/lit/ - Literature

The Strand, with its flagship on Broadway and on East 12th Street, is the New York City's’s most iconic bookstore. When New York closed all nonessential businesses in late March 2020, a week after the Strand had shuttered its doors as a precaution, the bookstore laid off 188 employees. The store remained in hibernation until the end of June, when management brought back a skeleton crew. Since then the Strand and its unionized workers have been locked in a struggle over money, priorities, and safety. Employees have accused the Strand’s owner, Nancy Bass Wyden, of flouting COVID safety precautions and taking a PPP loan meant to help people keep their jobs without rehiring enough people or explaining where the money went.

Bass Wyden’s responded with “it's honestly a miracle that we’re still operating” during the pandemic.

Last spring, a few weeks after the mass layoffs, the Strand was approved for between $1 and $2 million as part of the federal government’s Paycheck Protection Program, reporting 212 employees on its loan application. This loan would come to frustrate some recently laid-off Strand employees. Since reopening, the store has never employed more than around 100 people. Staff requests for more clarity about how exactly the loan was used have gone mostly unanswered, aside from “vague statements about, ‘Well, it’s going to payroll.’”

In October 2020, Bass Wyden used the Strand’s Twitter account to put out a call for help.

“Because of the impact of COVID-19, we cannot survive the huge decline in foot-traffic, a near complete loss of tourism, and zero in-store events,” Bass Wyden wrote in her letter. The tweet was re-tweeted 25,000 times. The next day, people lined up down the block on East 12th Street so they could shop in-store. On a typical day the Strand might get 300 online orders. The weekend after she made that viral tweet, the store got 25,000. The website crashed. Customers spent $170,550 in two days, enough to cover a little more than half the losses the store posted in September. To help handle the increase, Strand employees scrapped vacations and came in on their off days.