How Sisyphe, China's Biggest Mall Bookstore Chain, Actually Makes Money
A trending explainer has pulled back the curtain on Sisyphe's business model: the books are the bait, coffee and stationery are the profit, and the cheapest rent in the mall goes to the store that makes the mall look cultured.
The question that trended on Thursday — 西西弗书店是如何盈利的, "How does Sisyphe bookstore make a profit?" — has the quality of a question everyone already knows the answer to but wanted said out loud. Sisyphe (西西弗书店) is the bookstore chain you meet in Chinese shopping malls: warm wood, café smell, a children's cart of picture books arranged at toddler height, hundreds of stores across the country. The video that set off the trend, liked more than 10,000 times, walks through one of its stores and asks how, in an economy where almost nobody buys books, this survives.
The replies compressed into a three-step model that reads like a seminar on modern retail. Step one: bestsellers at the front as bait — the books bring the traffic, and the chain accepts their thin margins as a marketing cost. Step two: coffee and licensed stationery — the goods people actually buy, at margins the book trade can only dream of. As one much-shared summary put it: "Book margins are 30 percent; coffee and cultural-creative goods run 70. You sit there all afternoon, order a latte, and pick up a notebook on the way out." Step three is the quiet one: the lease. Malls want a "cultural flagship" that keeps shoppers lingering, and they price the rent accordingly. "Selling books is the face; selling space is the substance," the summary concluded. "You're not buying a book at Sisyphe — you're paying a seat fee. Inside a shopping mall, quiet is the most expensive luxury."
One reply came from a scientist with a bookstore habit: the palaeontologist Xing Lida, whose take was blunter. "Membership cards, membership cards, membership cards," he wrote — the prepaid cards that lock customers in — "plus coffee (huge margin), licensed goods (huge margin), public-domain classics, and very long payment terms from the publishers. Get an IP in to open the show, don't do anything stupid, and you'll be fine." The payment terms are the detail an outsider misses: a chain that settles with publishers on long cycles is, in effect, borrowing from them interest-free to finance its next store.
The model grew out of a specific Chinese bargain. Sisyphe opened in Zunyi, Guizhou, in 1993 and expanded by following the country's mall developers — a bookstore as the anchor that malls, competing for footfall in an e-commerce age, will subsidize. While the Anglophone high street lost its bookshops to online retail, Chinese landlords needed exactly what a bookstore sells: dwell time, gentility, a place for a family to spend an hour. The interiors are the tell — everything is built for lingering, from the café to the kids' cart, and the towering book walls are arranged as much to be photographed as to be browsed.
That bargain — culture as mall decoration — runs across Chinese retail; it is the same logic that had shopping malls putting scientists on their billboards over the holiday. Whether it is a betrayal of the bookshop or its last lifeboat was the argument the trend actually hosted. What the trending arithmetic establishes is narrower but firmer: in today's China, the bookstore's real customer is the mall.