Letters to the Editor
Letter to the Editor | Some on social media are targeting my local book store
My husband and I own Invitation Bookshop. As I write this, our business is being attacked on Facebook and in our Google reviews because someone didn’t like our Political Science section. It is not because we offered inferior customer service or because we asked anyone to leave or argued with someone’s point of view.
Our team engaged with the customer, offered to special order the requested book, and explained our inventory to the best of their ability — given that they are not the individuals who purchase our inventory. They did their job exactly as they should. Yet here we are.
I don’t know exactly what the discourse is online because it’s happening in a Facebook group that I am not a member of, and which, in spite of friends being allowed in since I made my request, I haven’t been approved to join yet.
In the sparse screenshots I’m getting, I’m seeing plans to come harass our staff, complaints about situations that I haven’t handled as gracefully as I could because I am one person who is so inundated with requests that to respond to them all perfectly is impossible, and patently false claims that we don’t carry “typical fiction and kids books” — in short, a community hell bent on tearing down a local business and local residents.
We knew before we opened a bookstore that what we were doing was inherently political and will continue to be as long as there are arguments about who is and is not allowed to have a voice and a platform in our country, or any other for that matter.
That said, as the person who does buy the store’s books, I have learned quite a bit about what this community does and doesn’t read. The vast majority of our inventory decisions are based on those trends, which is all I really feel I need to say about what is or isn’t in our Political Science section.
But when keyboard warriors sit behind their screens and decide it’s time to take down a local business, it stops being about the business very quickly and instead becomes an opportunity to vent their own biases or frustrations or grudges.
If it was about us and our business, our very local business, they’d remember that we are a family that lives and works here in Gig Harbor. We are real, normal people who are doing our best to be of service to our community and support our staff, while also doing our best to be present for our kids and each other, often imperfectly on all fronts.
They’d remember that our staff are also local residents who are impacted by negative rhetoric about my inventory choices. Those staff members are people whose safety and well being we are responsible for while they are at work, and which we are no longer sure we can guarantee when they open the doors tomorrow.
All because of a few books.
Or rather … all because of a few books?
I think, though, that even if I am approved to be in the audience to the torch-carrying takedown of the business we have poured our time and love and labor into, I’m unlikely to engage. What can I possibly say that is going to change the mind of people who want to see someone else in their community fail?
The spirit of that is the antithesis of who we are. Regardless of what’s on our shelves.
Allyson Howard
Founder and managing director, Invitation Bookshop