The management is horrible. They're out of touch with the individual stores, push questionable initiatives, constantly reshuffle areas, have poor inventory mana

The management is horrible. They're out of touch with the individual stores, push questionable initiatives, constantly reshuffle areas, have poor inventory management, and their IT is roughly 1995. They have plans to cut the number of stores, but they're not being aggressive enough. If they had strong leadership, they'd focus on customer experience; create a nice place for people to spend time enjoying books, not chasing the latest and greatest tech fad. B&N will linger on, since they have no real competition anymore with the demise of Borders. People still buy physical books, and book readers still like to visit bookstores. But the long term outlook is probably a 50% reduction in stores. Oh, and they pay their employees like shit, though all retail does to some extent.