We recently had a chance to help our good friends at Divine Chocolate move. We encourage all we know to visit their website and try one of their products(Toffee Crunch and the Milk Chocolate Crunch are my most beloved).

Chocolate is good. Maybe we can mostly agree on that. It’s even better when you know you are consuming a sustainable and fairly traded and grown product. That’s what these people are all about.

We’ve succeeded in our business because we believe in treating people fairly. Being upfront and honest. That’s why we are so honored to help a company like Divine even in the most minor capacity. It’s the kind of place where the people that sell the chocolate have met the people who grow the chocolate. In fact the farmers even own about 45% of the company!

I have to also give them major props for helping us out when Bookstore Movers was sending packages to soldiers and aid workers in Afghanistan. Divine Chocolate hooked us up with armloads of chocolate bars. Every single person that wrote back to thank us mentioned that chocolate.

You can grab yourself a sample of Divine at E Street Cinema for the upcoming Filmfest DC April 12-22, and you can always friend those delicious folks at www.facebook.com/DivineChocolateUSA

Bookstore Movers was named “Best D.C. Movers” by the Washington City Paper again this year! That makes three years in a row, which blows our minds but makes the scattered brain matter very happy. See all results here. Also, we apparently won by the 2nd largest margin in the reader poll. See image below. We feel very loved.

President Obama made a visit to a local DC book store last week, Kramerbooks (no Capitol Hill Books, but good), and one of our movers, Beau, got to meet him. See video here. Beau handled the meeting with the grace we would expect out of such a fine lad; with just a little nervous awkwardness mixed in.

“I hope that the store will stay around, but I am in the buggy whip era. Know what that means? For a while, they made buggy whips because not everyone had a car. With buggies, you needed a whip to get the horse to trot. With the car, the buggy whip people went out of business slowly. So, that is me, slowly going out of business. Big book shops are closing down, and those two-faced bureaucratic Johnny Onenotes in the D.C. government scream out the window that they want to help small businesses, and then close the window. So, I have property taxes, Kindle, and Amazon working against me.”

“I know it is just a matter of time before they push me out and make this another Starbucks, so that we can have more crap on every corner of this city.”

Jim Toole is the owner of Capitol Hill Books at 657 C Street Southeast.

Full piece here.

“I started working at a used bookstore and fell in love with the place — it’s a temple, a sanctuary. The name Bookstore Movers is because [I’m] saving up to buy Capitol Hill Books when the owner retires. But working at a bookstore isn’t always as intellectually engaging as you might hope. You cannot be world-weary and having an existential crisis when you are carrying 100 boxes. I’ve never known someone to do a full 10-hour day of moving and be depressed. You have a very clear, tangible sense of what you’ve accomplished. You took one apartment full of stuff and emptied it. And then you filled a new one and helped people start a new chapter in their life.”

“We are right there in the epicenter of an already stressful situation. You’re there at the beginning of a new job or a breakup of a marriage or when someone is moving in with their partner. You see the kids in a divorce upset because they’ll never see the dog again. There are no right words there — you just try to be a comforting presence. You have to be the one thing going according to plan.”

Full piece here.

We’ve pasted the article here because Roll Call is a subscription site. Hopefully we won’t get in trouble for this…

A Literary Crew to Lug Your Life Treasures

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the realm of Craigslist ads for moving companies, the word  “erudite” sticks out like a leather-bound volume of Camus on a Walmart shelf. As does “bibliophilic.”

Many movers’ online advertisements boast of their brawn and speed (frequently employing poor grammar and an excess of exclamation points!!!!), but Bookstore Movers, based on Capitol Hill, sells a more literary brand.

Its owner, Matt Wixon, is a part-time employee of Capitol Hill Books, the creaky row-house shop near Eastern Market known for its floor-to-ceiling towers of secondhand tomes. Wixon hopes to someday buy the store from its current owner when he retires, and he started the moving company, with help from fellow bookstore employees Aaron Beckwith and Kyle Burk, as a way to raise the funds he’ll need.

Wixon is a former philosophy and English major whose shaved head and goatee give him the look of a nightclub bouncer. Still, on a recent morning, he has a bit of down time in between moving jobs, and he seems perfectly at home among the bookstore’s sagging shelves. As he scales the store’s narrow stairs — lined, of course, with teetering stacks — he has to shift his broad shoulders sideways to avoid knocking down a paperback or two.

The moving company is a means to an end, and the goal is to preserve Capitol Hill Books, a quirky outpost in a world dominated by iPads and Amazon.com.

“You’re really engaged in a labor of love,” Wixon says. “You feel like you’re battling forces of inevitability.”

Jim Toole, the bookstore’s current owner, approached his young employees several years ago with the idea that they might take over the store someday.

“I’m not going to live forever, and I thought maybe they will bring some verve and new ideas,” says Toole. He declines to give his age but admits, “I’m just a stale old fart.”

Toole, a former Navy officer, is one of Capitol Hill’s characters, known for a gruff demeanor and ultra-dry humor that serves as a kind of litmus test: Either you get it and you become a loyal customer, or you don’t. Toole, who bought the bookstore in 1994, has taught his potential successors the essentials of running the bookstore, which he says mostly comes down to finding more books. Most other kinds of stores sell products that can be ordered wholesale. A used-bookstore owner, though, must constantly shuck and jive to stock his shelves, scouring estate sales, auctions and charity book sales.

Wixon doesn’t know just how much money he’ll need to raise. He might just buy the store’s stock and the name, or he might try a trickier feat in Washington’s hot real-estate market and purchase the building from Toole. He’s also unsure when he’ll need the money. Toole isn’t ready to give up the used-book game just yet, Wixon says.

But Toole himself has a contradictory story. He says he’s ready to retire once Wixon can slap a big enough check on the table. But then his eyes twinkle. Was that one of his inscrutable jokes?

Wixon is pondering changes he might make to the store, possibly keeping later hours and opening a cafe in the back. Its eccentricity, though, will remain.

“I don’t want to change it too much,” he says. “I like the way it is — a suspended tidal wave of books that, at any moment, might engulf you.”

After graduating in 2000 from the College of William and Mary and kicking around for a few years doing social work, Wixon, an Arlington, Va., native, came back to Washington and found a job at Capitol Hill Books. He started picking up manual labor jobs on then-nascent Craigslist, and he eventually placed his own ads.

Now, he owns two trucks and plans to buy a third next month.

The story of a scrappy gang of overeducated guys with the dream of owning an indie used bookstore is a marketing gold mine. Imagine the characters in “High Fidelity” on an underdog mission a la the “Bad News Bears.”

Bookstore Movers’ Craigslist ads play up the pathos: “Employees of a local independent used bookstore on Capitol Hill do moves to save up to purchase it upon the owner’s retirement,” they read.

The pitch often attracts clients with big book collections; they are Hill staffers and labor activists, Republican National Committee employees and teachers.

“They’re just people who love books and like the idea of being moved by people who love books,” Wixon says.

The company’s six employees are all connected to the bookstore in some way. Either like Wixon, Beckwith and Burk, they have worked at the shop, or they know employees.

“One guy is the younger brother of a girl who works at the front desk, and another is the ex-boyfriend of another girl who works there,” he says.

Only one employee came from outside the Capitol Hill Books orbit: When the Washington City Paper named the company D.C.’s “Best Mover,” the mention prompted a call from a kindred spirit seeking work — a philosophy graduate student from Georgetown University.

Still, Wixon allows that a college degree — and the “erudition” they boast of in their ads — has limited practical benefits during a move.

“It might help us to have more interesting conversations with each other in the truck,” he says.

We were named Best D.C. Movers of 2011 by the D.C. City Paper, which makes two years in a row. It’s nice to have your hard work recognized. This year was by a popular vote (last year by editorial).

Bookstore Movers

Matt Wixon started taking moving jobs as a way to supplement his income from working at Capitol Hill Books. “I found I kind of enjoyed the clarity you get with physical labor,” he says. Eventually the project grew as other employees of the bookstore joined Wixon in his enterprise. Last year Wixon made things official, purchasing his own truck and forming an LLC. All of the movers share some sort of connection to the bookstore, and many have degrees from schools like Princeton and William & Mary. Wixon says business has been so brisk he has to turn away twice as many clients as he accepts, but he wants to handle any expansion as methodically as he handles your possessions. Two days before I was scheduled to move, for example, the District received more than a foot of snow. I was certain my planning would be sacrificed along with a few days of work. Bookstore Movers got my stuff to my new place within hours. It was hardly the movers’ greatest challenge: One client told the movers they would be moving his plywood and tinfoil time machine. “We were very delicate and careful with it, so hopefully it’s still functional,” Wixon says. “That’s kind of the key to moving, is being adaptable. Snow, blocked loading docks, trick couches, you’ve got to figure out a way to deal with it. Maybe that’s part of the fun.”

—Gautham Nagesh

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/bestofdc/2010/goodsandservices/staffpicks/best-movers

We’ve finally made the upgrade from a Sole Proprietorship to an LLC.  Yay!