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The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

• gambiting 9y ago
  The real tragedy here is that US has laws which allow employers to fire someone on the spot. What a travesty - 20 years at work and they can get rid of you in a day? Just wow.
  • madengr 9y ago
    Legally, there is a difference between layoff and fire. Depends on the state, but employers of a certain size have to give warning that a layoff is coming. The article says they were given notice their positions were going away; that is probably legally enough. Even firing requires documented poor behavior.
    • amyjess 9y ago
      From what I understand, this wasn't considered a mass layoff because each site only lost a handful of workers. The definition of a mass layoff according to the law is that the "mass" applies to each site that experiences layoffs.
• Bucephalus355 9y ago
  Barnes and Noble did some dumb things as this article points out, but they are NOWHERE near what the CEO of Sears is doing. That is corporate malpractice, gross negligence, and perhaps high treason all rolled into one. Literally look up anything online for “Sears CEO is terrible” and you will get links from NY Times, WaPo, etc. Also with BN, I mean they were going up against one of the biggest most powerful companies in human history. Their survival so far is impressive at least, and they did try with the Nook, but Amazon was always a software company so BN has a difficult and late challenge. If anything, the best strategy for now with BN is to increase cash-flow, cut expenses, etc and wait for the legal and cultural environment to turn against some of the tech companies. Personally I don’t think Amazon has done that much wrong, but I imagine they will suffer some collateral damage from the move against first, Facebook, followed by second Google. Although Google is smart and already broke themselves up years ago to avoid just this fate, Facebook is still in denial......
  • justonepost 9y ago
    It's pretty unlikely either Amazon or Google will face much headwind as they fulfill necessary roles. Facebook isn't necessary from what I can see (though I personally like it and use it) and contributes to known social ills. Zuck is redirecting a lot of effort into community organizing which I think is a necessary role, though meetup already has that space and isn't really that big of a company. I think he's going to find out that it doesn't pay as well as feeding general narcissism does.
  • aorloff 9y ago
    For any company that can, increasing cash flow is a great way to proceed assuming you don't muck around with the balance sheet. Unfortunately, I don't see a way for BN to really do that, the sun set on their business a long, long time ago. Sure they could morph into some kind of WeWork/Starbucks thing, but its not like that's an open playing field begging for competition either.
    • barsonme 9y ago
      For the record, I do like that idea. I recently started working remote, and while I like my office it's nice to go to a coffee shop and get out of the house for a while. But, the WiFi usually sucks and it can be too noisy. A quiet place with decent WiFi and coffee would be superb. I don't know what books other professions need, but it'd be pretty neat to go and checkout TAOCP (or something) and do some work for a while. Like a library meets coffee shop meets BYOD internet cafe, or something. Idk.
      • icebraining 9y ago
        The stores of the French chain Fnac - which sells mainly books, movies and consumer digital equipment - often have coffeeshops inside, where you can sit with a book if you buy something. And during working hours, they're usually quiet enough. I'm not sure if they have wifi, but I've seen people studying there.
      • kalleboo 9y ago
        That sounds like the city library where I'm from. The view is also pretty nice: https://c1.staticflickr.com/6/5338/9521653521_94e44e88ef_b.jpg https://c1.staticflickr.com/6/5338/9521653521_94e44e88ef_b.j...
• so33 9y ago
  In Canada, Indigo is a chain of bookstores just like B&N. To counter the threat of Amazon, they have dedicated a large amount of their stores’ square footage to a lifestyle concept that sells aesthetically pleasing stationery, home goods, and gifts. AFAICT this has allowed them to keep afloat and they do still sell quite a bit of books.
  • seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    A quarter of B&N now devoted to toys. They also earn more in their cafe than they probably do selling books.
    • iopuy 9y ago
      Is this a fact or something you just assume?
      • deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      • seanmcdirmid 9y ago
        The floor space is anecdote, but I have yet to see a B&N that didn’t conform to that in the last few years. As for the cafe profits see articles like http://www.nrn.com/onsite/barnes-noble-expand-food-and-beverage-offerings http://www.nrn.com/onsite/barnes-noble-expand-food-and-bever..., downscaled cafes already bring in 10% of all sales for the store, the profit margins on those must be much higher than books.
  • megaman22 9y ago
    As far as I've seen, every chain bookstore has tried this, and most have subsequently gone belly up. It's a little like RadioShack going into cellphones. Maybe you can keep your head above water for a minute, but there's an existential risk in pivoting away from your raison d'etre.
    • bobsil1 9y ago
• InclinedPlane 9y ago
  I remember back when Circuit City fired all of its floor staff and replaced them with entry level (and bottom run wage) workers. Oddly, they went out of business not long after that. You can't race to the bottom in retail, the bottom is already taken by walmart and online stores (like amazon). You can't be cheaper or more convenient, you need to offer something they don't. For bookstores that means you have to have good selection, a good environment, author signing/speaking events, and so forth. The retail apocalypse is not being driven primarily by lack of revenue, there's plenty of meat on those bones for companies to survive on in perpetuity, and many continue to thrive. Rather it's being driven by poor business decisions. Hedge fund driven leveraged buyouts that load down retail chains with enormous levels of debt. Complicated expansion schemes designed to enrich some particular set of owners or executives at the cost of business health. And so on. B&N is just another example of how retail chains have becomes playthings for the business elite. Business fundamentals are irrelevant. The fate of the business itself or the workers are irrelevant. All that matters is how many golden eggs they can cut out of the goose's body before it dies.
  • icelancer 9y ago
    >> Rather it's being driven by poor business decisions Agreed. It's that plus a healthy dose of panic and a refusal to accept reality - that contraction of revenue is necessary to stay alive - that causes these companies to make idiotic Hail Mary decisions that never pan out.
    • nerdponx 9y ago
      That, or, as the author makes clear at the end, the execs do not care about saving the company and just want to make as much as they can for themselves before it all falls apart.
  • alsetmusic 9y ago
    > You can't race to the bottom in retail, the bottom is already taken by walmart and online stores (like amazon). You can't be cheaper or more convenient, you need to offer something they don't. For bookstores that means you have to have good selection, a good environment, author signing/speaking events, and so forth. I made the effort to visit a B&N earlier this month because I was looking for good translations of texts from Ancient Greece (Homer, Herodotus). I wanted the ability to compare different books to determine what I would actually enjoy reading, as opposed to trusting online reviews. There were two options for each. Herodotus sort of makes sense, but Homer ought to have several translations. It’s considered a masterpiece, after all. This was probably the final visit to a chain bookstore for me. I will still pop into mom and pop shops on occasion just to browse, but I no longer believe that I can find the things I want in a megastore.
• phil21 9y ago
  I was out shopping 3-4 days before Christmas this year, and happened to be near a Barnes and Noble so figured I'd grab a copy of a magazine I've been wanting to read for a while. Grabbed the magazine, wandered the aisles a bit and picked up another book then went to check out. Basically I was their marketing department's dream - walk-in traffic coming to buy something cheap and specific who made an impulse retail buy of a much higher margin item. The checkout line was at least 50 people long and probably estimated at over an hour. Two cashiers working out of 8 or so possible registers, and as far as I could tell a singular employee on the floor itself. I put my selections back and walked out the door. Granted it was near peak shopping season - but that was inexcusable. There were quite a lot of really pissed off looking people in that line. So that is to say my experience lines up with the article. They entirely botched their Christmas season and it wasn't the employee's or consumer demand's fault. Just that one store bled hundreds of dollars in lost sales just from the 5 minutes I watched people walk in and immediately out after seeing the line.
  • mistersquid 9y ago
    This makes me wonder why physical retail stores don't follow Apple's approach by developing an app so shoppers can self-check out.
    • Bud 9y ago
      Because it takes more than just an app. Plus, that app isn't that easy.
    • acdha 9y ago
      They’ve been chasing cost reduction for many years, reducing investment in total and in that specific case I’d bet they have considerable worries about shoplifting.
    • awalton 9y ago
      The app would likely be more expensive to develop and maintain than hiring a few seasonal part-timers per store (2000 people at, let's face it, minimum wage for a month is about $4M that immediately converts to sales numbers just by being conscious enough to operate a register - that's cheaper than ~10 software devs in America (at least two of which are specialists - iOS/Android devs), a manager, an office, their equipment and their benefits packages that takes a year to 18-months to produce anything at all). Maybe outsourcing it would be cheaper... but even then, your conversion rate is going to be lower than just hiring a damned cashier. And apparently B&N was against even spending for that, even during heavy sales periods. If I were a shareholder before I wouldn't be after reading this news - I'd be going and buying Amazon stock. And a lot of this explains why Amazon has been crushing Wal-Mart - people are just done with going to stores and waiting in lines, looking around at empty cashier stations in frustration when they can point, click, and have something on their doorstep the next day with less effort.
• icantdrive55 9y ago
  I will miss Barnes and Noble. I would pay a monthly membership fee just to keep my local store open. Kinda like a gym membership, but I would actually go in, and enjoy just the wifi, books, clean bathroom, and pleasant staff. I do think it's time to break up the monopolies. What do we have to loose at this point? I don't even need to list the companies. We all know them. Plus--three three companies will put so many of you tech workers out of business--eventually.
• djsumdog 9y ago
  So the bigger question, if this trend continues and B&N goes the way of Borders ... what happens to all your Nook purchases? I only have 2 or 3, but I feel like I need to figure out how to rip the DRM off and export all my highlights/notes sooner rather than later.
  • biggodoggo 9y ago
    I've heard from friends that https://calibre-ebook.com https://calibre-ebook.com is the "go to" solution for this kind of thing
    • AlphaWeaver 9y ago
      Calibre is fantastic, and open source too! It's primary a library management system with all the features you could ask for, but there are also open source plugins to remove DRM that make it a go-to for creating libre libraries.
  • mjevans 9y ago
    It will surely be yet another education on why "DRM is defective by design". Any of the free (consumer first) content loaded will continue to work.
• ballenf 9y ago
  Amazon's primary customer has shifted to the 3rd-party seller, i.e., it's not profit off water coolers that allows low prices. Looking at Amazon's financials, they make more profit off of selling advertising (lightning deals, search ads & "related" sponsored listings) than margin off sales. It really shows when you look at the lightning deals and find product after product with artificially inflated reviews. Amazon has zero interest in fixing this because customers are its product not its customers. Hard to see how a traditional retailer can begin to compete with this.
  • emodendroket 9y ago
    > Hard to see how a traditional retailer can begin to compete with this. Probably an administration actually interested in antitrust regulation.
  • paulcole 9y ago
    > Amazon has zero interest in fixing this because customers are its product not its customers. If you think 3rd party sellers are Amazons customers and get much better treatment than end buyers, boy are you barking up the wrong tree.
    • ballenf 9y ago
      Not just any 3rd party seller, only the ones willing to systematically spend ad dollars to promote products. But even non-spending sellers send a lot of transaction revenue Amazon’s direction. You don’t get good treatment however because you're a disposable commodity. Treating you well doesn’t increase revenue.
      • robryan 9y ago
        Yeah, they have no trouble finding the next person in line or cutting their own deal to replace the supply they have kicked off for anything remotely high volume.
• Overtonwindow 9y ago
  What's sad about Barnes and Noble is that the book industry never saw the ebook and online buying coming. So they kept the price of books high, pressured by big name authors who were use to the big royalty checks, and they can't move away. Imagine if B&N could compete on price with Amazon, and the booksellers had to take what the market is willing to pay.
  • Finnucane 9y ago
    Never saw ebook book buying coming? What? In the '90s we were selling books for the Palm Pilot. I remember when a sample of the Rocket showed up at the office. We thought, hey, now maybe people will start buying ebooks! I also remember when Amazon first started selling books online, and they were getting their data from Books in Print. Despite the name, BIP lists a lot of books that are not in print. Some effort was required to get them to clean up their data. In those days, B&N was rapidly expanding their superstore system, and trying to drive out the independents by, you know, discounting. And we said, hey, once they've gotten rid of the competition, those discounts will go away. And they did.
    • smacktoward 9y ago
      Not to mention that B&N went in big on ebooks. B&N's Nook platform was the only competitor comparable to Amazon's Kindle ecosystem. It didn't work out, of course, but that's something very different than missing the coming tide of ebooks altogether. > Imagine if B&N could compete on price with Amazon One of the points of the article is that they can't*, because Amazon has other lines of business and B&N does not. So Amazon can use the revenue from those other businesses to swallow losses on book sales in order to drive out competition.
      • chx 9y ago
        I am just a single data point but still I have a story to tell: I had a B&N Nook. Then I didn't and I still was buying Nook eBooks. You know why? Because DRM was a fig leaf. They had their DRM solution which was so easy to strip it's not even funny -- they encrypted your books with a key based on your name and credit card number (this might've originated with ereader.com). Then in 2015 March they changed algorithms and it was not so easy any more and I walked.
• dragonwriter 9y ago
  If management is assuring you repeatedly that there will be no layoffs, it's a good sign that layoffs are coming. If management is assuring you repeatedly that specific people will not be laid off, it's a good sign that those people will be laid off. At least this is what always seems to happen, IME.
  • ntsplnkv2 9y ago
    Everyone should have knowledge of how their company is doing. If the numbers aren't good you should expect there to be changes. It's business. Always assume the worst
  • bearjaws 9y ago
    I will never understand why people become loyal to their employers. You can be proud of your work, career, without being married to your employer. This is the inevitable conclusion to a bookstore competing against Amazon, but they still act surprised...
    • totalZero 9y ago
      A long history of good things adds up in one's mind. If your employer has benefited you, it's hard to maintain a mentality of pure rational self-interest.
      • freehunter 9y ago
        Yep. Some employers are really good to their employees, even if they do layoffs and downsizing. One place I worked had an employee with terminal cancer, in the later stage he told them he'd never be able to come back to work but they kept him on the payroll anyway so he didn't lose his health insurance, right up until the day he died. Doesn't mean they didn't also close unprofitable locations and lay employees off sometimes too. Businesses are cold-hearted machines, but they are staffed by humans. And sometimes those humans make good decisions.
        • mwexler 9y ago
• itronitron 9y ago
  that's a real freaky Santa gif
• ryanwaggoner 9y ago
  This is the flip-side of creative destruction. Amazon and ecommerce in general have given us a world where brick and mortar retail often just can't compete. 99% of these layoffs and restructurings, etc. are just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. The writer of this article seems to think that the executives are just trying to milk the company all the way down, but it's not even clear to me there's a better option. You can't lose money indefinitely, you can't compete in the sector you grew huge in (because it's rapidly dying), and so what's the end game here? Yes, they could handle this better, and maybe they overpay their executives (although what experienced executive would even want this job unless the pay was awesome?), but this is just quibbling. Whether it happened now or happened in six months or two years, this is inevitable. Now, it's definitely sad when people lose their jobs, but that's kind of the devil's bargain we've made with capitalism. Some of the startups that grow out of HN will be in new sectors that only add to the economy, but many will replace, supplant, cannibalize, and dominate companies and industries that aren't strategically or operationally capable of adapting. That means a LOT of people are going to lose their jobs in the process. It sucks, but I'm not sure there's a better option. Maybe the best we can do is try and structure a society where getting laid off from a decent job isn't so damaging and scary on a personal level.
  • emodendroket 9y ago
    I don't feel that you've really engaged the arguments of the post, particularly the failure to hire any seasonal employees for the holiday season and the "ship from store" change.
    • ryanwaggoner 9y ago
      I skipped over those because I think they're totally irrelevant. See the "rearranging deck chairs on Titanic" part of my comment. Yeah, they could have managed the holiday season better. They could have a better strategy for ecommerce. So what? It doesn't fundamentally change anything. It maybe delays the inevitable for a year or two? But in the end, B&N is almost certainly going out of business. EDIT: I guess there are two other possibilities: 1. B&N finds another B&M strategy that works beyond just selling books. But it's not clear what, given their financial situation, existing stores, employee base, etc. Either way, lots of layoffs between here and there. 2. They pivot to selling books online solely. This actually seems likely, at least for awhile, because it's a decent brand, and they're already doing this, so this would just mean shutting down all their stores. But all these employees are still losing their jobs in that scenario.
• icedchai 9y ago
  I'll be sad to see my local B&N disappear, but it's not unexpected: the writing has been on the wall for years. I generally hang out in the cafe, drink coffee, read magazines. If I see a book I like, I'll probably buy it on Amazon.
• purplezooey 9y ago
  I likes this article. This point, though, seemed off: I would double-down on what we can offer that Amazon can’t: enthusiastic staff that can find and upsell books... But it's already been proven, sort of, that this isn't what people want, at least in sufficiently large numbers. That kind of underscores the difficulty of recovering this franchise.
  • metaobject 9y ago
    "... find and upsell books" What can be easier than using the Amazon search bar? And as far as upwelling goes, Amazon's ML-driven 'suggestions' algorithm results often seem to interest me.
    • mattkrause 9y ago
      For the books you already know you want, I agree that Amazon is hard to beat. However, it’s hard to replicate the “discoverability” of a brick and mortar bookshop. Even without having a specific title in mind, I can always find something that looks interesting, just by walking around. Sometimes a blurb on the cover draws me in, sometimes it’s a recommendation by the staff, and sometimes seeing a title or author jogs my memory. Meanwhile, logging into my Amazon account recommends several books (out of order) in a series, some updated versions of textbooks I once bought, and a few titles I recognize from the NYT best seller list but have no interest in. Since I recently bought one, there are also a good dozen screwdrivers for what Amazon assumes is my burgeoning collection of flatheads. Also, books don’t cost very much, but they are a big investment in terms of time. Thumbing through the actual book is a great way to make sure you like your prospective purchase. This isn’t quite the same online—Look Inside is carefully metered out so you can maybe get a sense of the books style and level, but it’s often not enough to draw me in.
    • ohtwenty 9y ago
      there's a big bookstore nearby that does a few things right: (1)the staff know a lot. It's not just about 'I liked this book give me something like it', it's about where you don't even know where to start. I've walked in there a dozen times looking for gifts for people aged 4 through ~60, with mostly a vague description of what they're like and what interests them and they know a bunch of choices that fit. Amazon, Google, etc can build profiles on you and figure you out, but they cant figure your friends and gifts out (or even more out of the box recs, or have a more thorough look at what does or doesn't interest. (2) they have coffee. Yay. (3) they have two sections of interesting sales: books that are soon to be out of store (but still on the website) that are on clearance, prices going from €80 to ~€10 or whatever. Great sales. Or just old secondhand things, with books in there that are unique, rare etc, and you would be hard pressed to find online, or if you could you're mostly back at the discoverability issue IMO. So they know their strengths for meatspace stores, and supplement that with a good online presence (e.g. same day delivery in this city). This is Scheltema in Amsterdam btw
• ukulele 9y ago
  I can see how the author views this as company mismanagement, but I'd offer a possible counter: Online is killing retail, full stop. High touch sales models everywhere have lost profitablity due to "showrooming" -- curation and upselling aren't profitable for B&N, and they won't ever be again. To adapt, management needs to move to a lower touch model based on thin margins, web sales, and simpler stores. To do this, they need cash and they need to make staff cuts. Everything in the article fits perfectly with this course of action.
  • trynumber9 9y ago
    Except, you know, lying about the upcoming layoffs.
    • tytytytytytytyt 9y ago
      That fits in just fine with the above, at least as far as my understanding of businesses and what their goals are is...
  • wvenable 9y ago
    Retail seems to be killing retail though -- it's a death spiral. Going to a lot malls right now is depressing. And I need to buy things, mostly clothing, but the selection and quality has gone down significantly in the last decade. I'm not sure this being made up in online sales.
• debt 9y ago
  That was seriously well written. I don't normally read Tumblr posts but the pacing and the way they peppered the images throughout; very well-made piece.
• burlesona 9y ago
  Yes this is creative destruction, but Amazon is able to sell at a loss because Wall St. sees the infinite dollar signs at the end of this road when they’ve literally killed off all competition. Selling at a loss is anti-competitive and should get them hammered by anti-trust, but somehow the US government has decided that, in this generation at least, monopolies are fine as long as they don’t raise prices. As a customer I like Amazon, but as a citizen they deeply worry me.
  • criddell 9y ago
    Does Amazon sell at a loss? I'm pretty sure they've been profitable for a couple years now. And how could Amazon be a monopoly? They have larger competitors.
    • rhinoceraptor 9y ago
      Amazon has a certain side business that makes most of their profits.
      • criddell 9y ago
        That may be true, but their retail business still is profitable. Last year they made around $1 billion of profit from selling a lot of stuff ($120 billion in sales).
• zerotolerance 9y ago
  Barnes and Noble had a huge high-margin section, just like Best Buy did... their ridiculous physical video and music section. I think the availability of streaming services did as much to hurt those "book" stores as reasonable competition from Amazon.
  • EamonnMR 9y ago
    Is best buy going out of business too? I had a surreal experience while trying to buy a camera lens at Best Buy. The employee in the camera section first directed me to phone camera addons (cool, but not what I wanted) then once explained that I wanted camera accessories (I gestured like I was taking a picture) I was eventually lead to the camera section. I was able to find the Nikon lenses eventually, and the employee returned... I was hoping he'd explain to me what lens would be good for zooming in, but instead he fiddled with the floor model until he managed to take a picture with it, showed me the picture and said, triumphantly, "camera." I gave up and left.
    • DaveWalk 9y ago
      I was wondering about Best Buy too. Does anyone know what's going on with them? Last I heard (2017), they were trying hard to be more "on-demand" in response to Amazon. They were quite fully aware of people "demoing" items in store and buying them online, so they dropped prices and updated their e-commerce. If it worked is a separate question entirely...
  • memory_grep 9y ago
    >Best Buy You mean circuit city?
  • dragonwriter 9y ago
    > Barnes and Noble had a huge high-margin section, just like Best Buy did... their ridiculous physical video and music section. They didn't have that as a large section until deep into the time Amazon was eating their book sales; I'm pretty sure it was a response to the competition from Amazon.
• ikeboy 9y ago
  >As a side note: people often want to know why Amazon’s prices are so much lower than B&N’s, and why B&N doesn’t price match. There’s a lot of different reasons, but the biggest is that Amazon loss-leads their books: that is, sells them at a loss, then makes up the money with expensive add-ons, like Echos or Kindles or other non-book stuff. Well no, Kindles are breakeven and Amazon makes it up by selling more books (digital ones with good margins though)
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• indubitable 9y ago
  I think many people tend to grossly overestimate the profit levels of large companies. Let's take Amazon since they're arguably the reason for the failure here and a company I think many perceive to be lush with money largely because of 'greed.' It also hits on notions from this paper like companies just not hiring enough employees, even if only at certain times. Amazon currently grosses $178 billion. However, their net income is what matters. That's what's left over after paying cost of goods, salaries, rent, taxes, and so on. Basically what's left over after the mandatory expenses to keep your company running. And that's only $3 billion. 'Only' sounds funny preceding $3,000,000,000 and is undoubtedly what leads to complaints against Amazon (and here as well) that they're just being greedy, not paying employees enough, and so on. But that's not really accurate. Amazon has 566,000 employees. If they gave each employee a $1000 raise. For those working your average 2000+ hour year that's a whopping $0.50/hour raise. Yet that marginal raise amounts to $0.56billion, or 1/6th of their entire remaining revenue. Interestingly enough 1 executive earning $1million in compensation is, by contrast, only 1/3000th of their remaining revenue. This critical calculation on the number of workers to fill any given role is why compensation and things can seem so lopsided. The sheer magnitude of the number of workers at many of these companies is very counter intuitive. And this is the case for most large small margin companies. Back to Barnes and Noble, in 2016 they had a net income of -$24.5 million with 26,000 employees. Try to keep those figures in mind when considering this. I think the post that described any real solution for them as akin to 'shuffling chairs on the Titanic' is very apt. --- If anybody has a counter point here, I'd love to hear it. From my perspective it seems people are replacing reality with ideology, whether intentionally or not. We want to blame companies for being greedy, even when in reality the numbers don't really support such views. All jobs are disappearing, when we have 4.1% unemployment (even the U6 is down to 8.2%!), etc. I used to feel very similarly, but the numbers simply don't support these incredibly cynical views.
  • bleezy 9y ago
    You are being downvoted because Amazon is a bad example. They are intentionally not profitable so that they can lower prices to drive others out of the market and reinvest all revenue into R&D and horizontal expansion. They could net way more than $3B if they wanted to.
• mrbrowning 9y ago
  Bezos cheerleaders and their ilk never seem to be willing to acknowledge that creating wealth is much harder than extracting it, and either out of bad faith or naivety will misidentify ventures that specialize in the latter as being exemplars of the former. In this case, we have the incalculable loss of so many person-years of experience in a deep topic, literature, that’s being shrugged away as a case of the market moving on in a post facto justification of the actions of some corporate raiders that never even considered alternatives beyond stripping a company of its assets for their own sake. I just wish we could be honest about what actual competition, what actual wealth creation, looks like, because this isn’t it.
  • comicjk 9y ago
    What experience in literature are you referring to? Do many people ask Barnes and Noble employees for book recommendations?
    • mrbrowning 9y ago
      Well, that’s the point of the article, isn’t it? The long-time employees that were laid off were almost certainly there out of love of their wares, and the parent business could have put the work into making value out of that distinguishing fact. But beyond that, they had institutional knowledge, both of how the business works and what their customers want. I know it’s hard to imagine that retail work could involve any amount of skill or knowledge, but this is no doubt a loss of value.
      • tytytytytytytyt 9y ago
        > and the parent business could have put the work into making value out of that distinguishing fact The fact that you can easily make vague pontifications about what else they might have done doesn't mean that any of those things are actually viable for the business. > I know it’s hard to imagine that retail work could involve any amount of skill or knowledge, but this is no doubt a loss of value. But probably not enough value to be worth keeping them on staff, unless they did the layoffs on whim, like you seem to think. It is possible that they examined a lot of scenarios and are privy to a fair amount of relevant details to which the public isn't.
• Maro 9y ago
  I don't agree with the basic premise of the article wrt job security. B&N does not owe you a job. Nobody does. You got to work at the same company for 20 years? You should be happy and gracious. All things come to an end. I'm 37 and the longest I've worked at a company was 3.5 years, and that was my own startup. I average about 2-3 years/company. I'd kill to find a company/job where I can stay for 5 years without becoming a dinosaur. But I can't, because it's the startup/tech sector, things move fast, even here in Europe. On the flip-side, you could chose to be more static, risking increased irrelevance, in which case you'll be more upset upon losing your job. But that's the risk/tradeoff.
  • tytytytytytytyt 9y ago
    Plus these sound like mostly entry level, no-qualification jobs. I can't imagine why anyone would feel like they had any real measure of job security at jobs like those.
    • michaelmrose 9y ago
      Because treating people to lots of free kindness, ra ra spirit, free cheap food, team building is a great way to retain people so long as the wages you pay them are enough to get by. If you persue this strategy successfully your business will be chock full of people who love you and think you all are family even though you don't pay them much.. People that need more monetarily will of course notice that raises are minimal and long term growth meh but many people have modest needs or spouses that make more money and they have no particular reason not to collect the same money adjusted for inflation and stay comfortable.
• mdip 9y ago
  The writing is on the wall for Barnes and Noble, and I can't help but see what they've done here as mirroring what Circuit City did just before they shut everything down. IIRC, they ditched their most experienced sales-people, who were also the highest paid, and not soon there-after, they were done. That said, I don't entirely agree with the assessment of the author. She sounds like one of the employees that was let go and her view of things might be colored by that. She seems to be over-valuing the contribution these employees made to the bottom line of the business. She may or may not be right; I can't, personally, speak to that -- where I live, there hasn't been a Barnes & Noble nearby in a long time. In fact, the place I work is located on the second floor of what once was a Barnes & Noble. When there was one a couple of miles from my home, I rarely purchased anything from them other than coffee. This is anecdotal, of course, but I don't know that pulling employees from the floor and putting them to work boxing and shipping orders from the store was such a bad idea. If it did, indeed, decrease shipping time and costs, it would have been a fine use for that staff assuming they could find enough people to buy books online when those people could often save money at Amazon. In the decades that I did spend time at Barnes & Noble, my interactions were limited to the "kinda-Starbucks" folks and the (rare) store teenage cashier. Maybe I am a very specific customer[0]; I went there because of the selection of obscure programming books. I'd often need something not available at my library. They'd have a few options and I wanted to review them before having the library order it. I buy the argument that it's not necessarily Amazon that was B&N's downfall -- it hurt, a lot, I'm sure and I know former B&N customers who now exclusively purchase via Kindle -- but there are a lot of people like me, who didn't buy books from either place. In a twist of irony, I own a second-generation Nook with the e-paper/color screen. I have never owned a Kindle. Here's my take on where B&N fell over: (1) Failure to recognize who the competition actually was. Amazon needn't be mentioned; it's obvious. But the big one for me was my local home-town library. They are just as close, a little bigger, just as nice (sans Fivebucks coffee), but I don't have to spend anything there and being a speed reader (skim/scan style, not the gimmicky nonsense), I get through my book during the borrowing window. They also have an automated self-checkout and self-dropoff, so I wait in far fewer lines. So I'm already inconvenienced by having to gasp drive somewhere, but my library handles the experience entirely better. (2) Very expensive real-estate: I mentioned that my employer is in a former Barnes & Noble location. Our office is in an incredibly desirable area. I have no idea what the cost is, but I know that homes with fewer bedrooms than I have and half the square footage go for twice the price of my home (and homes just a few miles up the road) in less desirable parts of this suburb. The stores are very pleasant to be in, with expensive furnishings in expensive, convenient areas. These things don't come cheap. There's a reason the mom-and-pop book-sellers are located on the dumpier side of town, often have "use other door" signs posted on 8.5x11 paper with ink-jet Comic Sans all caps print and the books are jammed together on shelves stacked floor to ceiling separated by aisles that are barely large enough to meet ADA requirements... books are low-margin items. Every time I visited a Barnes and Noble for Fivebucks coffee I wondered how, on earth, they stayed in business. (3) Staffing costs had to be high. Ignoring the whole thing about the CEO and executives making stupid amounts of money[1], the staff requirements to provide the level of customer service required of those customers who do need help, especially those who purchased a Nook and mistakenly thought that driving over to B&N would be helpful in solving their problems, is impossible to do profitably. And I don't think that the quality of their staff would have been the same as the mom-pop bookstores described in point #2. The few mom/pops that I've been to are staffed by book-obsessed individuals; those individuals are often also the owners of the place, and the owners of the place are often the only employees. Thinking back about a decade, when I last went to a B&N, I'm not entirely sure that I never needed help, but I am sure that I never received any. I don't ever recall seeing an employee anywhere other than at the coffee shop or behind the counter ringing people up. Where they had employees, they had to few of them. It always took forever to get out of there with a (rare) purchase; even a (less rare) coffee purchase. I think they are the record holder for me of saving me money through waiting . . . how bad did I want that coffee? 15 minutes, bad? Or that 2600 magazine that had the cool payphone photo that I wanted to keep; do I really want to wait in line behind those 9 other people for the one cashier who's ringing everyone up in their (pointless) common-feeder line? (4) Inventory costs had to be high. I went to B&N only because I knew they had a huge selection, yet I rarely purchased anything from that selection[2]. I would have never walked into the store if they didn't have that selection, though. It's a lot easier for Amazon to handle that problem. My local library, as well, is massive and actually larger than the B&N was (though they had a more limited programming book selection). Back to point #1, their competition has far fewer difficulties doing what they do. Of the problems I can see, fixing any of the bottom three would be customer-hostile in (probably) equal ways -- different impacts, but would take enough away that they'd lose a lot of business. Staffing -- the third -- is the only one that can be done quickly and have an immediate impact on the bottom line. The problem, though, is that it's like borrowing money at a higher interest rate to pay off debt[3]. They'll lose high- and probably medium-maintenance customers, and they'll lose customers sympathetic to the employees' circumstances which will drive them into cutting more. It's a downward spiral and they're so close to the bottom, I don't see them having a chance at this point. [0] Generally, I ended up there in search of books related to programming, networks and other computing topics. They had the largest selection and I could crack the books open and see if they were worth burning the time on, which I would often then do in their coffee shop over a few weekend days. I'd occasionally look over the fiction titles under topics I like, but I don't read fiction, I listen to it and I generally did that by grabbing the CDs or (gasp) tapes from the library. [1] I'm not disagreeing; it's absurd given that they're failing at their actual job, it's just obvious enough, IMO, that it doesn't require more detail. [2] PSA- I feel that way about Microcenter, somehow they have almost everything that I can find on Newegg, and they manage to be nearly competitive, price-wise, with them. I don't want them to vanish, though, so I make it a point to do as much of my geek spending there, in-store, even if they are a little pricier; plus ... instant gratification is nice. [3] Or, as is said all too often by people who aren't thinking about what it is they're actually saying, the equivalent to "digging yourself out of a hole".
• joshpadnick 9y ago
  The thing that frustrates me most about the slow, drawn out demise of first Borders and now Barnes & Noble is that there has never been a bold vision for the future. The mega-bookstore was a great model in the 1990s, but post-Internet, they really needed to leverage their space to do something magical. One idea I would have loved: Browse your books in store, but buy them for Nook or Kindle -- at the same prices you pay on Amazon. Maybe that's even a loss leader and you upsell $5 lattes. Or perhaps they double-down on really awesome kids sections, where you want to try out a book on you kid before buying. Or maybe they aim to make the store more like a "community center" and build in meeting rooms, or make certain stores specialized in a particular topic (e.g. the "tech" store downtown). But running the same, tired playbook year after year ultimately is, just as the author suggests, a way for current executives to milk the cow until it falls over. I hope when my son is old enough to enjoy sitting down to read on his own, I'll still have a nice book store to enjoy with him.
  • pseingatl 9y ago
    Great idea. Don't carry physical books at all; maybe just a postcard-size flyer to advertise a particular text. Buy the postcard--which could be signed by the author--and get a code to download the book. Turn the spaces into, a la FNAC, exhibition spaces, deliberately permitting 'cataloging' of similar products. Keep in mind that the publishers don't really have skin in the game. Theirs, at least in the U.S., is wholly a consignment business. Put in an Espresso Book Machine for those who want paper copies. Make the stores membership only: blend bookstores and libraries. Offer an experience not obtainable elsewhere.
• a-nikolaev 9y ago
  Just wanted to say that in NYC, the quality of book selection at Barnes and Noble is just amazing. In my opinion, it's way better then the hyped Strand, for example. So, maybe, go to your local B&N some time and just buy a book? Support brick-and-mortar bookstores, while we haven't succumbed to Amazon just yet.
  • tzs 9y ago
    It would help with this if B&N would fix their website to make it less annoying to try to find out what is at your local store. Suppose there are several books you are thinking of buying. You want to know which of those are at your local B&N. You go to their website and search for the first book. On the book's page you click the "Check Store Availability" link. That pops up a form to enter your zip code. You do, and it brings up a pop up that shows the availability of the book in the nearest few stores. So far so good. Now you want to check the second book. You find its page, click the store check link. And you get the zip code pop up again...and it isn't even smart enough to pre-fill the zip code. You have to enter it again! This is just irritating. At the very minimum it should pre-fill the zip. Better would be to skip that pop up completely if it already knows the zip and go straight to the results. This would not inconvenience people who want to change the zip to check a different area's stores, because the results pop up has a zip entry field for doing that. Better than that would be to, once it has the zip, automatically show on the book pages whether or not they are available in nearby stores. Even better than that would be to also put that on the search results pages and on the browsing results pages, like Best Buy does. At Best Buy it tells me right there if it is available for pick up today at my local store. If not, it tells when it can be if I order online for local pick up. Once they do all that, they should add a way to filter results to only show locally available items. Best Buy again is a good example. On search and browsing pages, there is a tab that limits it to only items you can pick up today in your local store.
  • DaveWalk 9y ago
    In Boston the downtown B&N is actually pretty uninspired, and the store is probably 60% non-book items. It's like an airport bookstore (Hudson News in the US). And yet, from my experience no place in the city has a more comprehensive catalog of magazines (some come close). Go figure!
• jamiesonbecker 9y ago
  'The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act of 1988 (the "WARN Act") is a US labor law which protects employees, their families, and communities by requiring most employers with 100 or more employees to provide 60 calendar-day advance notification of plant closings and mass layoffs of employees, as defined in the Act.' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraining_Notification_Act_of_1988 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini... It's sad that old-school books are dying. I love books, especially older hard cover books; but, if you know your business and industry are dying, then you owe it to your team who got you there to engineer a soft landing. That's simply the ethical thing to do.
  • twtw 9y ago
    "The WARN Act also is not activated when the following coverage thresholds are unmet: If a plant closing or a mass layoff results in fewer than 50 workers losing their jobs at a single employment site;"
    • jamiesonbecker 9y ago
      Good catch, thanks.
  • adventured 9y ago
    > Personally, I think it's sad that old-school books are dying. They're not. US printed book sales climbed for the fourth or fifth straight year in 2017 (depending on how you're measuring it), at 687 million units sold. That compares with 648 million for 2004 for example. Further, independent book stores have been doing quite well [1]. "Unit sales of print books rose 3.3% in 2016 over the previous year, making it the third-straight year of print growth" https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bookselling/article/72450-print-book-sales-rose-again-in-2016.html https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/b... [1] http://www.bookweb.org/for-the-record http://www.bookweb.org/for-the-record [1a] http://theweek.com/articles/573874/4-reasons-why-independent-bookstores-are-thriving http://theweek.com/articles/573874/4-reasons-why-independent...
• jeffdavis 9y ago
  (Taking the article at face value for the sake of argument.) I have to imagine there's going to be a smarter way to finance and manage companies that don't have huge growth prospects. Sure, creative destruction and all that, but isn't there some size at which a bookstore works profitably? So figure out that size, which is maybe smaller but still a chain, and get organized around that concept. Is that unrealistic somehow? Does it really need to be financed in public markets?
• loorinm 9y ago
  Reading that Storytime guy’s tweet, I really wondered: Has this guy never taken a look at his situation and noticed something off? He works in a relaxing huge retail store reading books to kids for free, and makes above min wage and keeps his job for the next 20 years and supports 5 kids??? That’s insane, and completely abnormal. No one else with that same type of job has that kind of life. It reminds me of someone I know who lived in an in-law with no rent control and no law against eviction, for 15 years, paying 60% of market rate. And then was completely stunned and devastated when the landlord gave 60 day notice. Really???
  • maxander 9y ago
    Have you ever worked retail? There was presumably much much more to that guys job than reading books to kids.
    • loorinm 9y ago
      Yup, I have. It’s usually hard, stressful, customers are assholes, work is part time and unpredictable hours, and pay is horrible. Have you?
  • stagger87 9y ago
    There are a lot of retail employees who support families. He probably didn't make that much money. Retail is anything but relaxing.
  • flyGuyOnTheSly 9y ago
    Agreed, but that does not negate the overall point of the post. Which is that Barnes & Noble is currently digging their own grave, and that this did not have to be so.
    • loorinm 9y ago
      Honestly I’m surprised they are still around. Don’t get me wrong I love the stores, and it’s sad to lose nice things. I’m not happy about it. But don’t blame the new CEO, blame the old CEO for doing nothing for a decade as the market transformed around them.
• nikanj 9y ago
  Building a cash reserve in the business is important, if you're hoping to sell the business in a leveraged buy-out. Basically, someone buys B&N by using the B&N cash-at-hand as collateral.
• grey-area 9y ago
  The industry is experiencing a secular decline. There is no way back to profit for booksellers and publishers, because fewer people are buying paper books, nowhere near enough to sustain the existing industry, and authors can simply publish direct via schemes like Amazon. They've tried overpricing ebooks, taking things off Amazon, setting up their own online readers/stores (nook). Every publisher is now having real trouble making money, every bookseller also, and significantly cutting jobs - the industry is being turned upside down at every level and no-one except some big brand name authors has a viable business model. Those that are not affected because they live in a profitable niche like academic publishing will meet the same challenges soon, because they are driven by the introduction of computers and the internet, which has radically changed how people write, and how they read. Of course the management handled this incredibly badly, and have extracted huge fees for passively overseeing the death of the company, and the story is correct in saying it is not bleeding out, but the demise of Barnes and Noble and other booksellers like it is not, it is the inevitable consequence of the shift of content online, and the huge and ongoing disruption across a range of industries that the internet and free copying of information has brought. Ironically this may lead in the short term to the resurgence of small bookstores who sell second hand copies of books, at least until a generation grows up which has never bought a paper book, just as they have never bought a paper newspaper or magazine. But in the long term I think new mediums will arise more suited to the medium of production and transmission - now everyone in the world can access the store of the world's knowledge in their hand, mostly for free and share their thoughts with others, again for free - this will radically change our perception of culture, and our consumption and production of stories, so the disruption is just beginning.
  • randomsearch 9y ago
    Book sales are increasing in the UK and US https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/books/datablog/2017/mar/18/the-fall-and-rise-of-physical-book-sales-worldwide-in-data https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/books/dat...
    • grey-area 9y ago
      I've worked in the publishing industry in the UK - it is experiencing long term decline. To illustrate this, see the multitude of publishers merging, cutting staff and closing imprints. Very few publishers are making money any more. The story is the same for bookstores - there is one significant UK-wide chain now (Waterstones). The article you cite doesn't even show healthy figures - it shows a bump in 2015, then fall to almost zero growth in 2016 for the UK, and a dramatic decline in growth for the US from 2015 to 2016. Hardly signs of a healthy industry. This is just the kind of cherry-picked data the industry has been deluding itself with for years. The figures produced by the industry are unreliable, and the interpretation of those is equally suspect, as evidenced by the article you've found. They've tried to manipulate stats by doing things like pricing ebooks higher or just below physical books for example. Barnes and Noble will close soon (as this article predicts), as will all the other big brick and mortar booksellers, and soon after that mass-market paper books are doomed as Amazon has little incentive to promote them over ebooks, and no interest in sustaining publishers.
• kuang_eleven 9y ago
  A sidenote in the article, but I'd like to know why people think that Amazon treats books as a loss-leader... Last I checked in tech news, it was the common assumption that Amazon retail in general has razor-thin margins or might even be losing money, but AWS was making money hand over fist.
• LogicX 9y ago
  Taking a thought from another thread... What if B&N merged with wework? Wework just bought meetup.com - now you have more locations for meetups. B&N often has pretty good locations, and covers areas of the country wework doesn't akready have prescence. There's already a coffee shop built into B&N If you implemented a cashierless checkout process, and had ship from location, you now can compete with Amazon, and the retail prescence is an attractor for weworkers and meetups. I'm not sure of the B&N commercial real estate holdings, but wework seems to be all into that. Of all the possible fates of B&N - If I saw that happen, I'd be be pretty pleased with it.
  • freehunter 9y ago
    Remote working spaces have amazing untapped potential IMO. Right now they're mostly concentrated in downtowns of major metro areas which might be nice for the heavily concentrated populations living there, but sucks for anyone in residential neighborhoods outside of the downtown core. Take Chicago for example: there are six WeWork locations within 200 miles of the city, and the furthest distance from one to the other is less than 2 miles. If you live in Schaumburg or Skokie or Aurora or Joliet, to get to your closest "office" you have to commute downtown just like everyone else, every morning and back home every evening. And in my metro area of 1.5m, there are no WeWork locations at all, the closest is over three hours away. There are some other co-working locations in my city's downtown, but I don't want to commute downtown every day. I think there's potential for co-working spaces in residential or suburban areas, but it's a smaller market so it'd be pricey... unless you already own space in the suburbs. Like Barnes and Noble does. And they already have Starbucks available at most of them, and many of them are in areas with plenty of food choices around for lunch. Many of them are near plazas with nice places to walk and get some fresh air. We're just getting started with co-working spaces, there's a lot of untapped potential in smaller markets yet.
  • snarf21 9y ago
    I also think that this is what Staples and Office Max/Depot should do. Turn half of it into small offices and mini conference rooms. People will even pay 10% for the supplies if it means they can just go get them in 10 seconds. They have a lot of economies of scale to take advantage of.
• joekrill 9y ago
  > The people who lost their jobs had been actively assured this would NOT happen for the past several months. My last employer did this. Not so much the exact scenario, but they constantly assured us they were fully committed for the long-term to our satellite office that they opened. They went out of their way to reiterate this quite regularly and put a good of effort into it. Until one day they showed up and shut down the entire office. I just don't understand why. Who treats people like that? It's not like these decisions just suddenly pop up out of the blue one morning and a decision to fire people has to be made immediately. Clearly companies have to mull over this type of stuff for quite some time. I don't understand why you reassure people like that only to completely up-end their lives. Knowing that B&N pulled this crap, I'll definitely be avoiding them moving forward. So moral of the story is, when I company has to start assuring you that you most definitely won't be let go any time soon, it's a pretty good indicator that it'll be happening very soon.
  • seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    This is actually very typically “thou dost protest too much” behavior. You should always read management signally counterfactually and look for inside information via private communication.
  • sametmax 9y ago
    You do understand why. You know that people won't work as much. Will disengage. Will cause trouble and cost you money, time, efforts. This is resources consumed. Some companies value saving resources over human decencies. This is magnified when there is crisis and resources are in shorter supply than before. There is no mystery to it, no complexity to it.
    • joekrill 9y ago
      But I'm not suggesting they tell everyone the company is in dire straits and they are on the verge of getting fired. Just don't willfully lie to them on a daily basis and tell them that things are amazing and their jobs are totally secure. In my scenario, we weren't actively asking questions regularly. But they were offering the (mis)information on an almost daily basis.
• tzs 9y ago
  It would probably help some if their website didn't GIVE YOU LINKS to places you can buy the book you are looking at for less. I was looking up a book I'm thinking of buying, and right below the customer reviews section on the page they have a Google ads block, and the first ad was for the book at thriftbooks.com. The ad touted it for cheap used there, but clicking it also shows they have it new, too, for $25 (B&N online price is $30). Below that is another block of Google ads with pictures of the book and links to other sellers. Those ads show the new price right in the ad. Two are $25 (the aforementioned thriftbooks.com and biblio.com) and two are more than B&N's price. WTF? Why would they do this? PS: Here's a picture showing this: https://imgur.com/a/Pg5eL https://imgur.com/a/Pg5eL
  • greedo 9y ago
    I can't reproduce this on any browser...
    • tzs 9y ago
      If you have a decent ad blocker, it blocks those. I only get them if I turn off uBlock Origin.
      • greedo 9y ago
        Wow, you're correct. Yet another example of the stellar leadership from Riggio...
  • mwexler 9y ago
    When I was at BN around 7 years ago or so, we were experimenting with this capability on the site, and we had some processes like 1) rules around allowing no competitive sales ads and 2) if the probability of purchase calced by a set of models was higher than the estimated ad revenue, we supressed ads. This worked really well, in that "browsers" who tended to visit and not buy on the site (and who, based on models combining digital and loyalty card data, were not expected to go to a store) might see ads (non-competitive, so no other booksellers, for example) and every visit, even non-purchasers, had some chance of revenue on the visit. Obviously, we knew that many visits are shopping visits on the journey to buy in a later visit or at store, so the models needed maturing, but the concept had legs. But as BN looked to add 3rd party sellers of the same products they offered in store and on site (ala amazon, ebay, etc.) and with the myriad leadership changes, clearly they went away from our original approach... And you wind up with this comment's experience.
• deleted 9y ago
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• ornel 9y ago
  Why all the fuzzy love for Barnes and Noble? They intentionally destroyed independent bookstores in many places with their superstores. Good riddance!
  • NoGravitas 9y ago
    I think it's because the implicit value is: Independent booksellers > B&N > Amazon
• madengr 9y ago
  Don’t ever count on “loyal and faithful service” on keeping your job. I’ve seen engineers with 25 years of service laid off with 5 minutes notice. The only relationship you should have with an employer is extracting as much pay and benefits in exchange for work.
• dwighttk 9y ago
  Are any of these executives ex Walmart executives? I'm thinking a Elop -> Nokia sort of operation...
  • itronitron 9y ago
    hmmm, maybe they are going to sell the brick and mortar stores to Amazon?
• cafard 9y ago
  The one in Bethesda, Maryland, is closing. Whenever I have looked in--usually because I'm in Bethesda to see a movie or to take my car to the dealership--it has been busy.
• notyourday 9y ago
  When B&N decided not only not to compete with Amazon on books ("No, we will not price match these books". "Pay money to join our club to get a discount") but become a wacky showroom of wacky products ( sushi making kit, anyone? Would you like a reading lamp? Oh, wait, no, it is not a reading lamp, it is just a lamp that you could use for reading. How about our Nook thing? Not that we can run anything electronic ) it signed its own death sentence. B&N stores were overstaffed.
• ngvrnd 9y ago
  Our local B&N lost me when they eliminated the "New Releases" section of science fiction & fantasy novels.
• justherefortart 9y ago
  Now go prove you "deserve" unemployment. American labor laws are pathetic, yet we collectively keep voting for this shit over and over to appease the wealthy ownership class. Wonder if we'll ever wake out of this stupor that everyone can lift themselves by the bootstraps. Seems unlikely in my lifetime.
• greedo 9y ago
  My wife has worked for B&N for 21 years. I met her there, and worked there for a bit over a year. I've followed this company since then, and the amount of sheer stupidity exhibited by upper management is astounding. Decisions from the regional and main corporate offices that were just amateurish. Money wasted, time wasted, people wasted. I'm amazed they've lasted this long.
  • mratzloff 9y ago
    Any examples?
    • greedo 9y ago
      Around 2000-2002, you could walk into most B&N stores and find nice comfortable chairs to sit in. These chairs encouraged book lovers to grab a book, sit down, read a few pages, and actually enjoy the book buying experience. So what did B&N do over the next couple of years? Get rid of the comfortable chairs, and replace them on a 1:2 basis with hard, uncomfortable wooden chairs. Then slowly phase these chairs out completely. This did a couple of things; discourage people from reading books on the book floor, while encouraging them to read in the Cafe, where the books and magazines get damaged easily. But the core idea of having an inviting bookstore died that year. Another issue was the Cafe relationship with Starbucks. The Cafe's use Starbucks components, and often follow their recipes. They have tons of "Starbucks" branding as part of this relationship. BUT you can't use a Starbuck giftcard at a B&N Cafe. Try explaining this to someone who received a giftcard over the holidays. They order a coffee after waiting in line, and get hassled about the form of payment. It wouldn't have been hard for B&N management to work out a deal with Starbucks for handling these cards, but B&N never did. Also, bookstores have the ability to send a majority of their inventory back to the publisher (yeah, crazy legacy stuff). Inventory levels are largely decided by Corp HQ yet despite modern inventory mgmt software being a thing, they continually botched it. So you would get huge shipments. Then when cash flow for the company would get tight, they'd have you pull the books off the shelves and send them back to the publishers. This would be a continual process that consumes tons of time, time that would be better spent on customer service. Corp HQ would also decide to change the store layout frequently. The staff would pack up all the Sci-Fi/Fantasy books, move them to a completely different part of the store. Customers would come in, head to their favorite section, and be flummoxed. Since so many labor hours were spent doing this type of thing, (and the aforementioned book pulls), there weren't as many employees on the book floor to help. I called it the Titanic chair shuffling... Staffing levels were always a problem. On busy holiday weeknights, you might have 4-5 people working. One manager, one head cashier, two in the cafe, and one on the book floor. Employees need breaks, so often you would end up with one cashier, and one person on the book floor. If you get a rush of people, that line at the register can get awfully long. B&N only pays lip service to the customer experience. A lot of these types of decisions add up overtime to create a crappy customer experience. B&N never could compete with Amazon on pricing, and never should have. They should have embraced the book buying experience, and made customers love coming in. But that's a long long game to play, and their management made continually bad choices (like Nook) that distracted them, took capital they didn't have, and confused customers.
• mwexler 9y ago
  Anyone know the source of that awesome breakdown of comp for the execs? That is, I know it's from the filings, but it's a pain to manually assemble, so that's a powerful image...
• bbarn 9y ago
  Barnes and Noble and Borders effectively destroyed the independent book stores of the nation, because at the time they had a better business model. I don't have a lot of sympathy for their business model getting the same treatment from the internet sales model.
• stillsut 9y ago
  I feel for the grown man who dresses up in costumes to read stories for children. I respect him. And yet if there were some subjective corporate performance metrics he had to game to keep his job, I think other employees may know how to work the system better than him. A lot of the best employees are bad at office politics, because they simply love what they do. If there's something to be said about mass-layoffs, it's that they're maybe better than targeted and subjective firings. I think B&N was a wonderful place and concept while the underlying forces were working: it seems like a lot more people want to work with books than there are/were jobs at Independents or Libraries, and B&N got them into a business with the cashflow to support dozens of people on the floor. Are there enough jobs in the brick and mortar book business for everyone without B&N? Probably not right now, but there might be a new franchise concept at some point? Time for one of these people to start it.
• lmroz 9y ago
  It's time for BN to suck it up and put signs around the store saying 'Found a book you love here but are choosing to buy it from a competitor? Please use our referral code: xyz".
• bawana 9y ago
  Did retail ever deserve to live anyway? What kind of life and satisfaction does one get by selling someone else's work? It's easy, low skill and is just plain 'busy work'. Perhaps we are entering the golden age where one's worth is more closely related to the value they add to other peoples lives through their real work as human beings - not as middle men (middle people?) The trades for example are thriving. The food industry is burgeoning. Tourism is growing.Good riddance to mind numbing dehumanizing work - the assembly line, the stock clerk, the delivery person.