Recession-Proof and Community-Built
Why Bookstores Are Thriving Against All Odds
The Hermitage Bookstore, Denver’s Cherry Creek North District
Long before I moved to Nevada and Colorado, and before my musings here on Great Books, Great Minds, I had a stint as a bookseller in the Midwest.
First in Mishawaka, Indiana. Later in Skokie, Illinois. Both Barnes & Noble stores. Two different communities. Similar vibes.
If you’ve never worked in a bookstore, let me tell you something that doesn’t show up on profit-and-loss statements: bookstores are emotional first responders.
People don’t just walk in to buy books. They walk in because something in their life has shifted.
A breakup.
A diagnosis.
A political awakening.
A spiritual hunger.
I remember customers wandering the aisles in Skokie with that look. A facial expression that says, “I need something. I don’t know what it is yet.”
And often, a conversation would begin.
Not a transaction. A conversation.
That was my first education in what bookstores really are. They are therapeutic infrastructure.
The Counterintuitive Boom
In a world supposedly dominated by screens, streaming, and algorithmic everything, something strange has happened.
Independent bookstores in the United States have grown from 1,916 in 2020 to 3,218 today. That’s roughly a 70 percent increase. For every store that closes, four open.
Forbes Advisor recently identified bookstores as the most recession-proof type of U.S. business. During the pandemic, their numbers increased 43 percent. Wages in the sector rose 16 percent during COVID and 13 percent during the Great Recession.
Let that sink in.
In the middle of lockdowns, supply chain chaos, inflation, and political division, people opened bookstores. Allison Hill, CEO of the American Booksellers Association, noted that some owners were cashing in retirement savings to do it.
That is not rational behavior if you think bookstores are just retail. It only makes sense if you understand the role that bookstores play as community anchors.
Why Crisis Drives Us to Paper
When the world destabilizes, humans reach for two things: meaning and connection.
Books provide both.
During World War II, the Book Society in Britain famously said that books might become “more necessary than gas masks.” They understood that psychological resilience is as critical as physical protection.
We’re living through our own version of destabilization. Political fragmentation. Technological acceleration. AI rewriting labor markets. Social media eroding trust. Economic uncertainty that hums quietly in the background of daily life.
What do we do?
We read.
Not because we’re nostalgic. Not because we’re quaint. But because reading is how humans metabolize chaos.
And bookstores are the digestive organs of that process.
The 2020 Reckoning: Proof of the Role
After the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, something remarkable happened inside bookstores.
Black-owned bookstores reported 100 to 300 orders per day. Troy Johnson of AALBC said he sold more books in one month than in all of 2019.
During that period civil rights titles jumped 330 percent in a single week. Books about discrimination rose 245 percent. By late June, nearly 70 percent of the New York Times Best Seller list addressed race.
But what struck me most was not the numbers. It was the intention.
People didn’t just buy books. They sought out Black-owned bookstores specifically. They understood that where you buy a book matters.That reflects community consciousness in action.
It reminded me of something I witnessed years earlier at that Barnes & Noble in Skokie. After a major news event, customers would come in almost immediately asking, “Do you have something that helps me understand this?”
Bookstores became civic classrooms overnight.
The Memory of Being a Bookseller
In Barnes & Noble in Mishawaka, I learned that people often don’t know what they’re looking for until someone listens.
An older man once asked me for “something about grief.” He had just lost his wife of 40 plus years. He did not want platitudes. He wanted companionship in language.
We walked together through psychology, memoir, spirituality. I handed him a slim volume. He held it like it might break.
That was not retail. This was about witnessing his story.
In Skokie, I saw teenagers discover philosophy for the first time. I saw first-generation college students buy their first hardcover. I saw parents crouch down in the children’s section, reading aloud on the carpet, temporarily escaping the noise of adult life.
A bookstore is one of the last public spaces where you can linger without being interrogated for your productivity.That matters more than we admit.
The Third Place We Forgot We Needed
Sociologists talk about “third places.” Home is the first place. Work is the second. Third places are where community forms organically.
Bookstores are archetypal third places.
They’re not loud, nor performative, nor algorithmically sorted. Instead look at them as shelves of ideas placed next to each other without requiring ideological agreement.
In an era when digital feeds sort us into tribes, bookstores insist on adjacency.
You can stand in the history section and see competing narratives side by side. You can browse political theory next to poetry. You can overhear strangers debating a novel.
There is something quietly democratic about that.
BookTok and the New Reading Public
Now here’s the beautiful irony.
While independent bookstores are booming, so is BookTok. Millions of young readers are gathering on TikTok to talk about books while at times crying on camera about plot twists. What we are also seeing is a revival of backlist titles that publishers thought were done.
BookTok rose during pandemic isolation. Young people were alone. They found each other through shared reading.
Sound familiar?
It’s the digital mirror of the bookstore reading circle.
Humans do not want to read in isolation. We want to process together. Confirm collectively. Argue among each other.
Technology didn’t kill the bookstore. It amplified the need for it.
Digital discovery. Physical community.
That’s the formula.
Historical Roots: Black Bookstores as Resistance
The connection between bookstores and resilience runs deep in African American history.
Marcus Books in Oakland has served its community since 1960. Through Civil Rights. Through Black Power. Through the assassinations of Malcolm X and Dr. King.
These were not simply stores. They were intellectual sanctuaries.
During the Harlem Renaissance, bookstores and Black-owned publishers became infrastructure for a cultural rebirth. Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer. They were not just writing books. They were building identity.
Books circulated ideas. Bookstores fostered courage.
When mainstream outlets refused certain narratives, Black bookstores carried them anyway.That lineage still hums beneath today’s resurgence.
Black Owned: The Revolutionary Life of the Black Bookstore by Char Adams
Why They Survive Recession
Why are bookstores recession-proof?
Because when budgets tighten, we cut luxuries. We don’t cut meaning.
A $20 book that reshapes your thinking is cheaper than therapy, despair, and ignorance.
During downturns, people read more history. More political theory. More self-help. More spirituality.
We want frameworks. And bookstores offer something Amazon cannot replicate: serendipity.
The unexpected discovery.
The handwritten staff recommendation card.
The conversation at checkout that turns into a ten-minute exchange about life.
Algorithms predict. Humans surprise.
In times of uncertainty, surprise feels alive.
Bookstores as Therapy Without the Couch
I am not romanticizing.
Margins are thin. Owners work hard. It is not easy.
But what they are selling is not paper. It is psychological uplift.
Reading lowers stress. Research shows that six minutes of reading can significantly reduce heart rate and muscle tension. Book club participation correlates with higher social connection and improved mental health outcomes.
And bookstores are where those habits begin.
You walk in anxious. You leave holding possibility.
That is medicine.
A Personal Invitation
Let me speak directly to you.
When was the last time you wandered a bookstore without a mission?
Not hunting for a specific title. Not rushing. Just browsing.
Let yourself be curious.
Pick up something you disagree with. Read the first page. Notice what happens inside you.
Strike up a conversation with a bookseller or a fellow store patron. Ask them what they’re reading.
Join a reading group. Start one in your living room. Invite neighbors you barely know.
We underestimate how much we need physical spaces of intellectual encounter.
Scrolling is consumption. Browsing is contemplation.
One drains. The other nourishes.
The Painted Porch Bookshop, Bastrop, Texas
The Future Is Human-Scaled
The 70 percent increase in independent bookstores since 2020 is not nostalgia.
It is an adaptation.
New stores combine books with cafés, wine bars, author events, workshops. They are intentionally building community hubs.
They understand something profound, namely, that is an age of AI-generated content and algorithmic feeds, humans crave curation by other humans.
We crave imperfection.
We crave presence.
We crave shared space.
A bookstore says: slow down.
And in 2026, that might be radical.
Books as Social Glue
When I think back to my time at Barnes & Noble, I don’t recall sales numbers.
I remember faces.
The grieving husband.
The teenage philosopher.
The immigrant mother buying her child’s first chapter book.
Bookstores are where private struggles meet public shelves.They are where ideas become conversations. Where conversations become relationships. Where relationships become community.
In a time when institutions wobble and trust feels fragile, bookstores remain steady.
You walk in alone.
You leave part of a reading public.
The boom is not about commerce. It is about connection. And bringing people together, it turns out, is recession-proof.
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