Nanay Coring - The National Bookstore Story

Nanay Coring or also known as Coring Ramos, owner of the largest chain of bookstores across the country. Her story is truly an inspiring one as she built the bookstore business from scratch three times with a lot of challenges. 

Nanay Coring was born in Sta Cruz, Laguna on Sept 1923. She was one of the six children born to entrepreneur parents and grandparents. Her parents used to run a store selling a lot of stuff while her grandparents had a market stall where young Coring got used to see customers get their item on credit. As time goes her grandparents did not manage the business carefully because of too much credit and their business fell.

A year after they went to Manila. Their parent struggled hard to feed their six children. Her elder sisters help their family by working in a bubble gum factory. Coring spend her summer vacations doing summer jobs from working on a candy factory to peeling off papers from used cigarette sticks and selling them to cigarette factories for 5 centavo per pack. From then on young Coring started her entrepreneurial skills, she hired kids paying them 5 centavos for every 2 pack of cigarettes. As early as 10 years old she was practicing business and leveraging.

Immediately after finishing high school she worked as a salesgirl at Goodwill Bookstore owned by the family of her present husband Mr Jose Ramos. In the year 1940 Ramos family needed someone to look after a new branch they set up at Escolta Manila. Jose Ramos took over it and asked Coring to work with him in that branch. There their love story began and after several months they named it as National Bookstore.

Their parents were against it because Coring was just 18 years old that time. She was told to stay in her province to keep her away from Jose Ramos. But love never dies, Coring with just 11 pesos in her pocket struggled to went back in Manila just to marry Jose. Shortly after their marriage their families accepted them as couple. After a year Coring gave birth to twins: Alberto Ramos (present president of National Bookstore) and Benjamin Ramos (present vice president of National Bookstore).

As mentioned above their business the National Bookstore faced a lot of setbacks. It was rebuilt three times from scratch.

She recalled during the Japanese occupation, that the soldiers would look on each and every book on sale and if they found out questionable books they would just tear of the pages leaving them useless. As an idea instead of selling books Coring and her husband fill their bookshelves with candles, soaps, clothes, slippers, toys, papers and cigarettes. Second when the Americans came, their store was damaged by the war. They recovered by continuing to sell despite of not having a good store. Third, in 1945 after they relocated their business to a new location months later a strong typhoon came and blew off the entire roof of their bookstore leaving the merchandise worthless. Again for the third time they have to start from zero.

They never lose hope, again struggled hard and stay positive to rebuilt National Book Store for the third time.

Today, National Book Store is considered as the largest chain of bookstores in the country. Nanay Coring's life was another inspiring story. At the age of 86, Nanay Coring acts as the general manager of National Book Store. She keeps telling that the core values in her success are to keep learning, being actively involved in the business, being able to read changes and to never give up.

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