I have a family member who has worked at B&N for 16 years, and is continually worried about the health of the company. Some of the big issues are: 1. Employee

I have a family member who has worked at B&N for 16 years, and is continually worried about the health of the company. Some of the big issues are: 1. Employee pay and retention. Retail always pays shit, but if you want good employees, you have to pay them. 2. Re-zoning continually. B&N spends an inordinate amount of labor re-organizing and shuffling books from one area to the other. This make work makes it hard for customers to find books, makes it hard for associates to know where a book is, and is just shuffling deck chairs. 3. Pricing. BN.com is cheaper than B&N stores. Customers don't understand this, causing huge amounts of irritation. Plus, B&N is just charging too much. 4. Delivery/inventory. Order a book from Amazon, you can have it tomorrow. Order it from B&N or bn.com, and it might take a week. All deliveries are made from central warehouses, instead of leveraging the store's own inventory. A smart fix for this would be to have the delivery manager able to deliver books from his inventory overnight to the customer. If you're in San Jose, a San Jose B&N would fulfill your order, (assuming the book is in stock), otherwise the closest warehouse or store would. Naturally, Amazon is the exemplar when it comes to order fulfillment, but at least try and close the gap. Cut some of the deadweight management. A district manager who only shows up in your store once or twice a quarter is of no use to the company. Fire them or make them perform.