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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%

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.
  - cowpig 9y ago
    Well, the deckchairs could be rearranged on the titanic to make room for the women and children getting on lifeboats. In American Capitalism, we prefer arrange them into a large pile for the captain to climb up on top of so he direct the drowning of the women and children as he waits for the private helicopter to warm up.
  - b1daly 9y ago
    Your contention implies that there are no differences of import to how a company is managed, if business failure is inevitable. Sadly, I think this is not that rare of an opinion amongst a certain class of managers who disproportionately consider their own welfare, above all. You don’t have to think that hard to realize the callous absurdity of this viewpoint.
- ams6110 9y ago
  He's saying the arguments of the post are irrelevant. Sure they could have hired seasonal workers for the holidays, and maybe had better results, but either way they are doomed. I haven't bought a book at a retail outlet in probably 10 years. There's just nothing about the retail experience at B&N that's even worth the effort to drive there and park. It's not salvageable.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    You don't think there is space in the United States' market for even a single major brick-and-mortar retailer of books? I find that pretty hard to believe.
    - ams6110 9y ago
      Not really. Not for the long term. Certain independents and specialty shops -- sure. We still have record stores here and there, but the big chains are all gone.
      - emodendroket 9y ago
        Fye is still around.
        ams6110 9y ago
        Never heard of 'em. Where I live, we used to have Musicland - gone. Sam Goody - Gone. Tower - Gone. Several other smaller shops -- all closed years ago. There's only one record store here, an independent dealing mostly in new and used vinyl.
        emodendroket 9y ago
        https://stores.fye.com/index.html https://stores.fye.com/index.html There are also various regional retailers.
    - sanderjd 9y ago
- goofingaround 9y ago
  The "ship from store" argument does not make sense. Many healthy retailers use omnichannel, ship-from-store, buy-online-fulfill-in-store, etc. These methods can improve fulfillment, increase inventory utilization, and reduce stale inventory. If a retailer wants to draw down inventory, then just cut replenishment. I believe Target Canada was accused of doing so. Implementing "faux omnichannel" and the associated IT, store processes, etc. would be much harder.
  - CodeWriter23 9y ago
    What the author is saying is they used the “closer to customer” argument as a smoke screen to cover the fact that they performed a logisticextomy last year. The fact of the matter is logistic operations in the Midwest are favorable for the medium range retailer. In the post-warehouse age, when the book your NYC customer wants is in Seattle, you’re paying Zone 8 rates to USPS instead of Zone 3 from Indiana to NYC (or Seattle).
    - goofingaround 9y ago
      I don't see the logistics argument in the article. The article states i) distraction from in-store sales for employees, ii) removing inventory from store shelves, and iii) no credit for stores. The "stores don't get credit" argument is weak. The article implies that corporate is siphoning credit from stores to online. Sales are down 6% across the board. Samestore sales down 6.5%, online sales down 4.5%. Omnichannel does not create those numbers. Anyway, the logistics argument depends on more than rates. Fulfilling from a midwest warehouse can be cheap; a warehouse full of product sliding down a markdown curve can be expensive. I've been surprised by the merchant pushback to omnichannel. I've been hearing "there are no cash registers in the warehouse", etc. for years. Now we expose more inventory to customers and stores complain about selling to the wrong (usually ecommerce) customer.
      - emodendroket 9y ago
        My understanding of the article was that they were poorly managing the inventory and therefore unnecessarily cannibalizing their own sales.
ivraatiems 9y ago
> 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. Maybe we need to acknowledge that we're moving towards having a society where "everyone has a job that earns them their living" is untenable, because there will be less work for humans to do than humans to do it, and we have to find a different kind of social contract to survive on.
- ryanwaggoner 9y ago
  Maybe, but it seems a weird argument to make during record low unemployment. Yes, I'm aware of labor force participation rates, and that the pay for many of these jobs is too low, AI is predicted to destroy jobs, etc, but that's not what we're talking about, right? Amazon employs way more people than B&N, the company they put out of business. Maybe those jobs should be better (OK, they definitely should), but that's different from saying there are no jobs, isn't it?
  - ivraatiems 9y ago
    > Maybe, but it seems a weird argument to make during record low unemployment. Yes, I'm aware of labor force participation rates, and that the pay for many of these jobs is too low, AI is predicted to destroy jobs, etc, but that's not what we're talking about, right? Admittedly, I'm driving the conversation towards a general problem from this specific example. But I think that even if I accept the premise that right now, things are OK, we still need to prepare for the future that's coming. Automation is coming for truck and taxi drivers, for restaurant workers, for the last remaining factory jobs. It's even coming for relatively skilled workers in some fields. It's not directly what this post is talking about, but it's the context in which this post takes place, and we shouldn't avoid it. > Amazon employs way more people than B&N, the company they put out of business. Maybe those jobs should be better (OK, they definitely should), but that's different from saying there are no jobs, isn't it? Amazon employs more people than B&N, but B&N is by no means the first or only company they have destroyed, and there are more to come. And as soon as Amazon can make the same amount of money while employing fewer people, they will do so. Every company does. The cycle repeats, only this time more people lose and fewer people gain.
thesmallestcat 9y ago
It's destructive, and Amazon can get away with being a crap book store now. I've ordered many thousands of dollars worth of computing books from them over the years. In the past six months, and especially the past couple months, "new" books come with massive creases, scuffs, and dents. Or a bad print with hard-to-read text. A copy you'd never buy in person, or B&N would knock something off the price because of the damage. When you paid $80+ for the book, it sucks. I haven't been returning the books for two reasons: When you get ten books in the mail and eight of them are damaged, and some of them are immediately useful, are you really going to go through Amazon's return process for all of them, photograph each one, package, ship, etc.? Second, I just know that if I do this, it will contribute to some poor schmuck losing his job at a fulfillment center, or some LAZR driver getting taken off their route, because DATA-DRIVEN. Now I just order used books, sadly most of the vendors are on Amazon so I can't really take my business elsewhere. At least I don't feel quite as ripped off when my "Like New" book arrives in "Good" condition. Even sweeter, those vendors don't sit on my order for a week for funsies like Amazon does if you resist their PRIME offering. Has anybody else been receiving damaged "new" books from Amazon lately?
- throwaway9980 9y ago
  “Even sweeter, those vendors don't sit on my order for a week for funsies like Amazon does if you resist their PRIME offering.” What’s the deal with this? I turned off prime a couple of years ago and it certainly feels like they’re intentionally slow processing orders. For books, I only buy used and try to pick nearby sellers. Often the media mail shipment will show up in 2-3 days. Pretty great.
  - thesmallestcat 9y ago
    I think it's sort of like first-class flying. There's no logistical reason for not boarding the plane rear-to-front, but you can get people to pay for the privilege of being first, so why not? Non-Prime customers are second priority, and expected fulfillment is adjusted accordingly.
    - 9y ago
yock 9y ago
> Now, it's definitely sad when people lose their jobs, but that's kind of the devil's bargain we've made with capitalism. It's not so much a "bargain" as it is how we discover which jobs are useful. Capitalism is very efficient at exposing useless labor, and this is a good thing. Having a bunch of humans laboring at jobs no one needs or wants is wasteful.
- barsonme 9y ago
  Yeah. Sharp edges are all the more better for cutting, it seems.
- zipwitch 9y ago
  You are making the completely unwarranted (and demonstrated false by modern history) assumption that decisions coming from capitalism are made objectively and rationally.
  - ryanwaggoner 9y ago
    "Capitalism" doesn't make any decisions. It's emergent behavior. People make all kinds of decisions and bets and tradeoffs, some of which work better than others and "win". That doesn't mean we always like those outcomes, hence the need for regulations, social safety net, etc. Overall, it's a pretty shitty system, since it means that some people are always losing, but it also seems to be the best we've got.
    - yock 9y ago
      > "Capitalism" doesn't make any decisions. It's _emergent behavior_. People make all kinds of decisions and bets and tradeoffs, some of which work better than others and "win". > Overall, it's a pretty shitty _system_, since it means that some people are always losing, but it also seems to be the best we've got. _Emphasis mine_. Is it a system or emergent behavior? I'd argue that these are mutually exclusive and that capitalism falls squarely in the latter category. It is the result of individuals being free to exchange whatever they find valuable.
- 9y ago
sseveran 9y ago
I agree with the beginning, especially about the deck chairs as its an expression I often use. Let's be clear its people like me who killed Barnes and Noble not its executives. I have two or three sets of bookshelves downstairs in my office filled with books, many of which were bought at B&N. I spent hours sipping coffee in their cafe's. Then I bought my kindle. And I basically have not been back since. When I do buy a physical book it is typically a rare math or finance book which B&N is not going to carry. And my life is richer for it. I bought two books today for my kindle that were mentioned on a podcast I was listening to. B&N is just a dead company that has not gone out of business yet and I agree that there is little to nothing that can be done to keep it existing in its current form. The company today is only worth $340M dollars. Maybe it could restructure as some sort of higher end boutique store, but that would probably require a significant downsizing and realignment. Its hard to see a positive way forward but maybe someone else will.
- curun1r 9y ago
  The tragedy, for me, is that while I agree with most of what you've said and my transition to ebooks has been similar to yours, I've also begun realizing what we're losing by moving away from brick-and-mortar retail. I look back on my childhood in the 80s and 90s and remember retail as not only fulfilling the need of acquiring stuff but also as a central meeting place. Going downtown to buy stuff was an activity as much as it was an errand. There were movie theaters, restaurants and all sorts of other business that existed in an symbiotic ecosystem with all the retail outlets. Over time, each of these business has been or is being replaced by a more-efficient, internet version of itself. We now order more and more food delivery rather than eating out. We now stream more of our entertainment in our homes and many people haven't been to a theater more than a couple of times per year. And while none of these shifts is bad in and of itself, the common theme is that we've replaced the social version of each of them with a version that we use alone, interacting only with a computer and not another human being. I don't think it's a coincidence that we're having an epidemic of drug addiction and overdose considering how often drug addiction is a side effect of lack of human connection. We've taken all of these services and removed the human interaction and I think we're seeing that that human interaction was more than just fulfilling a transactional need. It was also keeping us sane in minuscule increments that, overall, added up to something tangible. It's a tough duality for me to accept. I love my Kindle and I find the reading experience to be so much nicer than a physical book. On a recent year-long trip abroad, I was able to bring enough books for the entire trip and it weighed less than a single physical book. In one sense, it was great. Every book I read was something I wanted to read and I probably enjoyed them more because of it. On my first prolonged trip abroad back in the late 90s, I could only bring a couple of books with me. After I'd finished them, I had to find people to trade with to get new books. I probably didn't enjoy those books as much as ones I would've selected for myself, but I also ended up reading things I'd never have even considered reading before because I just didn't have any other options. There's a distinct part of me--the person that's able to look beyond the immediate fulfillment of my needs--that thinks that things were much better back in the days where stuff cost a bit more, it took more time to buy and I had to actually talk to a person to buy it.
marzipan 9y ago
Waterstones came back, and recently, too. [0] They're a similar company that faced similar issues - it CAN be done. This is about a lack of vision and will from the management to re-position the company, make hard cuts, and tap into the best things it had going for it. Stripping the company down to book value assets with no repurposing or new goal is what you do when you've given up and become a liquidator. Even "Kodakcoin" is a better plan. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/03/balancing-the-books-how-waterstones-returned-to-profit https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/03/balancing-the-...
- ryanwaggoner 9y ago
  That's a wonderful story, but may be premature. I don't know the UK market, but I'm not sure I'd invest in 2018.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
Buge 9y ago
At some point the government could decide Amazon (or other big tech companies) are monopolies, and break them up.
- indubitable 9y ago
  A reasonable litmus test for monopoly is whether they would fail if they started exploiting their customers. Time Warner and Comcast pass this test. They refuse to compete and then aggressively raise prices, seemingly to no end, knowing full well their customers have no choice. Microsoft's Windows 10 also passes this test with extreme anti-customer behavior that relies exclusively on consumers tolerating only due to a lack of choice. Now back to Amazon. If they started ramping up their prices they would fail, fail hard, and fail practically overnight. There's a difference between a company being incredibly efficient and passing, with great success, that efficiency onto consumers and monopolies. Another general trend in monopolies is that they generally rely on tertiary forces to prevent competition. For the telecoms, this is the lack of access to wiring or even simply poles. For Windows, it's native execution of decades of third party software as well as the vast majority of all consumer software written today. There's no barrier to competing with Amazon, you're just not going to do it as well as them. It's the same reason WalMarts destroy small local businesses.
intended 9y ago
Cribbing from r/economics FAQ on automation -------- > It's important to note that the vast majority of workers (>90%) before the industrial revolution worked in agriculture, and that this number is now less than 5%. Why did the automation of agriculture not lead to widespread, long term unemployment? This is because disruptive technologies have multiple effects. They: * Destroy existing jobs * Complement existing jobs (by making them more efficient) * Create new jobs * Reallocate the workforce to where it is most productive Note that only one of those four effects causes long run job loss. Two of those cause job loss in general (job reallocation implies job loss in the short term, after all). For automation to cause long run structural unemployment, the new technology needs not only to destroy jobs and create no new jobs, but it also needs to somehow prevent reallocation of workers to other sectors of the economy. ------- The issue as I see it is not so much automation, which is inevitable. The issue is that humans are hard to retrain, unless you spend a lot of expensive human power to make the transition. This makes it un-economical (you need to give people money, and time, and teachers, and then IF they certify, they need to qualify/compete with people who were already in the industry). Re-training is an unsolved problem (In my opinion), and it is possible we may not want to solve it. As the internet has shown, any communication technology is morally neutral. If you found a way to re-train huge groups of people faster than ever before, then that tool could be used to indoctrinate people faster than before as well. EDIT: It is pretty important to note that this is the current weak spot in the over arching economic model that drives the world. Tech advances are mathematically responsible for improving the size of the economy - they are necessary and critical for humanity. The general answer by economics is that people move to other sectors where there is demand for them. Unfortunately, if you cannot make that move, the system doesn't work that well. Or worse - you make a move from being a manager to a burger flipper. One side effect of this is an increase in inequality of wealth distribution. So figuring out if re-training works, and if it is working at the scale needed to deal with creative disruption, is obviously a major component of future human well being.
- indubitable 9y ago
  I sometimes think our views might be to 'current-centric' when considering a post automation era. In my mind one of the most distinguishing features of the labor world today is the growth of complete independence. You have solitary people start software companies and independently design, develop, and publish products that go on to earn billions. I think a big part of this is the efficiency created by current systems. The economic systems to handle payments are almost entirely automated. The system of publication processes payments and delivers product in an entirely automated fashion. And consumers can learn about and purchase your product also using fully automated systems. Compare that to times when software was sold exclusively in retail outlets. For that matter you don't even have to go that far back to times when computers themselves were outside the reach of all except the most elite of society rendering such economic possibilities moot. And I think this trend of independence is something that will likely continue going forward. Imagine in a post automation world where things like industrial level machining and eventually even things like semiconductor fabrications become as accessible as PCs were let's say 30 years ago. This is a game changer that I think is going to be extremely difficult to predict the implications of. For that matter imagine automated construction bots capable of executing building designs all the way from ground clearance on up. Let's get more agrarian. Consider things like automated micro-farms. People could use these for their own nourishment, but then there's also the possibility of automated delivery systems enabling user-to-user distribution systems where people could even make a living off of their land in an autonomous fashion. Right there are vast amounts of great arable land in the US that's for sale for next to nothing. In some cases you can get land literally for free. But without automation it's not so straight forward to monetize this. What would be the implications, if it did become possible? 4 acres and a bot? The whole point here is that I think by focusing on training as a means of contributing to a large company as a means of earning a living is not necessarily something that will be a given in the future. These large companies are the ones that have the means and motivation to eliminate these jobs. The present already rewards independence vastly more than dependent labor and this is a trend I think we'll see grow exponentially in the era of automation. And that has very difficult to even imagine implications.
mrep 9y ago
Haha, you literally just came upon the realization for the economic use cases for unemployment benefits and also the main reason our government has one. You should read some economic textbooks as the world will make a whole lot more sense once you do.
- curiousg 9y ago
  Nothing about the comment gave the impression that the author isn't familiar with those concepts.
- ryanwaggoner 9y ago
  Believe it or not, I didn't just "come upon" this realization and I've taken multiple econ classes (though I'd like to take more). Also, our unemployment benefits are a pretty sorry excuse for a social safety net, which is why I wasn't specifically talking about them here.
  - mrep 9y ago
    Sorry, you didn't mention economics at all but all of your points are discussed thoroughly and pretty well agreed upon in economic textbooks so I assumed you weren't aware (since if you were, I thought you would have sourced them).
    - ryanwaggoner 9y ago
      In general, conversations are more interesting and edifying when they consist of more than someone just saying "my reaction on this topic is what economics textbooks say" :)
      - mrep 9y ago
        That part was 100% me suggesting you read up on economics as it seemed like a subject you were unaware of but one that you would totally love since it completely matched your logic. My main point was bringing up unemployment benefits.
  - 9y ago
Feniks 9y ago
Yeah internet shopping is decimating physical retail. The old multi story bookstores were you could find all kinds of stuff are dead. What's left is stores selling only the best sellers.
jandrese 9y ago
IMHO, a large number of idle people is not good for society either. People need a purpose in life, and a great many people don't seem very good at making up their own. Otherwise there's a strong chance that they'll become depressed, and often start abusing drugs, and then it's just a big spiral downward. As dumb as it is, that stupid job at least gives them a reason to get up in the morning, maybe even a bit of satisfaction from time to time. These universal income ideas have the notion that your average joe will decide to learn an instrument, or maybe practice swimming, or maybe backpack across the country. In the real world they'll sit on the couch all day watching TV or playing video games and/or getting high. Universal income won't work until we figure out how to not turn the country into rural West Virginia with it. Or as Picard put it: You see, one of the most important things in a person's life is to feel useful.

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.
- cowpig 9y ago
  Well, the deckchairs could be rearranged on the titanic to make room for the women and children getting on lifeboats. In American Capitalism, we prefer arrange them into a large pile for the captain to climb up on top of so he direct the drowning of the women and children as he waits for the private helicopter to warm up.
- b1daly 9y ago
  Your contention implies that there are no differences of import to how a company is managed, if business failure is inevitable. Sadly, I think this is not that rare of an opinion amongst a certain class of managers who disproportionately consider their own welfare, above all. You don’t have to think that hard to realize the callous absurdity of this viewpoint.
ams6110 9y ago
He's saying the arguments of the post are irrelevant. Sure they could have hired seasonal workers for the holidays, and maybe had better results, but either way they are doomed. I haven't bought a book at a retail outlet in probably 10 years. There's just nothing about the retail experience at B&N that's even worth the effort to drive there and park. It's not salvageable.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  You don't think there is space in the United States' market for even a single major brick-and-mortar retailer of books? I find that pretty hard to believe.
  - ams6110 9y ago
    Not really. Not for the long term. Certain independents and specialty shops -- sure. We still have record stores here and there, but the big chains are all gone.
    - emodendroket 9y ago
      Fye is still around.
      - ams6110 9y ago
        Never heard of 'em. Where I live, we used to have Musicland - gone. Sam Goody - Gone. Tower - Gone. Several other smaller shops -- all closed years ago. There's only one record store here, an independent dealing mostly in new and used vinyl.
        emodendroket 9y ago
        https://stores.fye.com/index.html https://stores.fye.com/index.html There are also various regional retailers.
  - sanderjd 9y ago
goofingaround 9y ago
The "ship from store" argument does not make sense. Many healthy retailers use omnichannel, ship-from-store, buy-online-fulfill-in-store, etc. These methods can improve fulfillment, increase inventory utilization, and reduce stale inventory. If a retailer wants to draw down inventory, then just cut replenishment. I believe Target Canada was accused of doing so. Implementing "faux omnichannel" and the associated IT, store processes, etc. would be much harder.
- CodeWriter23 9y ago
  What the author is saying is they used the “closer to customer” argument as a smoke screen to cover the fact that they performed a logisticextomy last year. The fact of the matter is logistic operations in the Midwest are favorable for the medium range retailer. In the post-warehouse age, when the book your NYC customer wants is in Seattle, you’re paying Zone 8 rates to USPS instead of Zone 3 from Indiana to NYC (or Seattle).
  - goofingaround 9y ago
    I don't see the logistics argument in the article. The article states i) distraction from in-store sales for employees, ii) removing inventory from store shelves, and iii) no credit for stores. The "stores don't get credit" argument is weak. The article implies that corporate is siphoning credit from stores to online. Sales are down 6% across the board. Samestore sales down 6.5%, online sales down 4.5%. Omnichannel does not create those numbers. Anyway, the logistics argument depends on more than rates. Fulfilling from a midwest warehouse can be cheap; a warehouse full of product sliding down a markdown curve can be expensive. I've been surprised by the merchant pushback to omnichannel. I've been hearing "there are no cash registers in the warehouse", etc. for years. Now we expose more inventory to customers and stores complain about selling to the wrong (usually ecommerce) customer.
    - emodendroket 9y ago
      My understanding of the article was that they were poorly managing the inventory and therefore unnecessarily cannibalizing their own sales.

ivraatiems 9y ago

> 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. Maybe we need to acknowledge that we're moving towards having a society where "everyone has a job that earns them their living" is untenable, because there will be less work for humans to do than humans to do it, and we have to find a different kind of social contract to survive on.

ryanwaggoner 9y ago
Maybe, but it seems a weird argument to make during record low unemployment. Yes, I'm aware of labor force participation rates, and that the pay for many of these jobs is too low, AI is predicted to destroy jobs, etc, but that's not what we're talking about, right? Amazon employs way more people than B&N, the company they put out of business. Maybe those jobs should be better (OK, they definitely should), but that's different from saying there are no jobs, isn't it?
- ivraatiems 9y ago
  > Maybe, but it seems a weird argument to make during record low unemployment. Yes, I'm aware of labor force participation rates, and that the pay for many of these jobs is too low, AI is predicted to destroy jobs, etc, but that's not what we're talking about, right? Admittedly, I'm driving the conversation towards a general problem from this specific example. But I think that even if I accept the premise that right now, things are OK, we still need to prepare for the future that's coming. Automation is coming for truck and taxi drivers, for restaurant workers, for the last remaining factory jobs. It's even coming for relatively skilled workers in some fields. It's not directly what this post is talking about, but it's the context in which this post takes place, and we shouldn't avoid it. > Amazon employs way more people than B&N, the company they put out of business. Maybe those jobs should be better (OK, they definitely should), but that's different from saying there are no jobs, isn't it? Amazon employs more people than B&N, but B&N is by no means the first or only company they have destroyed, and there are more to come. And as soon as Amazon can make the same amount of money while employing fewer people, they will do so. Every company does. The cycle repeats, only this time more people lose and fewer people gain.

thesmallestcat 9y ago

It's destructive, and Amazon can get away with being a crap book store now. I've ordered many thousands of dollars worth of computing books from them over the years. In the past six months, and especially the past couple months, "new" books come with massive creases, scuffs, and dents. Or a bad print with hard-to-read text. A copy you'd never buy in person, or B&N would knock something off the price because of the damage. When you paid $80+ for the book, it sucks. I haven't been returning the books for two reasons: When you get ten books in the mail and eight of them are damaged, and some of them are immediately useful, are you really going to go through Amazon's return process for all of them, photograph each one, package, ship, etc.? Second, I just know that if I do this, it will contribute to some poor schmuck losing his job at a fulfillment center, or some LAZR driver getting taken off their route, because DATA-DRIVEN. Now I just order used books, sadly most of the vendors are on Amazon so I can't really take my business elsewhere. At least I don't feel quite as ripped off when my "Like New" book arrives in "Good" condition. Even sweeter, those vendors don't sit on my order for a week for funsies like Amazon does if you resist their PRIME offering. Has anybody else been receiving damaged "new" books from Amazon lately?

throwaway9980 9y ago
“Even sweeter, those vendors don't sit on my order for a week for funsies like Amazon does if you resist their PRIME offering.” What’s the deal with this? I turned off prime a couple of years ago and it certainly feels like they’re intentionally slow processing orders. For books, I only buy used and try to pick nearby sellers. Often the media mail shipment will show up in 2-3 days. Pretty great.
- thesmallestcat 9y ago
  I think it's sort of like first-class flying. There's no logistical reason for not boarding the plane rear-to-front, but you can get people to pay for the privilege of being first, so why not? Non-Prime customers are second priority, and expected fulfillment is adjusted accordingly.
  - 9y ago

yock 9y ago

> Now, it's definitely sad when people lose their jobs, but that's kind of the devil's bargain we've made with capitalism. It's not so much a "bargain" as it is how we discover which jobs are useful. Capitalism is very efficient at exposing useless labor, and this is a good thing. Having a bunch of humans laboring at jobs no one needs or wants is wasteful.

barsonme 9y ago
Yeah. Sharp edges are all the more better for cutting, it seems.
zipwitch 9y ago
You are making the completely unwarranted (and demonstrated false by modern history) assumption that decisions coming from capitalism are made objectively and rationally.
- ryanwaggoner 9y ago
  "Capitalism" doesn't make any decisions. It's emergent behavior. People make all kinds of decisions and bets and tradeoffs, some of which work better than others and "win". That doesn't mean we always like those outcomes, hence the need for regulations, social safety net, etc. Overall, it's a pretty shitty system, since it means that some people are always losing, but it also seems to be the best we've got.
  - yock 9y ago
    > "Capitalism" doesn't make any decisions. It's _emergent behavior_. People make all kinds of decisions and bets and tradeoffs, some of which work better than others and "win". > Overall, it's a pretty shitty _system_, since it means that some people are always losing, but it also seems to be the best we've got. _Emphasis mine_. Is it a system or emergent behavior? I'd argue that these are mutually exclusive and that capitalism falls squarely in the latter category. It is the result of individuals being free to exchange whatever they find valuable.
9y ago

sseveran 9y ago

I agree with the beginning, especially about the deck chairs as its an expression I often use. Let's be clear its people like me who killed Barnes and Noble not its executives. I have two or three sets of bookshelves downstairs in my office filled with books, many of which were bought at B&N. I spent hours sipping coffee in their cafe's. Then I bought my kindle. And I basically have not been back since. When I do buy a physical book it is typically a rare math or finance book which B&N is not going to carry. And my life is richer for it. I bought two books today for my kindle that were mentioned on a podcast I was listening to. B&N is just a dead company that has not gone out of business yet and I agree that there is little to nothing that can be done to keep it existing in its current form. The company today is only worth $340M dollars. Maybe it could restructure as some sort of higher end boutique store, but that would probably require a significant downsizing and realignment. Its hard to see a positive way forward but maybe someone else will.

curun1r 9y ago
The tragedy, for me, is that while I agree with most of what you've said and my transition to ebooks has been similar to yours, I've also begun realizing what we're losing by moving away from brick-and-mortar retail. I look back on my childhood in the 80s and 90s and remember retail as not only fulfilling the need of acquiring stuff but also as a central meeting place. Going downtown to buy stuff was an activity as much as it was an errand. There were movie theaters, restaurants and all sorts of other business that existed in an symbiotic ecosystem with all the retail outlets. Over time, each of these business has been or is being replaced by a more-efficient, internet version of itself. We now order more and more food delivery rather than eating out. We now stream more of our entertainment in our homes and many people haven't been to a theater more than a couple of times per year. And while none of these shifts is bad in and of itself, the common theme is that we've replaced the social version of each of them with a version that we use alone, interacting only with a computer and not another human being. I don't think it's a coincidence that we're having an epidemic of drug addiction and overdose considering how often drug addiction is a side effect of lack of human connection. We've taken all of these services and removed the human interaction and I think we're seeing that that human interaction was more than just fulfilling a transactional need. It was also keeping us sane in minuscule increments that, overall, added up to something tangible. It's a tough duality for me to accept. I love my Kindle and I find the reading experience to be so much nicer than a physical book. On a recent year-long trip abroad, I was able to bring enough books for the entire trip and it weighed less than a single physical book. In one sense, it was great. Every book I read was something I wanted to read and I probably enjoyed them more because of it. On my first prolonged trip abroad back in the late 90s, I could only bring a couple of books with me. After I'd finished them, I had to find people to trade with to get new books. I probably didn't enjoy those books as much as ones I would've selected for myself, but I also ended up reading things I'd never have even considered reading before because I just didn't have any other options. There's a distinct part of me--the person that's able to look beyond the immediate fulfillment of my needs--that thinks that things were much better back in the days where stuff cost a bit more, it took more time to buy and I had to actually talk to a person to buy it.

marzipan 9y ago

Waterstones came back, and recently, too. [0] They're a similar company that faced similar issues - it CAN be done. This is about a lack of vision and will from the management to re-position the company, make hard cuts, and tap into the best things it had going for it. Stripping the company down to book value assets with no repurposing or new goal is what you do when you've given up and become a liquidator. Even "Kodakcoin" is a better plan. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/03/balancing-the-books-how-waterstones-returned-to-profit https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/03/balancing-the-...

ryanwaggoner 9y ago
That's a wonderful story, but may be premature. I don't know the UK market, but I'm not sure I'd invest in 2018.
- deleted 9y ago
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Buge 9y ago

At some point the government could decide Amazon (or other big tech companies) are monopolies, and break them up.

indubitable 9y ago
A reasonable litmus test for monopoly is whether they would fail if they started exploiting their customers. Time Warner and Comcast pass this test. They refuse to compete and then aggressively raise prices, seemingly to no end, knowing full well their customers have no choice. Microsoft's Windows 10 also passes this test with extreme anti-customer behavior that relies exclusively on consumers tolerating only due to a lack of choice. Now back to Amazon. If they started ramping up their prices they would fail, fail hard, and fail practically overnight. There's a difference between a company being incredibly efficient and passing, with great success, that efficiency onto consumers and monopolies. Another general trend in monopolies is that they generally rely on tertiary forces to prevent competition. For the telecoms, this is the lack of access to wiring or even simply poles. For Windows, it's native execution of decades of third party software as well as the vast majority of all consumer software written today. There's no barrier to competing with Amazon, you're just not going to do it as well as them. It's the same reason WalMarts destroy small local businesses.

intended 9y ago

Cribbing from r/economics FAQ on automation -------- > It's important to note that the vast majority of workers (>90%) before the industrial revolution worked in agriculture, and that this number is now less than 5%. Why did the automation of agriculture not lead to widespread, long term unemployment? This is because disruptive technologies have multiple effects. They: * Destroy existing jobs * Complement existing jobs (by making them more efficient) * Create new jobs * Reallocate the workforce to where it is most productive Note that only one of those four effects causes long run job loss. Two of those cause job loss in general (job reallocation implies job loss in the short term, after all). For automation to cause long run structural unemployment, the new technology needs not only to destroy jobs and create no new jobs, but it also needs to somehow prevent reallocation of workers to other sectors of the economy. ------- The issue as I see it is not so much automation, which is inevitable. The issue is that humans are hard to retrain, unless you spend a lot of expensive human power to make the transition. This makes it un-economical (you need to give people money, and time, and teachers, and then IF they certify, they need to qualify/compete with people who were already in the industry). Re-training is an unsolved problem (In my opinion), and it is possible we may not want to solve it. As the internet has shown, any communication technology is morally neutral. If you found a way to re-train huge groups of people faster than ever before, then that tool could be used to indoctrinate people faster than before as well. EDIT: It is pretty important to note that this is the current weak spot in the over arching economic model that drives the world. Tech advances are mathematically responsible for improving the size of the economy - they are necessary and critical for humanity. The general answer by economics is that people move to other sectors where there is demand for them. Unfortunately, if you cannot make that move, the system doesn't work that well. Or worse - you make a move from being a manager to a burger flipper. One side effect of this is an increase in inequality of wealth distribution. So figuring out if re-training works, and if it is working at the scale needed to deal with creative disruption, is obviously a major component of future human well being.

indubitable 9y ago
I sometimes think our views might be to 'current-centric' when considering a post automation era. In my mind one of the most distinguishing features of the labor world today is the growth of complete independence. You have solitary people start software companies and independently design, develop, and publish products that go on to earn billions. I think a big part of this is the efficiency created by current systems. The economic systems to handle payments are almost entirely automated. The system of publication processes payments and delivers product in an entirely automated fashion. And consumers can learn about and purchase your product also using fully automated systems. Compare that to times when software was sold exclusively in retail outlets. For that matter you don't even have to go that far back to times when computers themselves were outside the reach of all except the most elite of society rendering such economic possibilities moot. And I think this trend of independence is something that will likely continue going forward. Imagine in a post automation world where things like industrial level machining and eventually even things like semiconductor fabrications become as accessible as PCs were let's say 30 years ago. This is a game changer that I think is going to be extremely difficult to predict the implications of. For that matter imagine automated construction bots capable of executing building designs all the way from ground clearance on up. Let's get more agrarian. Consider things like automated micro-farms. People could use these for their own nourishment, but then there's also the possibility of automated delivery systems enabling user-to-user distribution systems where people could even make a living off of their land in an autonomous fashion. Right there are vast amounts of great arable land in the US that's for sale for next to nothing. In some cases you can get land literally for free. But without automation it's not so straight forward to monetize this. What would be the implications, if it did become possible? 4 acres and a bot? The whole point here is that I think by focusing on training as a means of contributing to a large company as a means of earning a living is not necessarily something that will be a given in the future. These large companies are the ones that have the means and motivation to eliminate these jobs. The present already rewards independence vastly more than dependent labor and this is a trend I think we'll see grow exponentially in the era of automation. And that has very difficult to even imagine implications.

mrep 9y ago

Haha, you literally just came upon the realization for the economic use cases for unemployment benefits and also the main reason our government has one. You should read some economic textbooks as the world will make a whole lot more sense once you do.

curiousg 9y ago
Nothing about the comment gave the impression that the author isn't familiar with those concepts.
ryanwaggoner 9y ago
Believe it or not, I didn't just "come upon" this realization and I've taken multiple econ classes (though I'd like to take more). Also, our unemployment benefits are a pretty sorry excuse for a social safety net, which is why I wasn't specifically talking about them here.
- mrep 9y ago
  Sorry, you didn't mention economics at all but all of your points are discussed thoroughly and pretty well agreed upon in economic textbooks so I assumed you weren't aware (since if you were, I thought you would have sourced them).
  - ryanwaggoner 9y ago
    In general, conversations are more interesting and edifying when they consist of more than someone just saying "my reaction on this topic is what economics textbooks say" :)
    - mrep 9y ago
      That part was 100% me suggesting you read up on economics as it seemed like a subject you were unaware of but one that you would totally love since it completely matched your logic. My main point was bringing up unemployment benefits.
- 9y ago

Feniks 9y ago

Yeah internet shopping is decimating physical retail. The old multi story bookstores were you could find all kinds of stuff are dead. What's left is stores selling only the best sellers.

jandrese 9y ago

IMHO, a large number of idle people is not good for society either. People need a purpose in life, and a great many people don't seem very good at making up their own. Otherwise there's a strong chance that they'll become depressed, and often start abusing drugs, and then it's just a big spiral downward. As dumb as it is, that stupid job at least gives them a reason to get up in the morning, maybe even a bit of satisfaction from time to time. These universal income ideas have the notion that your average joe will decide to learn an instrument, or maybe practice swimming, or maybe backpack across the country. In the real world they'll sit on the couch all day watching TV or playing video games and/or getting high. Universal income won't work until we figure out how to not turn the country into rural West Virginia with it. Or as Picard put it: You see, one of the most important things in a person's life is to feel useful.