Hello everyone! Something that we’ve wanted to do here at Griffeys’ from the beginning is a buyback program, where you can bring your used books to us and trade them in for cash or store credit. We were planning to begin the program in October, but due to a variety of factors we have decided to delay it for now so that we can focus on other key areas of our business.

First of all, we need to focus on organizing our collection. At the moment, only some of our shelves are organized alphabetically by author, and some of our more general genre shelves (especially nonfiction) are quite jumbled; there are great books on the shelf, but it can be hard for customers to find them. So we need to focus on alphabetizing our shelves and maintaining that organization as much as possible for the convenience of our customers.

Secondly, we want to start doing more with our old and rare books. “Rare” is in our tagline, right along with used, local, and indie, but up until now we haven’t really done much with our rare books besides put some of them in our display cabinet to look nice. That’s going to be changing though; I just listed our first rare book for sale yesterday, a first American edition of Tolkien’s The Silmarillion in excellent condition, over on our Instagram and Facebook pages. Like organization, evaluating, researching, and pricing old and rare books is quite time consuming, especially when you are teaching yourself like I am, so that is another area we are prioritizing at the moment.

Thirdly, we have been overwhelmed by generous donations of books, along with stock which we already had on hand, and our back room currently contains a very disorganized pile of boxes which need to be cleaned, sorted, priced, and stocked on the shelves. This is another time consuming task which we feel we need to focus on before we start doing buybacks.

Finally, we need to prioritize creating and maintaining good cash flow as a business before we start branching out too much into other areas. In plain English, before we can start doing buybacks, we need to make sure that we are able to cover our own business expenses and keep our doors open! This is just an unfortunate reality of doing business in this world, and not something that I am particularly fond of dealing with. But as a new business, it is definitely a priority, as we want to be serving our community with quality books for years to come!

So unfortunately, we will be delaying the buyback program for now while we focus on these areas and on making Griffey’s the best that it can be. Thank you for bearing with us, and we hope to see you in the store very soon! We have a ton of amazing books waiting to find new homes in this community.