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MICHAEL KRUSEThe Big Three - Borders, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million - contend the county just doesn't meet their demographic criteria.
A little more than a year and a half ago, former St. Petersburg Times Hernando County reporter Bobby King wrote that local folks wanted "the biggest, fattest, coffee-brewingest bookstore we can find."
King had lobbied earlier, in column form, for a Chick-fil-A, and successfully, too: The Atlanta-based fast-food joint actually moved in posthaste on State Road 50. He then turned his attention to what he called a "first-class bookery."
"You are close," a Barnes & Noble vice president told him in a story that ran March 1, 2004. "It's not so much if. It's really a matter of when."
The guy said something about five years. Or three. Or even two.
When, then?
The question comes up a lot during the holidays. Greater Hernando County Chamber of Commerce executive director Pat Crowley has been hearing the bookstore talk of late. She thinks Hernando could and would support a major bookstore.
The chains do not agree.
Brooksville real estate broker and developer Buddy Selph was talking with Books-A-Million earlier this year about filling a spot in the upcoming addition to the Coastal Way shopping center on SR 50.
But no dice.
"They just decided they didn't think our market was ready," he said. "They didn't think the demographics were there to support the store."
Books-A-Million is No. 3 on the list of the nation's biggest book sellers. Borders is No. 2. Barnes & Noble is the industry leader.
The public relations people from Borders and Barnes & Noble say their companies have a list of things they look at when trolling for potential sites: consumer demographics, traffic patterns, parking potential, strength of co-tenants, education level, income level, age range in the area and so on.
Here are some of Hernando's key demographics:
The population, as of late November, according to the county planning department's latest update, is 157,209.
More than 78 percent of the population that is 18 and up has a high school diploma or higher. That's just shy of the national average. Less than 13 percent have a college education or higher, though, and that's 9 percent lower than the national average.
The median household income in the 2000 census was $35,572.
Here are some of the places Borders has put stores, or at least announced plans to do so, in the past six or so months:
Manhattan.
The airports in Phoenix and Cincinnati.
Middletown, N.Y.; Crestview, Ky., and Rancho Cucamonga, Calif.
Malaysia.
Manhattan? Totally okay.
The airports? Fine.
But Crestview?
Malaysia?
Here are the demographics of two of the places where some lucky ducks are getting Borders:
Crestview, Ky., the city proper, has a population of just 471. It's in Campbell County and is considered part of the Cincinnati metro area. Campbell County has an 81 percent high school graduation rate, a median household income of $41,903 and had an estimated overall population in 2004 of 87,256 - which, by the way, has gone down since the 2000 census.
Rancho Cucamonga has an 86 percent high school graduation rate and a nice, high household median income of $60,931, but its population figures (127,743 in 2000, an estimated 159,346 last year) are very, very similar to the Hernando stats.
So what's up?
Why doesn't Hernando get a Borders?
"It's not that simple," spokeswoman Holley Stein said last week from the company's Ann Arbor, Mich., headquarters. "There isn't a specific formula necessarily for these things.
"We have stores in smaller towns, we have stores in suburbs, we have stores in what could be considered urban locations. We have stores in a bunch of different locations and a whole bunch of different reasons we go into each store we open."
Barnes & Noble, meanwhile, has a Carrollwood store in Tampa on Dale Mabry Highway, that's the closest store to Hernando, and there's another store in Tampa, two in Brandon, one in Clearwater, one in St. Pete and five in Orlando.
King, the former Times reporter, jump-started the Hernando talk.
It kicked off, kind of, with the Chick-fil-A stuff, when he wrote a column asking for it in December 2002. More like demanding it. A Chick-fil-A opened within the year.
So he wrote another column asking Hernando readers of the Times what they wanted next.
Starbucks?
Olive Garden or Carrabba's?
White Castle or Krispy Kreme or Michael's arts and crafts?
Half of the people who responded wanted the same thing: a major chain bookstore.
No major bookstore then.
No major bookstore now.
Reps from Borders and Barnes & Noble told King in March of last year that they were looking more at New Tampa.
But that was when the county's population was almost 20,000 smaller, before Ruby Tuesday, before a second Lowe's.
Now Hernando is new New Tampa, right?
"I would say we're getting to a critical mass where many of the national chains want to have a presence here," county Office of Business Development director Mike McHugh said last week. "I think the numbers are getting there."
Selph knows this.
The real estate man also knows his wife.
"She spends a ton of time and a ton of money at the Barnes & Noble and Borders in Tampa," he said. "You've got, what, 150,000 people in this county, and you ain't got a bookstore?"
"So many of our people get in their cars and drive south to go to a major bookstore," said Crowley, the director of the chamber.
Neither Barnes & Noble nor Borders has signed a lease anywhere in Hernando. The PR people can say that much at least.
"We don't comment unless there's a lease signed," Borders' Stein said, "and we don't have a lease signed."
"We continue to expand nationally, certainly including Florida," Barnes & Noble spokeswoman Abbe Ruttenberg Serphos wrote in an e-mail to the Times. "We're not able to comment on specific areas. Please let me know if you need anything else."
Meaning other than a bookstore?
King left Hernando in August 2004 and now writes about religion at the Indianapolis Star.
"Bookstores are a fine and wonderful thing," he said by phone one morning last week. "I guess you could say I'm still hopeful for my friends back there that they will have a place where they can sit down to have a cup of coffee and read the newest books.
"I think the day will come."
Times researcher Carolyn Edds contributed to this report. Michael Kruse can be reached at mkruse@sptimes.com or 352 848-1434.