An Update From Emily Powell
Friday, March 27
Dear Powell's community,
Thank you, from the bottom of our hearts, for your incredible and unwavering support. Your kind words, messages of encouragement, ideas for perseverance, and orders for books have taken our breath away.
Thanks to your orders on Powells.com, we now have over 100 folks working at Powell’s again – all full time with benefits. Most importantly, we’re working hard to keep everyone safe and healthy. Doing that work means we have to move a little slower as a company than usual. Please bear with us as we take all the necessary precautions to keep everyone healthy, and get your books headed your way.
We’ve made an internal commitment to only pay for expenses that keep folks employed, and the lights on, for the time being. We can’t do that forever – we love our vendors and business partners, and want to support them as well. Right now, however, our focus is on keeping Powell’s moving, keeping our community healthy, taking care of our wonderful customers, and having as many folks working with health insurance as our sales can support.
We don’t know what the future holds – none of us does. We’re going to keep the doors to Powells.com open as long as we can, and we will open the doors to all of our stores as soon as it is safe to do so. In the meantime, we are eternally grateful for your support. We love nothing more than connecting readers and writers, and sending books out the door to their new homes. Your orders allow us to keep working and keep our team of incredible booksellers employed.
If you’d like to help in other ways, we’d love for you to consider donations to the Oregon Community Foundation COVID-19 Fund, to BINC (the Book Industry Charitable Foundation helps booksellers experiencing financial distress), or to the ILWU Local 5.
Thank you, again, for all of the love.
Emily
A Message to Employees From Emily Powell
On Tuesday, March 17, Powell's Books Owner and CEO Emily Powell shared the following letter with employees.
Dear Powell's,
These are unprecedented and grievous times. Only a few days ago we had reason to hope that we could continue with our meaningful work of bookselling and maintain some small semblance of normalcy. Now we see the path ahead more clearly: it is dark and scary.
I have always described Powell's as resilient: lumbering sometimes, full of quirks and personality, but always resilient. We are having that resilience tested as never before. As you all know, we made the decision, with only a small amount of time to act, to close all of our stores over the weekend. We felt we could not wait a moment longer for the sake of the health of our community. We had hoped to find some way to consider this a short-term closure. Today, only one more day out from that decision, we now understand what we all must face: an extended, difficult period of significant measures to protect public health. We don't expect we will be able to open our doors for at least 8 weeks, and very likely longer. When we do open our stores again, we expect the landscape of Oregon, and all of our abilities to spend money on books and gifts, will have changed dramatically. I wish we could have planned more and prepared you more; the situation simply moved too quickly and our responsibility to act quickly to protect public health felt too dire.
When we closed our doors, we also closed off the vast majority of our business without any prospect of it returning soon. As a result, we have been forced to make the unthinkable decision to lay off the vast majority of you in the coming few days. Many people have spoken publicly demanding we pay our employees and extend health insurance for the duration. No one can possibly know how much I wish I could make that happen. We are simply not that kind of business – we run on duct tape and twine on a daily basis, every day trading funds from one pocket to patch the hole in another. We have worked hard over the years to pay the best possible wages, health care and benefits, to make contributions to our community, to support other non-profits. Unfortunately, none of those choices leave extra money on hand when the doors close. And when the doors close, every possible cost must stop as well.
I am doing everything within my power to keep Powell's alive for the next generation of readers and writers, for the next generation of Portland and Oregon. And yet Powell's is also where I grew up and have spent most of my life, and I cannot imagine attempting to move forward without so many of you, colleagues who feel like family. Please know none of our choices were made lightly, and our slow communication has masked our desperate efforts to find a different possible path.
My heart breaks for all of us. Our stores are meant to be full, our city bustling, our minds at ease. And for a time, none of those will be true. I know for many of you, your lives will be forever altered by our decision to close our stores and you will never think of Powell's the same. For all of that and more, I am deeply sorry. I can only hope we might find a way to come back together on the other side of these terrible times.
Emily