much busier than anyone probably expected, which is wonderful.”

Over the past year, like the Booksellers Association, Daunt has questioned why bookshops have been classified as non-essential and said he was concerned for the retail sector if a third lockdown was to happen and nothing changed. He said: "I think the thing that everybody needs to be doing, and certainly I'm saying, is to question why they were closed in the first place. They kept most retail open. This notion of essential and non-essential was arbitrary."

Daunt pointed out that during the recent period of restrictions he could go into a coffee shop or into a W H Smith but yet bookshops and clothing stores had remained shuttered due to a decision that created “winners and losers on an arbitrary basis”.

He said: “That doesn't have any rationale to it to the extent that the biggest risk for bookshops is there's another period of closure, another lockdown. I cannot see the logic of having closed us in the first lockdown, other than that nobody knew what the hell was going on, so that's excusable.

“By the time of the second lockdown it really made no sense at all. If there's a third lockdown one has to hope that bookshops can remain open really cautiously, really sensibly, as we're perfectly capable of doing and, indeed, are doing now.”

During the second lockdown, Daunt was one of a number of retail leaders who renewed calls for business rates reform. In February, he warned up to 80 of his 290 Waterstones branches could close when leases expire unless business rates decline.

He said of reform: “I think that it's essential for the health of the high street. Evidently most places have reopened with more vacancies than existed prior to the pandemic and in some places dramatically more. In leafy, wealthy, exclusive Hampstead where there's never any vacancies on the high street, opposite our shop there's probably half a dozen — six out of 10 are empty. So, it's not as bad as that everywhere but nowhere is immune to that and the government's going to have to help.”

The government is still reviewing business rates and Daunt warned that, without changes, more chains would follow the likes of John Lewis, which has cut the number of its branches from 51 to 34 since the pandemic.

He said: “There's a very broad acceptance that the current situation is unsustainable and if it is sustained then everybody will suffer, jobs will go, stores will close, rates will not be collected, everyone will lose.”