Monroe shop owner holds out for a buyer
Published 1:31 pm Monday, January 25, 2010
Customers arrive carrying plastic bags full of books, usually dog-eared and a bit ragged.
The books they leave with look about the same. They just have different titles.
That’s the way inventory moves at Main Street Books in Monroe, where every book on the shelves is a trade-in, mostly from Amanda Kleinert’s “bread and butter” regular customers.
Amanda Kleinert at Main Street Books. (Dan Bates / The Herald)
Kleinert has owned Main Street Books for four years. Her personal touches are everywhere: the yellow walls, the hand-tied genre signs hung high above the shelves, the tiny blond toddler dashing between the back of the store to the front desk.
“It’s something I’d wanted to do since high school,” she said.
But now she’s ready to move on. Kleinert is looking to sell the bookstore that lives in a rented storefront on Main Street, asking $50,000 for the company.
She’s listed the store on Craigslist.com several times, and in The Herald once. So far, she’s had a steady stream of nibbles but no serious buyers.
“I know it will just take the right person — or people — to come along and run the place,” she said.
For now, she’s being patient. She wants the store to have the same small-town vibe after the sale, and she wants it to retain her regular customers, many of whom are on fixed incomes.
Main Street Books isn’t the only small business sitting on a stalled market. Closed business-for-sale transactions in the United States were down 28 percent in 2009, according to data from the listing site BizBuySell.com.
The site’s Seattle section, which includes Snohomish County, also shows a decline. The median asking price for businesses slipped to $225,000 in 2009, down from $250,000 during the year before.
Tough credit markets have made it harder for buyers to close the deals, and data from the site shows that sales of large businesses took a bigger hit.
Know a small business you think we should write about? Contact Herald writer Amy Rolph at arolph@heraldnet.com.
