Mission trumps money for some bookstores and gift shops
Signs on the front door of the World Bank’s unabashedly wonky bookstore, the InfoShop, practically plead for customers to step inside: “Discounts for bank and fund staff & retirees on just about everything!”
It’s not that the shop’s titles aren’t tantalizing. There are books on the South Asia bond market, conditional cash transfers and an HIV prevention plan for Lesotho — a selection that had Salvatore Salzillo, a manager at a federal financial agency, debating between “Development Economics” and “Teachers in Anglophone Africa.”
Even as the recession leaves many retail strips pocked with shuttered stores, the Washington area remains home to some plucky businesses that define themselves as much by their mission as by their profits, which are often nonexistent. In a region with more than its share of wonks and do-gooders, mission-driven shops chug along despite high rents, a treacherous economy or, in the case of the nonprofit bookstore at the Busboys and Poets restaurant on 14th Street NW, customers who steal their lefty books.
Sprinkled around affluent or progressive neighborhoods, the businesses are large and tiny, from the InfoShop to the Culture Shop in the District’s Takoma Park, to Bethesda’s Ten Thousand Villages, which hawks $70 mats made in Burkina Faso and $40 stone sculptures made in Kenya.
