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Barnes and Noble Sets Itself Free
- djood 3y agohttp://web.archive.org/web/20231018011209/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/17/style/barnes-noble-redesign.html http://web.archive.org/web/20231018011209/https://www.nytime...
- politelemon 3y agoIt's always nice to read about their "comeback" story. There are no BN stores in the UK or I think it would be worth visiting. I guess our equivalent is Waterstones? But no idea if they've been going through similar moves to appeal to customers.
- ddek 3y agomy understanding i’d that the ceo who revived waterstones is now reviving BN.
- ceruleanseas 3y agoFrom the article: “Mr. Daunt proved his book-selling bona fides as the founder of Daunt Books in London and, more recently, as the executive who rescued Waterstones, Britain’s largest bookstore chain. The hedge fund Elliott Advisors took a majority stake in Waterstones in 2018; the next year it bought Barnes & Noble for $683 million and installed Mr. Daunt, a Cambridge-educated Brit, as its leader. (He is still the managing director of Waterstones; the two chains operate separately.)”
- wizerdrobe 3y agoNice to hear of a fund that is reviving a beloved brand and not raiding it in this cynical world.
- NoboruWataya 3y agoI don't have hard evidence but I suspect this is more common than you think, it's just we only read about the failures or the aggressive raiding stories (because they make juicier stories).
- steveBK123 3y agoThese funds make more money if the company they attempt to turnaround is a success, but the turnaround strategy tends to be high risk as they load the company with debt. So we mostly hear about the failures. Further, I'd observe that most of the companies getting bought by funds for turnaround are.. in need of a turnaround. So many of them were on the path to failing if left to their own devices anyhow. That said there are structural legal/tax issues that benefit "corporate raiders" in these these take-private deals.
- highwaylights 3y agoThis doesn’t surprise me at all. Waterstones have been pushing the “tat” further from the entrance and really are focused on being what bookstores were pre-Amazon. My local Waterstones is the last surviving dedicated book store in the city and is really a destination as much as anything else. They run a lot of activities in their coffee shop too (book clubs and such). I was certain covid would have been the final nail in the coffin but their renewed focus really is working - they’re thriving in a way they haven’t been in 20 years.
- thaumasiotes 3y agoThe "tat"?
- brylie 3y agoNoun (UK) anything that looks cheap, is of low quality, or in bad condition: Like most souvenir shops, it sells a lot of old tat. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/tat https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/tat
- highwaylights 3y agoExactly - In this case by tat I mean things like Harry Potter drinking flasks, Hunger Games calendars, and vaguely book-related trinkets that can be sold for under £5. (The kind of high-margin items that you didn’t come to the shop for and most people won’t buy anyway.)
- sherr 3y agoIt means "rubbish" (or "trash").
- abid786 3y agoClearly you didn't read the article
- Dobbs 3y agoWaterstones and B&N are the same company.
- huytersd 3y agoI wish they served beer and wine there.
- randcraw 3y agoI wish they sold BOOKS. My local B&N (15 miles north of Philly) has converted 25% of shelf space to toys. The tradeoff: just 2 shelves of computer-related books, now titled "Technology", most of which are about using Windows or Office. Does this trend reflect the dumbing down of B&N or its customers?
- LordN00b 3y ago....or does it reflect how we consume our information about technology these days? How quickly are tech-books out of date?
- AshamedCaptain 3y agoVLSI design books written in the 1990s/2000s are still relevant today. This is one of the areas which are arguably at the forefront of knowledge advancement, and yet the tools of the trade, concepts, languages are still the same.
- dale_glass 3y agoOkay, but who actually walks into a physical book shop and expects to find a highly technical book relevant to less than 0.01% of the population? Unless it's attached to the CS/EE campus of an university.
- varjag 3y agoHow many Verilog books an average bookstore branch is going to push monthly you think?
- dageshi 3y agoIt reflects the reality of the internet existing and it being the year 2023 not 2003 I think? Why on earth would a book store carry any relevant computer technical books nowadays?
- nondefunct 3y ago[flagged]
- jackblemming 3y agoThe CEO probably got paid $100 million for the advice too!
- docdeek 3y agoI think it is a little more than that. A chain store strategy of deliberately embracing inconsistent branding is unusual, and going as far as to brand a store with an entirely different name so as to adapt to local tastes is uncommon. Collecting less data about stores (removing foot traffic counters and customer counters) so that staff can concentrate on being nice instead of worrying about store entry/exit metrics is also unusual. It’s a story about a store making a comeback by doing something that other stores wouldn’t do and other retail leaders would quickly reject.
- isitmadeofglass 3y ago[dead]
- UberFly 3y agoThe article mentioned more than that honestly.
- keiferski 3y agoSince he embarked on the Barnes & Noble redesign in 2020, Mr. Daunt has demonstrated that consistency doesn’t rank very high on his priority list. New York City has nine Barnes & Noble stores featuring four different logos above the front doors. A lot of brands benefit from uniformity, knowing that your coffee or burger at Starbucks/McDonalds/wherever is functionally the same in Tokyo or Toronto. I think book stores and other "cultural spaces" might not benefit from this, and the more local flavor, the better. So, this lack of consistency might be more deliberate than it seems. (As an aside, I dislike the uniformity of global brands and my favorite chain locations were ones unique to the location. This Costa Coffee in Sopot, Poland, being one of the more interesting examples: https://www.tripadvisor.com/LocationPhotoDirectLink-g274735-d8041313-i317138980-Costa_Coffee-Sopot_Pomerania_Province_Northern_Poland.html https://www.tripadvisor.com/LocationPhotoDirectLink-g274735-...)
- NoboruWataya 3y agoIf nothing else, uniformity doesn't add as much value to a brand that isn't selling its own product. Nobody really worries that the copy of a book they buy in one shop will be different to a copy bought in another. There are likely some benefits to consistency, like a familiar store layout or knowing that a shop will stock a good range of books, but these are kind of ancillary to the product (and my experience is that these things aren't that consistent across big chains anyway). There is a great book shop in Dublin, Ireland called Hodges Figgis. It was bought by the UK chain Waterstones in 2011, but you wouldn't know it - they wisely decided not to interfere at all with such a locally beloved brand.
- rsynnott 3y ago> There is a great book shop in Dublin, Ireland called Hodges Figgis. It was bought by the UK chain Waterstones in 2011, but you wouldn't know it - they wisely decided not to interfere at all with such a locally beloved brand. In a sign that this works, there used to be a few actual Waterstones branches in Dublin, too, but they didn't survive the general decline in the bookselling industry. I think Waterstones also own a couple of formerly independent shops in London where they've left the branding and operations alone, for similar reasons. (From the article, the new Barnes and Noble chief exec previously ran Waterstones.)
- fmajid 3y agoSee also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34165960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34165960 It’s not just decor. Daunt clearly respects readers and has upped the quality of books stocked, eschewing payola and tchotchkes.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- camgunz 3y agoIt's not clear to me what the benefit of chains is (before anyone says consistency that's definitely not it) to consumers and markets. I guess the idea was supposed to be something like leveraging economies of scale, but most chains are just fronts for broader supply chains with multiple other clients--it's pretty rare that there's a specific like, Applebee's supply chain. But isn't it clear by now that it's all around bad?
- bluGill 3y agoChains have the money to invest in a large store. 90% of the books in any store are not of interest to any particular reader. However each reader wants a different set. Tiny bookstores often only have 5 books that might interest someone, and when you finish those you have nothing to buy there until they change inventory. A large store will have enough inventory that you can come back for more.
- camgunz 3y agoEh I think books are a weird example here because really we should just have libraries (the mechanism here is if there isn't a book you want you have them order it, which is exactly what libraries do, ergo why bookstores). But I can't really think of anything else that's good for this example. It's not like a huge McDonald's is a good idea. Hardware stores were all independent shops bought up by like Ace and True Value (or closed by Wal-Mart, etc.) so like, nothing really changed (a small hardware store is still a small Ace hardware store). Basically anything else (furniture, carpet) has some floor display models and a catalog you can browse. Which is also what B&N does when they don't have the book you want. Maybe like a Menards or Lowe's? But again they're just like a weird superstore that's part appliance store, part hardware store, part greenhouse and part lumber yard. Feels like we'd actually get broader inventory at individual stores for those things.
- pseg134 3y agoWell since you have constrained the answers we can tell you aren’t actually curious so let me just say you are a genius and you have figured it out. Chains are pointless and I wouldn’t be surprised if they haven’t all shut down by the end of the week after reading what you wrote.
- yayamo 3y agoNow if only Canada’s largest bookstor, Indigo, would do this. Instead their CEO is intent on moving in the opposite direction. “Mr. Ruis is planning a major expansion in categories such as cookware, tech gadgets and beauty products. “It’s not four or five things; it’s about 400 or 500 that we’re busily beavering away, trying to bring them to market,” he says, sitting in a boardroom at Indigo’s Toronto offices.” https://paulwells.substack.com/p/the-rideau-centre-indigo-store https://paulwells.substack.com/p/the-rideau-centre-indigo-st...
- Sprocklem 3y agoI recently visited my local Indigo after having not gone for a couple of years, and was surprised at how little space was dedicated to bookshelves. And even those shelves were surprisingly empty. I'm sure that those other categories have higher margins, but I can't help but think that Indigo is shooting itself in the foot in the long term: none of those other products are paricularly good in quality or value and I can't imagine people would go to Indigo for many of those products. Instead, I get the sense that people go to Indigo for books, and see and buy those products while they are in the store. With an ever-decreasing selection of books, who knows how they're going to keep up the traffic required.
- jamincan 3y agoFor what it's worth, Ruis left as CEO earlier this year and it was announced that Heather Reisman was returning to the post about a month ago. https://globalnews.ca/news/9967909/indigo-heather-reisman-ceo/ https://globalnews.ca/news/9967909/indigo-heather-reisman-ce...
- AdmiralAsshat 3y agoIt is nice to see the store doing well. Unfortunately, my partner and I are pretty much all-in on ebooks at this point, aside from the odd graphic novel or coffee table book. I did manage to convince her to switch away from her Kindle to a Nook, with the idea that at least B&N would continue to get a cut of the sales when she stops buying physical. But even then, it's unlikely that a purchased Nook title would benefit our nearby store specifically, unless B&N somehow tracks the store from which the device was purchased. Meanwhile, I'm rocking a Kobo, so, the only recurring business from me they're getting these days is the tin of tea I buy at their cafe. Nonetheless, I still enjoy going there to browse. The new management seems to have a better "vision" of what the store should be, whereas the previous few years just screamed desperation. The place was starting to feel like half bookstore, half Toys 'R Us.
- mwexler 3y agoThis is a great pr/marketing piece. The reality is not so rosy. Still a fan, but they make harder and harder. The new stores and redesigns may be portrayed as "inviting browsing"... But they are rather soulless racks of shelves, with little of the unique touches that differentiated Barnes. The new designs are uncomfortable, not quite sterile but just... Meh. In effect, in the effort to put the books up front, locations now look more like the pop-up calendar remainders shops that show up every Feb in US malls. Gone are any nods to community: chairs are few so no sitting, comparing, or even quietly chatting to fellow book shoppers. Newer locations have no bathrooms. Some have food still, but fewer options with higher prices tell the story there. While newer stores have fewer "bestsellers", they also have fewer variety of books in total, as smaller footprints force out more niche categories. Daunt is an amazing fellow, and he loves books. Some of his changes are great to see. And Waterstones are still a joy to visit. But B&N isn't quite Waterstones. At the end of the day, B&N have chosen to ignore the power of scale and presence, and instead act like a local shop. But, I'd rather then go to a local shop. If the local shop doesn't have my unique need covered, I expect a bigger shop to do so. And up til a few years ago, B&N would have. B&N owned the middle-to-largr size bookstore space. Amazon was infinite, my local was curated, but what was immediate, relatively vast, and had good open hours? Instead of playing to this strength, it tried to become Amazon, then the local "upscale" toy store (Learning Express et al), and a cd/record/DVD shop, a genre "collector's" shop, anything but leveraging the things that made them. And now, they try to copy the local bookstore. It feels like the old cartoon images of the massive American football player in the ballerina tutu. Instead of trying on every costume in the shop, perhaps B&N should have played to its strengths instead of trying to find a new thing to copy. All that being said, I will still keep visiting, hoping that we won't lose B&N in total. But I hope they recognize why I go, sooner rather than later. Disclosure: worked at bn.com and the nook store for a few years.
- SpaceLawnmower 3y agoYeah Barnes and Noble for me was a third place where I could sit down, read a book, study, read some manga, eat a cookie, spend time. The new design downgrades most of those uses and turns it in to a better place to buy books.