From Booksellers to Owners

hen the pandemic brought their business to a standstill in March 2020, the owners of Trident Booksellers & Café in Boulder, Colorado, initially furloughed all but five of their staff of about twenty-two. “Everything went sideways when COVID hit,” recalls co-owner and general manager Peter Jones. “We had to do some major pivots to stay in business.” At the top of his mind was also the well-being of Trident’s staff: Witnessing the precarity of the book-store’s team, who as artists and non-traditional workers lacked the social safety nets that other careers provide, Jones persuaded the store’s three owners to transition to an employee-owned model, a move that he hoped would give the employees a sense of stability.