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.
>>Two cashiers working out of 8 or so possible registers
And the worst part about this is that each cashier seems determined to relentlessly pester me with annoying questions at the register! Did I want to join this loyalty program? Did I realize that I could save $5 by signing up for so and so. Do I want to get on the B&N mailing list? Really aggressive questioning.
Oh my God. I realize that the cashiers have been ordered to do this (I assume) but knock it off already! This is so consumer unfriendly. I just want to pay and go. I'm sure that this also delays checkout times significantly over the course of a day.
This is one of the main reasons I use Amazon when possible. Retail checkout in the US has become a one-way grilling. You end up leaving the store feeling like a murder suspect.
Just another case of business being penny smart and dollar dumb.
"Traditional" media did the exact same thing when faced with competition from the internet. They reduced the quality of their service & product when they saw a reduction in customers which only fueled a further reduction in customers, rinse and repeat til death.
This happens in a lot of places. The shopping experience may be nice but the actual payment experience is atrocious. Honestly if I have to wait more than 10 minutes to pay for something, I just don't buy anything, or purchase online instead. Even if there are long queues, there are many ways you could improve the experience - for example get an automatic ticket to get "in line" in the system, and get called when it's your turn - at the same time you can continue looking at more items instead of wasting your time in line.
When I've gone to Barnes and Noble recently, I've found editions of books in prominent places that were poorly printed. For instance, one hardcover with a fancy binding had very thin/transparent pages to the extent that the text was less legible. Don't get me started about the trade paperbacks that I suspect will have the binding break immediately.
I wonder if Barnes and Noble sells reduced quality books the same way that Wal*Mart gets brands to make cheaper but reduced quality versions of their products for their stores.
Either way it turns me off. They are pretty good at getting me into the store to use my laptop at the Starbucks or for when my son is doing a group project and the other students are meeting there -- only to immediately turn me off with inferior products.
As in the story above, bad experiences don't just cost a sale immediately, but they might cost all future sales from that customer.
But the rest of the year, the stores are empty. Which validated the company's decision: why have a bunch of full time employees, when what it really needs is part time and flexible employees to handle holiday surges (probably caused by waiting for Amazon shipping to not be an option).
I'm always amazed also at how slow cashiers can be. I worked at walmart nearly 20 years ago and briefly they had a bonus for speed. All of the "career" retail cashiers got pissed because new employees who had only been there for a couple months started making more than them, being twice as fast. Visiting walmart and some other stores when there are long lines can be excrutiating as I see cashiers just not caring about speed while wasting time of people in line. Customers should not be able to scan a full cart of items in self-checkout faster than the average cashier.
This happened to me yesterday - I ordered a book from Waterstones and popped out at lunchtime to pick it up.
The collection desk is the same desk as the front of the store (there are payment desks on each floor of the store) and it was rammed. I ordered on Amazon instead of waiting.
All they have to do is put a sign saying collections are on X floor and it would be a better all round experience.
I also noticed that people were queuing and then asking if so-and-so book was in stock. How is this efficient?
> 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.
This is a perfect instance for self-checkout kiosks. They're everywhere: big retailers like Target, chain groceries, national pharmacies, home improvement stores, and they're turning up in smaller places and even fast food venues. This suggests to me that the kiosk price is dropping and there's less reason to have empty registers and long lines except for deliberate ignorance.
Whenever I have ordered online from BN the shipping has taken a ridiculously long time, as in weeks not days. I'm not a huge fan of Amazon so if BN had at least been able to do 2-3 day shipping they would have had my business. Regarding their retail experience, it wouldn't surprise me if some executive is selling them on the concept of long checkout lines as it results in people buying more books from the discount tables at the front. It is very unfortunate that corporate dictates operational policy to individual stores like that, I have always only had positive experiences with BN employees so I wish them well.
>I put my selections back and walked out the door. Granted it was near peak shopping season - but that was inexcusable.
Scaling retail is hard. Especially if you're against "be on call 24/7 for minimum wage without additional on call compensation".
They could buy self-checkout terminals, though, but I imagine they don't want assets like that and would rather let the business fail. That's the writing on the wall (if not the stock trend)
Even worse. I wasn't able to buy online from them. My credit card charge was declined (two different cards). I contacted the Card bank and they said that it is B&N that cancelled the sale.
I contacted B&N support and they gave me a response that it is due to their fraud detection service. There was no solution to buy. They didn't offer PayPal or another gateway. So I had to walk away.
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......
Note that they have decreased staff numbers, but increased efficiency.
For example my local store had 2 people on the main till at Xmas[1] but the wait was short as they were turning them over very fast. I walked in 2 days before Xmas and was out within 10 minutes.
Also, at the bottom of the article, they say they're opening new stores, 5 last year, 15 more planned this year.
[1] Another poster said they'd walked out of a B&N store with 50 people in a queue and 2 servers at Xmas.
At the end of the article the author makes it very clear what she thinks is happening: they are deliberately scuttling the company and attempting to wring it dry in the process.
The Sears situation is just sad. I'm not sure why shareholders are putting up with it, except... most probably have just accepted the narrative that sears is dead, and are OK with the sell off and ... yeah, treason isn't a bad word. But... selling off assets you control to another company you also control would seem like... oh.. what's the term? Conflict of interest? I don't understand in the slightest why this has been allowed to go on. I can't imagine if, say, Target's CEO started cutting store budgets, then closing and selling the bad performing stores and real estate to another company the CEO owned, and then made a profit repurposing those stores to other companies. It's truly bizarre.
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.
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.
> [...] 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
It may be too late. Even if Amazon stopped selling books, people have gotten used to buying their books online. They will just switch to AbeBooks.com, Biblio.com, Thriftbooks.com [1], or others.
[1] I had never actually heard of Thriftbooks before today. I found them when I looked up a book on Barnes & Noble's website, and on the bottom of the page at B&N they had Google ads for other place selling the book, and Thriftbooks was one of them (and they were cheaper than B&N). B&N sure did not get their money's worth for the $1.4 million they paid their CMO in 2017.
> 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.
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.
I think your point about offering what your competitors are not is spot on: a hub that facilitates community and study, events with widely known authors and public figures, and so forth. Portland's Powells book store in the Pearl District nails this, with multiple stories of books that seemingly never end and centered right in the middle of the hustle and bustle of the city. I hope B&N replicates this because I would hate to see them go and it's why any book I buy is only from one of these chains.
> 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.
>> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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???
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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)
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] phil21|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] eludwig|8 years ago|reply
And the worst part about this is that each cashier seems determined to relentlessly pester me with annoying questions at the register! Did I want to join this loyalty program? Did I realize that I could save $5 by signing up for so and so. Do I want to get on the B&N mailing list? Really aggressive questioning.
Oh my God. I realize that the cashiers have been ordered to do this (I assume) but knock it off already! This is so consumer unfriendly. I just want to pay and go. I'm sure that this also delays checkout times significantly over the course of a day.
This is one of the main reasons I use Amazon when possible. Retail checkout in the US has become a one-way grilling. You end up leaving the store feeling like a murder suspect.
[+] [-] wnevets|8 years ago|reply
"Traditional" media did the exact same thing when faced with competition from the internet. They reduced the quality of their service & product when they saw a reduction in customers which only fueled a further reduction in customers, rinse and repeat til death.
[+] [-] ekianjo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PaulHoule|8 years ago|reply
I wonder if Barnes and Noble sells reduced quality books the same way that Wal*Mart gets brands to make cheaper but reduced quality versions of their products for their stores.
Either way it turns me off. They are pretty good at getting me into the store to use my laptop at the Starbucks or for when my son is doing a group project and the other students are meeting there -- only to immediately turn me off with inferior products.
As in the story above, bad experiences don't just cost a sale immediately, but they might cost all future sales from that customer.
[+] [-] rayiner|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 83457|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mistersquid|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KevanM|8 years ago|reply
The collection desk is the same desk as the front of the store (there are payment desks on each floor of the store) and it was rammed. I ordered on Amazon instead of waiting.
All they have to do is put a sign saying collections are on X floor and it would be a better all round experience.
I also noticed that people were queuing and then asking if so-and-so book was in stock. How is this efficient?
[+] [-] rlonstein|8 years ago|reply
This is a perfect instance for self-checkout kiosks. They're everywhere: big retailers like Target, chain groceries, national pharmacies, home improvement stores, and they're turning up in smaller places and even fast food venues. This suggests to me that the kiosk price is dropping and there's less reason to have empty registers and long lines except for deliberate ignorance.
[+] [-] frogpelt|8 years ago|reply
1. Use their app to scan the bar code
2. Pay with a card
3. A self-service printer prints a receipt/confirmation of purchase.
4. Show it to an employee on your way out the door.
Might be an inventory nightmare, but it could be done.
[+] [-] itronitron|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FLUX-YOU|8 years ago|reply
Scaling retail is hard. Especially if you're against "be on call 24/7 for minimum wage without additional on call compensation".
They could buy self-checkout terminals, though, but I imagine they don't want assets like that and would rather let the business fail. That's the writing on the wall (if not the stock trend)
[+] [-] csomar|8 years ago|reply
I contacted B&N support and they gave me a response that it is due to their fraud detection service. There was no solution to buy. They didn't offer PayPal or another gateway. So I had to walk away.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bluedino|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Bucephalus355|8 years ago|reply
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......
[+] [-] mattmanser|8 years ago|reply
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/18/waterstones-an...
Note that they have decreased staff numbers, but increased efficiency.
For example my local store had 2 people on the main till at Xmas[1] but the wait was short as they were turning them over very fast. I walked in 2 days before Xmas and was out within 10 minutes.
Also, at the bottom of the article, they say they're opening new stores, 5 last year, 15 more planned this year.
[1] Another poster said they'd walked out of a B&N store with 50 people in a queue and 2 servers at Xmas.
[+] [-] nerdponx|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mgkimsal|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justonepost|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jroseattle|8 years ago|reply
B&N needs leadership to offer product and services that can compete, period. Need to cutback? Sure. But where's the business plan?
That's call this what it is -- poor execution by leadership.
[+] [-] aorloff|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tzs|8 years ago|reply
It may be too late. Even if Amazon stopped selling books, people have gotten used to buying their books online. They will just switch to AbeBooks.com, Biblio.com, Thriftbooks.com [1], or others.
[1] I had never actually heard of Thriftbooks before today. I found them when I looked up a book on Barnes & Noble's website, and on the bottom of the page at B&N they had Google ads for other place selling the book, and Thriftbooks was one of them (and they were cheaper than B&N). B&N sure did not get their money's worth for the $1.4 million they paid their CMO in 2017.
[+] [-] joekrill|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] reedx8|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alsetmusic|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] icelancer|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] burlesona|8 years ago|reply
As a customer I like Amazon, but as a citizen they deeply worry me.
[+] [-] ryanwaggoner|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dragonwriter|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bearjaws|8 years ago|reply
This is the inevitable conclusion to a bookstore competing against Amazon, but they still act surprised...
[+] [-] ntsplnkv2|8 years ago|reply
If the numbers aren't good you should expect there to be changes. It's business. Always assume the worst
[+] [-] LogicX|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ballenf|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] purplezooey|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] loorinm|8 years ago|reply
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???
[+] [-] so33|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshpadnick|8 years ago|reply
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|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] stillsut|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tzs|8 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] mwexler|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] greedo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ikeboy|8 years ago|reply
Well no, Kindles are breakeven and Amazon makes it up by selling more books (digital ones with good margins though)
[+] [-] zerotolerance|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ukulele|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] grey-area|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ornel|8 years ago|reply