Few things to share about Read and Brew

We started Read and Brew for our own passion and love for books. Read and Brew, also being our dream, we have always tried our best to keep things smooth, but human errors are inevitable, and we accept wherever we went wrong. The way we work would be one in a million. As much as we care about you all, we care the same for our staffs too. Every staff that contributes Read and Brew is treated as a family, as much as we could eat in the same plates, while Read and Brew also sponsors well for their individual or family health insurances.

We (as owners) DO NOT depend on the earnings from Read and Brew for our daily bread and butter. We run Read and Brew to personally stay close to books, while fixing some literary gaps in the society and enjoy the experience altogether. Hence, we expect a blissful and peaceful experience for everyone of us. Read and Brew is run by families like you all. We might not be perfect always, and when we aren’t, we fold our hands and request you all to cooperate.

From our highly valued and regarded library members, we just expect a little responsibility, towards careful handling the borrowed books and timely renewal of the membership whenever it’s time to do so. Of all the terms and conditions, these two are the most important and critical ones for us. Members who have always taken care of these, are undoubtedly our favourites behind the scene. Some of them do feel like families to us. 

We have faced several rough experiences where a member ignores all of our reminders for renewal, and when we finally reach them over call, the member starts arguing, that even after silently ignoring our reminders for 8 days, the day we call them, it disturbs and irritates them. Some even bluntly deny returning the borrowed books back to us. A few of such members even block our contacts. We need to understand that the deposit we take against five books (also considering its quality) is very minimal, and it only covers us partially against the losses. There remains two options for us to deal with this – either we stop the KYC process and increase the deposit to Rs 3000 for everyone, or keep the deposit to Rs 500, and handle such specific adverse scenarios legally, where the member’s KYC details come into picture. To keep the accessibility and affordability in mind, we preferred the latter, while also keeping the deposit value as a choice by the enrolling member.

It’s been 2.5 years journey now. We also need to know that our delivery boys have driven approx 100 kms a day to deliver books to every corner of the city – sometimes completely drenched in the rain themselves, while protecting the book packets – sometimes in the scorching heat of the sun, in the hours when we all prefer staying back at our homes – sometimes in the heavy traffic jams, which we all know how painful it gets in the city roads during peak hours. A thank you could always make them feel more energetic and motivated. 

Let’s together enjoy the experience with books and keep up the support towards our initiative. Because, for a moment if we just imagine Read and Brew not being there, most of us would surely miss the accessibility and affordability related to books.