I had to visit this bookshop tonight on Mary Street in Brisbane tonight. At 5:20pm the street was dark and this shop stood out. The brightness of the lighting says something about the business. It made me feel I was certain to find a good book there.
Call me crazy but I connected the brightness with optimism.
While there were other shops open on Mary Street, this was by far the best lit, the most visually enticing.
Any retailer on this end of Mary Street competing for a bookshop customer will have to lift their game if they want to compete. The newsagency across the road was open but the lights were dim. It didn’t have the feeling of optimism. This could be fixed with some shop floor changes and fresh lighting.
We compete in an ever changing world and while newsagents often worry about what they cannot change – like online, print disruption and the like – too often they ignore what they can change like in-store lighting.
I found a good book by the way – Prisoner X by Rafael Epstein.