Calvary Chapel Church Bookstores

This is a tough one. We definitely do not want to condemn Christian bookstores, no matter where they are found. Further, the selection of materials at some of these CC bookstores has become excellent. We are only commenting on something that we happened to notice while trying to find a copy of The Magog Invasion, "by" Chuck Missler.

We went to several Christian bookstores in the Southern California area trying to line up a copy to check out the plagiarism charges that we received. In the process we noticed something interesting. We went to Pink Lady in Orange and Bereans in Fullerton to get the book. We also tried the Super Crown next door to Bereans and they also did not have it in stock. In the end, we just went home and decided to try again the next day.

On the next day, we decided to try the CCCM Chapel Store. They always have that sort of material and we thought we would look for some more Missler materials as well as Larry Taylor's book on assistant pastors. Also, the CCBC Chapel store has the books at 15% off and we needed to spend some big bucks to buy what we wanted (Missler's book alone sets you back $12.95 retail price). We knew that the Taylor book would only be at CCCM (or the CCBC bookstore).

Remember that the Christian bookstores all sell their books for full retail. After all they have regular employees to pay and rent on the building to keep up. The church bookstores do not have the overhead that they regular stores do. They are open limited hours in many cases (CCCM is exceptional) and can in many cases keep their overhead low due to sharing space with the church (no rent) as well as using members to work the store on a regular basis.

This started us thinking about fair market principles and market competition. I'm sure that most of you can see where we are going here. We are stuck with a sort of dilemma. We all complain about what a poor selection and what high prices most Christian bookstores have. In the end, we buy lots mail order through CBD or Great Christian Books as they are significantly cheaper and have a good selection of books.