Beyond The Register, with Keenan Kok-Carlson
8 Years In, She's Still Behind the Counter. On Purpose. With Bookstore Owner Christina Rosso-Schneider
Christina Rosso-Schneider and her husband Alex got married six weeks before opening A Novel Idea in Philadelphia's East Passyunk neighborhood. Almost eight years later, the store still runs on just the two of them and a rotating pair of part-timers, and that's mostly by design. When your name and your face are the reason customers walk in, Christina says, hiring around that doesn't lighten the load. It hands someone else the weight of a job they can't actually do for you. That community has carried the store through two crises eight years apart. A 2020 GoFundMe raised $3,750 to get through a shutdown that classified bookstores as nonessential. A second campaign in 2023, aimed at $10,000, brought in $25,700 in a single weekend. Christina says she still gets chills talking about it. She's also a published writer with two small-press books and a debut novel, The Last Sheaf, coming from Blackstone Publishing in 2027, and she talks openly here about running a retail business with chronic illness and being colorblind, something she says has never come up on a podcast before. Her answer to the question every small business owner eventually asks, what actually happens when the owners are the product, is the most useful part of this conversation. In this episode: - Why closing up shop for a planned summer break felt like both a win and a surrender - The one steady employee Christina and Alex ever hired, and the lesson about mixing friendship and payroll that came out of it - What happens when the owners are the product: what can get handed off, and what can't - The $3,750 GoFundMe that got them through 2020, and the $25,700 one that came in over a single weekend in 2023 - Eight years married and still working the same small space together, and the line they use to check in with each other: "where are you on the page?" - Running a queer, disabled, woman-owned bookstore, and the accessibility conversation Christina says no one has asked her to have before - Why success, for Christina, was never about the money Subscribe to Beyond the Register for real conversations with the people keeping small retail alive. Listen on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. Beyond the Register is brought to you by Genius™ (Link globalpayments.com/genius ) from Global Payments, the retail point of sale system designed to help busy store owners track inventory, manage customers and take payments.
