The Intimate squeaks by; how a small chain plans to survive the battle of the bookstore dinosaurs.

• Author: Overton, Sharon
• Position: Intimate Bookshop - Company Profile

The Intimate Bookshop has the kind of customer loyalty other retailers only dream of. For generations of Carolina alums, visiting the home church on Chapel Hill's Franklin Street is as obligatory as stopping by Jeff's Campus Confectionery for a fountain Coke or paying one's respects to the Old Well.

The Intimate can even change its name and the faithful know it by sight and smell. When owner Wallace Kuralt opened a store in Atlanta five years ago, he decided to call it The Renaissance, figuring the "Intimate" sounded too much like an adult bookstore and no one in Atlanta would know the name anyway. "We had the same wood floors, fixtures, yellow paint and jazz," Kuralt, 54, says. "One of the first people who came and looked at the thing says, 'Is this the Intimate Bookshop?'" (The Atlanta store closed in January 1993 when the shopping center it was in failed to catch on.)

Kuralt and his wife, Brenda, have owned the Intimate since 1965 when they bought it from the couple who bought it from the founder, Milton A. "Ab" Abernethy, a Chapel Hill legend who started selling used books from a small room above Sutton's Drugstore in 1931. The Kuralts have built the business into a chain of nine bookstores with annual sales of $10.5 million. Their success is based in part on the fond memories people have of the original.

"A lot of readers everywhere have a loyalty to the Intimate name, particularly those who spent any time in Chapel Hill," says Bob Summer, Southeastern correspondent for Publisher's Weekly, who spent some time in Chapel Hill himself in the 1970s working for the University of North Carolina Press. "It was very often their first good bookstore experience."

But lately it has taken more than fond memories and a familiar name to survive in the bookselling business. As the superstore phenomenon sweeps the country, independent bookstores -- even those with long-standing community ties -- have been going under at what some in the industry consider an alarming rate. National chains such as Barnes & Noble, Borders and Crown Books offer thousands of titles in outlets the size of small department stores. They draw customers by offering substantial discounts and extras most independents can't match -- espresso bars, music and video departments, comfortable chairs for reading and wide aisles for browsing.

Charlotte is the latest battleground in the book wars. In September, Barnes & Noble opened a superstore across the street from the Intimate's SouthPark Mall location. (The New York-based chain already had two smaller stores in other parts of town, plus the campus bookstore at UNC Charlotte.) At 24,000 square feet, the new store is almost five times the size of the Intimate's mall shop. Within three months, Borders, owned by Kmart Corp., opened an even bigger store a block away. The Intimate's sales in Charlotte fell 15% and have yet to recover fully, Kuralt says.

The battle may be just beginning. In February, Minneapolis-based Musicland announced plans to open three Media Play superstores in Charlotte in the coming year. At 40,000 to 50,000 square feet, these megastores will carry music and computer software and games, as well as 85,000 book titles. (The nine Intimate Bookshops range from 2,700 to 13,500 square feet and carry 25,000 to 60,000 titles each.)

Not all the superstores will survive, say observers, who speculate that the Charlotte market may have passed its saturation point. But in the meantime, some independents almost certainly will have to close.

"It's like dinosaurs fighting," says John Barringer, whose Little Professor Book Center has been hurt by the superstores. "Everyone will be fine if you can just stay out from under their feet. But you can't."

Sitting in his sun-filled, third-story office overlooking Franklin...