Waterstones abandons click and collect and closes its stores over lockdown

Waterstones is temporarily closing its stores owing to the latest lockdown, furloughing staff and no longer offering a click and collect service.

In a post on

, the firm said customers who have made orders to collect their books would be contacted by the company.

M.d. James Daunt told The Bookseller he would be making use of the furlough scheme but said the government needed to to do more than “token efforts” to support independents.

He said some larger stores would be providing “ship from shop", where some online orders were fulfilled from bigger branches rather than a warehouse, with the number involved changing according to how sales go in the next few weeks.

But he said: “In the circumstance of a lockdown in which people should not be leaving their home other than to 'go to an essential retailer', and we are deemed not to be essential, click and collect becomes something that simply doesn't work."

He added: “Fortunately the furlough scheme is there and that is hugely important to keep people employed, otherwise we along with all other businesses that were forced to close would have had to engage in terrible redundancy programmes so the government at least is protecting jobs in that respect.”

Daunt said: “Effectively we're closed. Waterstones of course is lucky enough to have a big and successful online operation and Waterstones.com will keep sales flowing but we are at heart a physical bookseller and we want to get back into our shops so it's intensely frustrating.

“On top of which one has the curiosity of so many shops being open and deemed essential, including W H Smith in our own sector, and many other people who sell books. So we sit here and we obviously support the principles of what the government is trying to achieve while clearly falling into the losers as far as the overall impact goes from a financial perspective.”

Like the Booksellers Association, Daunt has previously led calls for bookshops to be named “essential” retailers and remain open during the pandemic. He said: “If there was something rather more logical and understandable in which we were closed alongside anything that operates in much the same manner as us I think it would be more understandable. But that's an argument which was played out many, many months ago and of course we have a government that seems never to learn from its mistakes.”

Referring to a government loan scheme announced today for closed businesses, he said the £9,000 on offer for indies was “probably not going to be enough to keep an awful lot of people going”. He added support for indie booksellers ought to include a rates holiday extension beyond April and a moratorium on landlords taking action against their tenants.

Daunt said: “We all of us will digest and see how long this will go on for. If it's a relatively short lockdown and the promise of vaccinations and reopening does come to pass relatively soon i.e. that we're again open in March then perhaps the damage will not be too great.”

The new England lockdown, announced by Boris Johnson on 4th January, is expected to last until at least mid-February but could run into March. Scotland's lockdown will last until at least the end of January while Northern Ireland and Wales have also closed essential stores as part of their own lockdowns.