— By Katie Lee —
How Half Price Books has grown into the largest family-owned new and used bookstore chain in the U.S. by rehoming books into the hands of more people — and not into landfills.
Book lovers often joke that they could “start their own bookstore” from the stacks of books tucked into every corner of their own home, but imagine actually doing it. Over 50 years ago, a pair of bibliophiles named Ken Gjemre and Pat Anderson did just that. In the summer of 1972, they drew from their own personal collections to open a used-book shop in an old laundromat in Dallas. They ran ads in the newspaper saying, “We Buy Books,” and watched their inventory soar. With approximately 120 brick-and-mortar locations today, Half Price Books has become the largest family-owned new and used bookstore chain in the U.S.
The president of Half Price Books, Kathy Doyle Thomas, was one of Gjemre and Anderson’s first employees. She joined the team in 1989 and has immersed herself in every aspect of the business ever since, from book buying and IT upgrades to lease negotiations and store maintenance.
“Part of the reason I stay is I love it,” Thomas says. “I love the concept, I love the product. I’m a big reader so I love our inventory. Because we’re small and family-owned, we’re able to try new initiatives and react quickly to the marketplace. I’ve been offered jobs by bigger corporations throughout my professional career, but you don’t get to do as much hands-on stuff and make a difference like we do with Half Price Books.”
One way Half Price Books makes a big difference is to make literacy accessible and affordable for all — and to find new homes for used books, rather than be thrown away.
“[Gjemre and Anderson], they were hippies,” Thomas says. “They were doing recycling before it was cool. They were both so passionate about reading. No one could bear the idea of throwing a book away. We still can’t. With a book, I have an experience with it. I want to have someone share that same experience.”
Half Price Books does not limit its inventory to books. In the early days, a man opened the trunk of his car and hauled out a box of used records and asked Gjemre, “Do y’all sell vinyl?” to which Gjemre replied, “We do now!”
Today, in addition to books, Half Price Books buys and sells magazines, collectible comics, used records, cassette tapes, cassette players, record players, CDs, DVDs, Blu-Ray discs, even a smattering of VHS tapes. “People sell to us what they’ve finished watching, listening to or reading,” Thomas says. “Since we buy from the public, every store has its own little personality.”
Sometimes, a book doesn’t sell. But as the founders put it: “If we can’t sell it, we’ll give it away.”
Half Price Books’ community book donation program is not just about keeping books out of landfills but also about making reading accessible. Often at great shipping expense to itself, the company donates upwards of 1 million books a year.
Thomas sits on the board with Feed the Children, which in addition to addressing food insecurity sends books all over the world, builds libraries and helps with disaster relief. Half Price Books is constantly sending books to support different literacy programs in different communities. The idea is to get more books in people’s hands, especially children.
The founders’ desire to reuse and recycle books — the mantra that “books should fill our lives, not our land” — has shaped how Half Price Books is viewed as an environmental steward today, more than a half-century later.
Each store has plain concrete floors, with no stain in order to stay environmentally healthy. The company’s cleaning supplies are eco-friendly, as well as its paints. Stores use LED lighting and recycled carpeting. In 2023, Half Price Books fully phased out plastic bags in favor of tote bags for purchase, something its customers have embraced.
“We really try to practice what we preach,” Thomas says. It also helps to see solidarity in the industry.
Thomas was recently shopping in DSW and noticed that they, too, eschew plastic bags for tote bags. “We as retailers need to challenge each other, push each other and try new things,” she says. “That’s the best lesson, to encourage other businesses to be more ecofriendly.”
Half Price Books’ packing materials and boxes are also reused. “Frankly, it costs more,” Thomas says. “Sometimes it’s easier and cheaper to throw things away and start fresh. But we don’t want to do that. It’s like throwing a book away, throwing a cardboard box away and not recycling it. It’s part of our roots and it’s important to us to keep that.”
Not only does the company recycle and reuse books, the same might be said about its real estate. Utilizing many second-generation spaces, stores range from 8,000 to 10,000 square feet, with each location tucked into unique shapes and sizes. Second-generation spaces are often more affordable. Keeping rents down, whether in new-build or retrofitted real estate, is always top of mind because Half Price Books doesn’t utilize outside investors to open new stores.
“We don’t open stores unless we know we can afford it,” Thomas says. “We don’t borrow money, and that really helped us during COVID because we didn’t owe anything to the banks. We keep cash and if we need to buy a building or a warehouse or upgrade our IT department or buy some software, we have the cash. That cost-savings mentality has kept us healthy and profitable.”
Currently, Half Price Books has stores in 19 states: Arizona, California, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Washington and Wisconsin. After a deal recently fell through in Austin, Texas, the company is looking at Albuquerque, New Mexico, which would also be a new state for the retailer. Half Price Books hopes to open at least three new stores in 2025.
“We want to open more,” Thomas says. “We believe in our concept. It’s the rents. We would be opening a lot more stores if we could afford the real estate.”
Yet Half Price Books continues to pay only what it has on hand, not relying on loans. “I have friends in the retail business and all they do is worry about their debt and keeping ahead of it,” Thomas says. “Because their brick-and-mortar store sales are flat, they have to open new stores to show growth, and that costs money. It’s hard. COVID hit us hard. I think it was a good wakeup call for all of retail. We had to furlough people and then lay people off. That was so gut-wrenching for us as a family business, because all these people are our family.”
Stores were closed, some for as long as 4 months. “We didn’t know how long that was going to last,” Thomas remembers.
To adapt, Half Price Books launched several new programs during COVID, including Buy Online, Pick Up In-Store. It upgraded its website and launched a new phone system. It introduced new IT programs. With fewer staff to train, it was easier to finish rolling out its new Buy Module. Today, Half Price Books has a proprietary book-buying system where someone can sell their books in-store, and staff can scan the barcode and know how many of those books are in every store in the country. Staff can see how much was paid for a book, how long it’s been sitting on the shelf, and what it’s currently selling for in different marketplaces.
“It’s a very complicated system and we were launching it before COVID. We went ahead and launched it during COVID when we had less people to train, but we also knew it would help the stores [operate] with less people,” Thomas explains. “It got us back in a good place. Everything we did was to help the stores.”
The COVID-19 pandemic forced retailers to increase efficiency in all areas of operation — and fast.
In that same spirit of DIY efficiency, Half Price Books builds all of its store fixtures at its own workshop, the HPB Woodshoppe, in Dallas. If a store closes or moves, the lumber from those fixtures gets shipped back to Dallas and reused. “It is cheaper for us than to go buy some prefab wood,” Thomas says. “Because we have a lot of second-generation space, we might have to build around a weird corner. They aren’t cookie cutter. Since our footprint varies, we have to be more creative. Having our own construction team and woodshop has been good for us.”
What’s good for the company is good for its people, all of whom Half Price Books famously views as family. Thomas enjoys traveling to the stores and meeting the ‘family.’
“I get inspired. Our employees are great artists, they’re great musicians; they have other hobbies outside of the bookstore,” she says. “I love to go to the Employee Pick section of each store. I can look at it and tell you about the store based on what they’re reading. And I always pick a book that I would never buy normally, because I like to challenge myself! I think that’s the best part about bookstores: walking around and discovering new authors, new types of books and genres.
“Everyone is different, but they all have this love of reading.”
— This article originally published as the cover story of the December 2024/January 2025 Retail & Restaurant Facility Business magazine issue. To have your retail or restaurant company featured on our cover, please email Editor Katie Lee at katie@francemediainc.com.