A little more than a year ago, in late February, as reports of a virus started increasing, Roxanne Coady, like most of us, was a little bit concerned. She figured that things might slow down, at worst maybe for a month or so.

“Then we’d all be back,” she thought at the time.

On March 20 of last year, as cases of the deadly virus spiked, a statewide stay-at-home order went into effect to help save lives and slow the spread. As March turned into April, sales at her store, R.J. Julia Booksellers (RJJ) in Madison, slipped to about 50 percent of what they had been. And then they dipped lower.

Up until then, in her 30 years as the head of the iconic local indie bookstore with a national reputation, there were only two times when she thought the store might not make it. The first time? Five years into starting the business, the cost of running the store finally burnt through her start-up financial nest egg. The second? That was during The Great Recession, from about 2007 to 2009, when hundreds of thousands businesses nationwide ceased operations.

March and April 2020, the pandemic, became the third time she stayed awake nights fearing the worst.

“I thought…’How am I going to pay my staff? Are we going to go bankrupt?’ On the eve of our celebrating our 30th anniversary, I thought, ‘Is this it?’”

Through sleepless nights filled with dread and days filled with furious activity and innovation, there emerged a heroic effort on the part of the people working at the Madison and Middletown stores, a heartfelt and enthusiastic response from customers, and, well, dear reader, it wasn’t the end.

RJJ once again weathered the storm, and Coady is celebrating by hosting a book club, her first in about 20 years, that will kick off with a discussion of the novel The Midnight Library by Matt Haig on Tuesday, March 30 at noon. More information and registration is available at www.rjjulia.com/event.

At the center of the novel is a library that contains an infinite number of books, one that tells the story of Nora, the main character, as she lived her life. The other books contain the stories of lives she might have lived, had she made different choices. She must answer this question: Would any of those lives have been better? Should she choose another?

Coady knows this is a the book that will generate lively discussion, especially now. It focuses on what it means to live well, the threat of death, the nature of regret, and how to make the most of whatever time we might have left.

“As you get older, you can’t help but think of some of these things,” she says. “Did you live the life you wanted to live? The one you were meant to live? The one you thought you lived?...I think it will be a fun discussion.”

Some Survived, Some Didn’t

If you stand on Madison’s main street downtown, facing RJJ, to the right side of the store, in the brick wall, there is now a sliding glass window with a sturdy green awning that can be cheerfully lit up at night. Some of the booksellers call it the “ice cream window” and say, wouldn’t it be fun if someday they could actually give away ice cream from the window.

Right now, it is set up to dispense treats of another sort, the games, the puzzles, the clothes and home goods, and mostly, the books that RJJ customers have ordered for pick-up, purchases that will brighten their day, help get them through yet another weekend stuck at home, or be dropped on someone’s doorstep to brighten their day or weekend.

Lori Fazio, RJJ’s chief operating officer, says the window has always been there, but it hadn’t really been used. The awning and the lights in the alley are brand new. It’s known as the ice cream window, she says, but they plan to come up with an official name for it and christen it soon with some fun fanfare.

With this window, customers who remain concerned about shopping in the store, or even customers who are just in a bit of a rush, can pick up pre-ordered items without setting foot inside.

Around the corner from the ice cream window is the store’s front door facing Boston Post Road and the movie theater that remains closed (we all hope just for now) due to the pandemic. There are many stores and restaurants that, like the bookstore, have managed to survive, but the town’s main street is pockmarked with several empty storefronts.

An article from The Wall Street Journal in December reported that one in three businesses in Connecticut closed their doors since the start of the pandemic. Since then, it has gotten worse. In Connecticut, as of Feb. 22, the number of small businesses open decreased by 40.2 percent compared to January 2020, according to statistics compiled by Opportunity Insights, a Harvard University-based team of researchers and policy analysts.

Next to the bookstore’s front door is a stand with baskets. Customers are asked to bring in a basket while making their purchases. If no baskets are left, they are asked to wait. The number of baskets is the same as the number of people that can safely come inside the store.

When things return to normal, whenever that might be and whatever that might mean, the baskets will return to being an option rather than a way to handle crowd size. The service window with the cute green awning will remain, says Coady. After a year of innovating, adjusting, reacting, evaluating, and innovating again, as the state continues to open up and return to what some say might be some sort of recovery, there is now a process of deciding, from the past year, what stays and what goes.

Both Coady and Fazio agree that one of the good things to come out of the past year, and one that will remain beneficial, is the store’s more robust online presence, and the ease with which existing and new customers continue to use it, in addition to in-person visits. Unlike some online operations, ordering online at RJJ might include talking or exchanging emails with one of the booksellers you know if there is a glitch or question or any confusion, or even if someone just needs a personal recommendation for which book or which puzzle to buy next.

“We actually invested a lot of time and resources into making the site more user friendly,” Fazio says. “While we felt it was a good website, we didn’t feel that everybody could benefit from it as easily as we hoped. We’ve seen a significant change in web sales now that we have changed it. And I think that will last. I think there will be more of a mix. We’re busy in the store, but we realize that the comfort level of people shopping in the store will vary, for a year or longer.”

And, for now, the plexiglass protection for staff inside the store will stay for as long as it is deemed necessary. Coady, who is old enough to have been at heightened risk during the pandemic and so had to work from home, says she is eternally grateful for her frontline workers who staffed the store, and pivoted with the store as it came up with one tactic after another to survive this past year.

‘We Can’t Let Our Guard Down’

Fazio, who manages the RJJ’s Middletown store as well as the Madison location, says it was a bit nerve-wracking to deal with both stores, but that she constantly immersed herself in the latest best practices, which kept shifting as the science caught up the intricacies of the pandemic.

“I did some back and forth. I wanted to be there for them, but I didn’t want them to be uncomfortable,” since, potentially, any COVID spread at one store could have then affected the other. “I kind of went with my gut and did what was needed of me. So it was difficult. But there wasn’t a time when I felt unsafe.

“There was uncertainty for sure. But I said to myself, I am going to be a demon about following guidelines. If there is something that has to be changed or shifted, or if people are a little too close, I am going to be on you,” she continues. “And everybody was great. Over and over, I said, ‘We can’t let our guard down.’ I was a little bit forceful about it. But it came from a place of caring.”

In addition to making sure staff stayed safe, the bookstore’s other tactics for survival including a Book for Kids program implemented around the time of the state shut down. Customers were invited to make a donation, and those donations were put toward the purchase of books for children in New Haven who otherwise might not be able to afford a new book. It was so successful that it benefited children in several of the state’s largest cities, and it helped keep the store afloat and pay salaries at a critical time as other sales slumped.

Helping Kids Helped The Store

“We raised $45,000 from customers to buy books to hand out to kids. That carried our payroll for a bit before we got PPP [proceeds from the federal Paycheck Protection Program]. We got donations from readers and kids got books with their free lunch pick ups in New Haven,” Coady says. “Then [U.S. Senator] Chris Murphy reached out to me and we ended up distributing books to free-lunch kids in Waterbury, Bridgeport, Norwalk, Middletown, and New Haven.”

Coady worked giving out books at a few of the distributions.

“And, you know what, it was one of those moments where I felt so grateful to be able to do what I do. The excitement of these kids seeing this table full of books and being able to pick out any two they might want. And these were kids that might now own a book, or own very few.”

The federal Paycheck Protection Program helped keep the store in business for another few months.

Another tactic, after the state shutdown, and the store was closed to customers, Coady says, was to transform the store, in a matter of days, from a cozy, neighborhood bookstore into a fast-moving fulfillment center so that the store could feed customers’ deep hunger for distraction in the form of books, games, and puzzles, puzzles, and more puzzles. The entire interior of the store was essentially stripped down and re-imagined so that orders could be fulfilled as quickly as they came in over the phone or online.

“We were doing curbside and fulfilling web orders with a small skeleton crew, maybe 10 of us, all following strict protocols. It was insane and at the same time exhilarating. We were running up and down stairs, between the fulfillment center and the phones. And the phones were non-stop. I can’t even describe it,” Fazio says. “Yet we knew we had to forge on. People needed us. At the end of every day, we went home in exhaustion. But we knew that this was what it was going to take.”

Fazio says she is among customers who succumbed to an intense and constant craving for puzzles. Never before had the store sold so many puzzles to so many people.

“I was really surprised by how many puzzles people bought. And I’m included in that,” she says. “My youngest daughter and I became puzzle maniacs. Even after I came home so exhausted. It was a way for us to shift our brains. It helped us focus and it helped us unwind.”

Balancing a Stool with Three Legs

Another tactic the store employed, and one that helped them retain all of the staff members who wanted to stay on during the pandemic, was making use of Connecticut Department of Labor’s Shared Work Program, which allows businesses to temporarily reduce employee hours and use partial unemployment benefits to fill in for lost wages. The goal is to prevent permanent layoffs.

“When things were really tough and out of whack, we used the workshare program in Connecticut. So we put some of the salaried people on like 20 percent workshare,” Coady says.

Another tactic was constant communication, including weekly staff meetings and candid email communications.

“I was writing to the staff constantly,” Coady says. “I told them, ‘My job is to take a stool with three legs and balance it.’ One leg is our staff, one leg is our customers, and the other is the financial viability of R.J. Julia’s. I told them I will do my damndest to balance those three things. And, in the end, no staff member was furloughed. We had a number of people who chose not to work, but anyone who wanted to work, they worked.”

While all of those tactics were critical to the survival of the store, Coady says the overall strategy was one she has employed for 30 years, through good times and through those three particularly bad times. And that strategy is this: trusting the staff and trusting the customers, and then just doing the right thing.

“You always have to remember it’s a long game. I think about that when we talk about, in the store, having to make some difficult decision. And what I always say is that the filter is, what is the right thing to do? What is right for the staff? What is right for the customer? That way, you can’t make a bad decision. You might make a wrong decision, but you won’t make a bad decision.”

She says the secret to the store’s success in the past year really was that simple: great staff, led by Fazio and Julie Arriens, and the store’s great customers.

“The staff were heroic. They remain committed to our mission and our customers. They were extraordinary. And our customers understood that their support was more important than ever,” she says. “And, so, that, with the combination of government programs, a 30-year reputation with our staff and customers, and the loyalty of both of those groups, that got us through.”

A Dream within Reach

Coady looks back at the past year and expresses sorrow for so many who have lost so much, whether it’s a business or, worse, a family member or friend. More than 7,600 people have died in Connecticut, more than 518,000 have died across the country, due to COVID. The toll continues to rise, even as so much hope is on the horizon.

“No one dear to me was hospitalized or, even worse, died,” she says. “Without having to had experienced that awful sadness, this past year has been a year of experiencing people’s kindness and loyalty and goodwill.”

She is looking forward to talking about The Midnight Library with her community. She’s not sure which books she will pick for the other meetings of the book club, but one of the things she looks forward to most is the day when she can have one of those events in person, in the store, rather than just online.

The store likely will continue to offer some events online, as it allows more people from all over the country to participate, but having a group of book-loving people huddled in the cozy store, ready to listen and then talk about a book, seems like a dream that is within reach.

“Being able to have events in the store again is what I’m looking forward to most,” she says. “Again, it will probably be 2022. I can’t imagine it will be before then. Or maybe in October or November of this year. But just that whole experience of watching customers who are so happy to meet an author and an author so happy to meet readers. Those are magical moments.”