While small businesses struggle, a Myrtle Beach bookstore is thriving in the pandemic
As life shut down all around them in March, life for Cortney and Eli Hornyak didn’t change much, even when the state forced them to shutter their used bookstore in the small beach town of Murrells Inlet.
If anything, business got better.
The couple’s two-year-old bookstore, The Bookworm, found a retail niche in the pandemic that evaded so many other brick-and-mortar businesses. Their customers, stuck at home without much else to do — beaches, restaurants and even live sports all closed or suspended — started reading more ... and more.
“We’ve had a steady incline of business since we opened, which has been really great,” Cortney Hornyak said. “And then once the pandemic hits, I think people were a little afraid to get out of the house. Things were a little bit slow. But everyone has a ton of time on their hands, so we’ve been busy with that. More people are reading.”
Nestled at the end of a nondescript strip mall on Highway 707, The Bookworm isn’t the most flashy place. As one of the few used bookstores in the region, though, it’s one of the only bookstores that comes up in a Google search.
Just because the inside of the store closed in March, however, didn’t mean longtime customers stopped calling. Hornyak only lives five minutes away from the store, so she quickly pivoted to curbside pickup. People could call in and pay via Paypal or Venmo, and Hornyak put them on a schedule for coming by to grab their books.
After the store reopened in April, Hornyak said her biggest change was no longer accepting new books from customers. So much information about how the coronavirus spread was unconfirmed or understudied at the time.
“We weren’t sure how the virus was spreading,” she said. “Every day you would hear something different, if it stayed on surfaces or it’s not going to stay on paper.”
Bookworm’s customers are their main source of new inventory. For a time, Hornyak said they did run out of books by some of the most popular authors — the James Pattersons,John Grishams and the like.
Running out of books altogether? Never a worry. Not only is the bookstore itself packed full of books — barely a few feet separate the shelves from each other — so is Hornyak’s home.
One customer, George Cathrall stopped by on a recent Wednesday morning just half an hour after the store open. He brought a handful of titles with him to exchange, and a list of dozens more that he wanted to find.
Retired for 17 years, the 72-year-old considers himself a “lightning-fast” reader, blazing through 1,000 or more pages a week. He’s one of Bookworm’s regulars, stopping by almost every week to find new titles and exchange the ones he’s finished.
This week, he was on the hunt for L.T. Ryan books like “The First Deception” and “Deadly Distance.” Hornyak knew where they were as soon as he said the names. She maintains that she doesn’t have the placement of every book in the store memorized, but an untrained observer might think otherwise.
“The more time you spend here, you’re like, ‘Oh, it’s over on that specific shelf, down six books,’” she says, trailing off and trying to contain her laughter.
For customer Debbie Lyons, the ability to resell books after she’s done with them ensures her house stays uncluttered.
“You can always bring stuff back,” Lyons said. “I don’t keep things anymore. We have like five of us that will rotate books and put our initials in the back (before) giving it to the next person, and when they’re done, they come here.”
Hornyak said her regulars are some of her favorite customers. Talking to them, she both gives and gets suggestions on what to read next.
“We have such great regulars. They’re ... characters, too,” she said. “They are a lot of fun. I’m not great with names, but someone comes in and I know exactly what they got the last time.”
The tourists are always fun as well, she said, and their reading habits are a bit more predictable. During the summertime, the “beach lady” books, novels by Mary Kay Andrews and Dorthea Benton Frank, fly off the shelves when people come to town looking for something to read by the water.
As a used bookstore, Hornyak said Bookworm fills a niche that online retailers like Amazon can’t compete as easily with. In this market, many customers find it easier just to go to a real store and browse for hidden treasures.
It goes without saying that Hornyak is an avid reader herself, so seeing the popularity books grow in recent months has been particularly exciting.
“Everybody is reading,” she said. “Even people who might not have been very avid readers before are now.”
This story was originally published February 5, 2021 at 7:00 AM with the headline "While small businesses struggle, a Myrtle Beach bookstore is thriving in the pandemic."
