By David Lavrinovich, Alumni Editor and Olyver LaGabed, Staff Writer
A longstanding pillar of Knoxville, Tennessee, McKay’s Used Bookstore, has announced that it will be closing. After 40 years of service, its last day of operation will be on Sunday, May 3, 2026. This follows the Knoxville store’s employees unionizing in November 2022 and striking for fair wages and better working conditions. There’s no place quite like McKay’s in East Tennessee, aside from its locations in other cities, which is what makes their closure all the more impactful, especially to Pellissippi State Community College students.
Economics
Despite having locations in multiple cities, McKay’s Knoxville location uniquely benefited the surrounding community. Independent bookstores give a greater boost to local economies, and according to Straight Arrow News, they have a 405% greater local impact than larger corporations offering the same services. McKay’s also offered a place for individuals to sell or donate their pre-loved belongings rather than adding them to landfills. Now that Knoxville’s local buy-and-sell shop is out of order, residents are left without a place to buy necessary resources at reasonable prices, and without a place to sell items they’d otherwise waste.
Another result of McKay’s shutting down is the loss of a substantial number of jobs. More than 50 employees will be put out of work by the store’s abrupt closing. Many employees of McKay’s had been there for several years, and the store’s abrupt closure is something that, frankly, not even residents saw coming.
This business decision is anything but simple; it will reverberate across the Knoxville economy and have a lasting cost. That’s not only the aftermath of McKay’s shutting down, though.
Education
Bookstores are crucial for encouraging literacy amongst all ages, but especially children and students. Without McKay’s, many are losing an affordable selection of a variety of books. McKay’s housed several genres of fiction, as well as cookbooks, college textbooks, and books for learning English as a second language. Not to mention that tools like calculators, rulers, flashcards, and more were much more affordable at McKay’s. These are just a few examples of the many different types of learning materials the shop had available for purchase.
The loss of such a valuable resource does not bode well for the literacy crisis in the U.S. and particularly for the state of Tennessee, which ranks in 39th place for literacy rates across the country in a study done by the Institute of Education Sciences. This particularly impacts students who have to shop for their classes on top of paying tuition fees. Oftentimes, textbooks are easily over a hundred dollars, so many students rely on stores like McKay’s to sell easy-to-access textbooks for a lower price.
The closing of McKay’s certainly won’t help schooling and can be expected to have an aftermath on the state of education in Knoxville, as people inside and outside of school lose the easy access to books and media that McKay’s supplies. Many students may be led to purchase overly expensive books, get scammed online from attempted piracy of necessary materials, and may even fail specific classes simply due to a lack of resources. Stores like McKay’s aren’t just cool, retro archives where people sell physical media they don’t want anymore. Thrift stores like McKay’s often act as an incredibly necessary resource for students who are unable to fund their education at the unfair rate that many are being asked to do so.
Third Places
Furthermore, the Knoxville community will be harmed by losing a significant third place, somewhere people can go outside of home, school, and work. The closure of McKay’s will lead to people all over Knoxville spending more money, discovering less media, and feeling more alienated as residents lose a pivotal third place within the city, one of the few third places that still exist in the city at all.
The disappearances of third places are happening on a national scale, with the amount of time Americans spend with friends dropping by 37% between 2014 and 2019, according to Business Insider. This has drastic effects on social and mental health, and is something that many Knoxvillians are expecting following this closure. The loss of a third place like McKay’s means that many people in Knoxville will have to find other substitutes or be left lacking in community.
Physical Media
Patrons of the used bookstore are now left wondering where they can buy, sell, and trade their gently loved items. McKay’s was unlike other businesses, which usually cater to one niche, as it not only offered books, but also comics, CDs, DVDs, vinyl records, video games, toys, and more.
With its closure, Knoxvillians will have a much harder time obtaining and owning physical media in an age where digital copies and subscription services are becoming the norm. This will lead to more consumption, more waste, and more tossing of items that never needed to be thrown out to begin with. Of course, many thrift stores in the area do act as a place for people to house their old items, however many of the popular ones in East Tennessee (specifically Karm Thrift Stores) wind up compartmentalizing and tossing items that don’t sell rather than donating to organizations in need.
This ultimately leads to more waste, especially as thrifting becomes less and less accessible to individuals in need due to fast fashion trends and the over-consumption of necessary goods. Ultimately, in the Knoxville area and East Tennessee region in general, the closure of McKay’s poses a truly detrimental question: why bother donating or thrifting when everything gets wasted in the end, when everything is just going to get more expensive? Is it even worth it to put the effort in anymore? While Knoxville still has options like popular thrift stores such as Goodwill, Karm, and others, the shutdown of McKay’s is still a huge detriment to the community.
The Big Picture
At the end of the day, McKay’s was more than a business. McKay’s was a staple in Knoxville’s community, a place where individuals could go to teach themselves and each other about literature, music, and art. It was a form of income for some, a building that held generations of invaluable media to most, and to everyone, a centerpiece of Knoxville’s community. Now that it’s closing, Knoxville will miss out on a lot of benefits that the shop provided, and cannot be replaced by anything else.
There are other places in Knoxville to thrift and pick up old media, but none are as accessible and widespread in their variety of media as McKay’s. With the closure of McKay’s, many students will not be able to find textbooks at affordable prices, many pieces of physical media will be lost to landfills and time, and the thrifting community in Knoxville loses its centerpiece. With only a few days until McKay’s closes down, Knoxville is already grieving and preparing to say its farewells to the beloved store.
