Small Biz Profile: ​Stax Discount Books In Marlborough

MARLBOROUGH, MA—For Michael Joachim and Tracey McCrea, like most bibliophiles, opening a book store was a dream. Unlike others, they made it come true and opened up Stax Discount Books in Marlborough together. Joachim started as a book seller and then a book buyer for Hudson News. Most recently, he was the book buyer for The Paper Store. McCrea is a publishing professional, currently working at Pearson.

Stax Discount Books is located at 193A Boston Post Road West (in Hannaford Plaza next to the Dollar Tree)

When did you open? December of 2016.

What made you decide to go into this type of business? And why this location? Owning a bookstore has always been a dream of ours. We are both passionate readers. We picked Marlborough because it's an area that is growing and would be a great place to start a retail business. Since Borders closed, people in the area haven't had a lot of options for buying books.

What do you like best about it? There's so much! Seeing the look on kids' faces when they pick out a book they want, talking with people who come in about what they like to read and helping them find something new for them to read, picking out the books for the store, knowing that parents can come into the store and find a picture book that's normally $16 for $4,

Biggest struggle? We made plans and budgets and everything but most of it went out the window when we opened. We knew owning a business would be hard but we didn't know what would be the hard parts, if that makes any sense. Mike works at the store full time and does the ordering and management of the store and Tracey has a full time job in Boston and works at the store part time and does the social media and marketing. That's been a struggle trying to balance it all.

What do you see for the future? We see the store doing very well and becoming more connected with the community and more able to meet the needs of the community. We have so many things we want to do. In addition to our book clubs, we want to host storytimes for kids, we want to host nights at the store for people to learn knitting or keeping a bullet journal. We want to see what the needs of the senior citizens are in the community and do what we can to meet those, maybe having a mobile bookstore. There's so much we can see us doing.

Politics and business - how does government affect your business? There are many different ways the government can affect our business. We have employees and any laws about minimum wage and health care affect us and them.

Name another local business you’d send customers to: We are apparently all about food...I would send customers to Halfway Cafe, Stephen Anthony's Restaurant, The Plum Tomato

Photo via Stax Discount Books