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The Slow Demise of Barnes & Noble (techcrunch.com)
John Biggs via TechCrunch reports of the slow demise of Barnes & Noble, which he has been chronicling for several years now. There have been many signs of trouble for the bookseller chain over the years, but none have been more apparent than the recent layoffs made earlier this week. From the report: On Monday the company laid off 1,800 people. This offered a cost savings of $40 million. [...] In fact, what B&N did was fire all full time employees at 781 stores. Further, the company laid off many shipping receivers around the holidays, resulting in bare shelves and a customer escape to Amazon. In December 2017, usually B&N's key month, sales dropped 6 percent to $953 million. Online sales fell 4.5 percent. It is important to note that when other big box retailers, namely Circuit City, went the route of firing all highly paid employees and bringing in minimum wage cashiers, stockers, and salespeople it signaled the beginning of the end.
Note the word "third party seller". I'm the first party, Amazon is the SECOND party.
Amazon inserted itself as a middleman into all those transactions. They are not the best thing to happen to small business - internet sales are the best thing.
Amazon made it slightly easier for the seller by taking a slice of their profit and also making it MUCH harder for anyone that doesn't want to give Amazon that slice of the profit.
Worse, it makes deep searches much harder. Do a search for anything that is for sale and Amazon pushes itself to the top of the list. If you are not trying to buy, it's annoying and makes searching for what you really want much harder. If you are trying to buy it is very hard to use any other store.
The word for that is Monopoly and it should be considered a curse word.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
What "required expenses" do brick and mortar stores have that Amazon doesn't have?
It costs money to lease space in malls, and money to keep it open to the public. It is much cheaper to lease or build warehouse space that is open only to employees.