General market store mishap underscores value of the service you provide

You may have heard that a Southern California Costco recently stocked copies of the Bible with a “Fiction” sticker on them. When a pastor noted the error and tried to get someone to help to no avail, he tweeted a photo of the Bible display and FOX News picked up the story.

Costco eventually corrected the error, issuing the following statement: “Costco’s distributor mislabeled a small percentage of the Bibles, however we take responsibility and should have caught the mistake. We are correcting this with them for future distribution. In addition, we are immediately relabeling all mislabeled Bibles. We greatly apologize for this error.”

I expect it quickly came to your mind, as it did to mine, that the “fiction Bible” error underscores the fact that Christian retailers likely know the Scriptures and related products better than general market retailers as a whole—and serve an important need in their communities. As a longtime customer of Christian retail stores, I am thankful for frontliners who keep displays in order and can answer questions from their significant knowledge of the products they sell.

Each year we celebrate the quality of their products in our Christian Retailing’s Best awards. With the 2014 awards season upon us, we look forward to seeing what publishers, authors, music labels, DVD companies and gift suppliers will deem worthy to nominate. What will they consider their best products from last year—and will Christian retailers and others from our industry agree? We’ll find out soon enough!

Finally, I remember a Christian retailer saying to me once that he never realized we would want feedback from our readers. I appreciated his honest surprise, but yes, we do! 

We value your honest assessment of our work at Christian Retailing and want to know if what we do every day is serving our readers well. So, our contact information is available to you in each issue (see p. 3), or if you’d like to get to know our editorial and advertising team members, visit our Contact Us page at www.christianretailing.com. 

At our website, you also will find a wealth of resources, including more news than we can fit into our print issue; links to our free digital issue; and the New Release Listing, with its abundance of new products. See you there!