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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.
The expensive management that steered the ship into the rocks don't get cut: https://www1.salary.com/barnes...
I hate amazon. It's prevalence makes searching for other sellers harder. That said, B&N is no better.
Barnes and Nobles used to be the best book store. That is why it outlasted all the other big chains.
Now, when I go to a B&N, they give the same crappy service that the old chains do. They used to have a section for the new science fiction/fantasy books, not anymore. The new ones are shelved alphabetically. Same for Mysteries.
As for the Nook, they do stupid things like storing samples as if they were books. When you read a sample, no link to buy the book (let alone opening the new book to the end of the sample and deleting the sample).
Their service has gone down hill. They decided to try and out-cheap Amazon. They failed.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I thought they had saved themselves with the Nook (unlike Borders). But their business model is fundamentally flawed; you can't compete with Amazon prices while paying high-end department store lease costs! In December, it looked like they were trying to be a toy store to bring margins up, but that didn't work for them either (and Toy-R-Us is going out of business too.) Can anybody compete with Amazon?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
B&N sells the books for list price, which is typically 50% over Amazon. That’s too damn much, physical store or not.
There's so many books that they can only possibly stock a tiny percentage of them in the store. Unless I'm going to by some just out best-seller, it's unlikely the book I want is going to be there.
Sure I could order it, but then why not just order from Amazon? It takes the same amount of time to arrive at that point and I saved myself two trips to the mall.
If brick and mortar book stars were going to survive, the needed to switch over to some sort of print on demand system like the Espresso Book Machine that could spit out any book a customer might want in an hour.
There's a certain amount of cash coming in. When that's reduced, the decision makers don't want to take a pay cut. So they cut costs. It just goes to show a) how good they are at managing and b) where their priorities lie (not with the long-term health of the organization).
They actually did that in the past. Some companies used to publish telephone directories of Email addresses, because they really thought that was going to be the future.
Book stores were really popular before Amazon and online internet. You could walk into a high street bookstore in a large city and it would be a paradise of advanced knowledge. Every subject in the world would be there to read; science, fiction, reference, technical, music, arts, geography.
After Amazon, those bookstores have been relegated to selling fiction and crime categories if they haven't been closed down altogether.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
I suggest B. Dalton or Waldenbooks. I hear Borders is alright, too.
.. but probably will.
Couple of points:
Independent book stores can do well, Amazon or not. They can do very well indeed if they serve the local community, if they are book lovers/book worms (at least to some reasonable degree) and not just mere brainless peddlers of books. You don't need a large inventory to make this a good experience. Provide a good user/customer experience, add value. Don't sell candles. I actually think good board games are ok, but then know your games, too.
Go, for example, to the Book People in Austin, Texas, in the U.S. (hey, this is slashdot, stop by when you go to SXS next time). It's actually a rather large store, by square footage, but the number of different books is not all that large by comparison. A fair percentage of the books there have been read by staff and they talk about these books. Lot's of hand-written cards telling you about the books, and all those books they recommend/have read are displayed with their front page, not their spines. In fact, I'd say that close to 1/2 their display space shows the fronts of books on the shelves, not their spines. Tells you how many fewer books per linear yard of shelf space they present. You'll find a good book every time you go. I do. (I don't live there, but I visit the store when I do go.). I know, this is Austin, and Austin is weird. Still, loose the pink hair and some of your tattoos/piercing, and this works wherever you want this to work.
In Germany one of the most well-known chains (Hugendubel) went almost bankrupt when they went the way of B&N (or more precisely, Borders). The next generation took over the leadership of the chain, and it now looks like they will actually make it and do well again. Why? Store respond to the local needs, stores got more independence, they started selling books knowledgeably again, in fact, they make their new stores smaller again (you guessed it, fewer candles, cards and videos), etc. etc. Yes, they all have a café now (why not??), which they own and operate (no chain Joe there).
Same with Blackwell in the UK. Although the Oxford store is crazy large and friggin' amazing ... Same problems here not too long ago, and a very similar solution. Amazon does not need to kill your business. But you *do* need to adapt.
But people are right: if management sucks, they will take the business down sooner or later. Which is why B&N may well die –or rediscover its roots in NYC. We shall see, I wish them luck. I hope they reinvent themselves, which they can if they fire management and hire people who really *want* to sell books the right way.
BTW, I always laugh at all the comments about Amazon. Don't get me wrong, they are too large, the know too much, they suck in many parts, yada yada yada. All true. Nonetheless, we buy a lot at Amazon. When do we do it? The price has to be right, it has to be much easier than to drive around town to get the item I need, and there is no need whatsoever that I inspect/try on/evaluate the item in person before I buy it. Which is one of the reasons why I basically stopped buying books at Amazon. They treat books like crap. Books arrive damaged so often that it is not funny. On top of that, Amazon has stopped being all that cheap to begin with. No books, no electronics, no clothing (God no!), no groceries (sorry, that's just plain silly), and many others. Nice to have Amazon if you break a leg, though. I often wind up at specialty retailers (brick and mortar or online) instead. I go window shopping at Amazon a lot and then buy elsewhere (the reverse of what many stores complain about ...). And yes, you can do this anonymously if you care to, even if that means you get a different price than the next Jane doing it – but that is true no matter what you do. Amazon games us. Game back as much as you can.
On a side: if Amazon deploys high end AI to make shopping recommendations to me, I'd rather rely on the stray cat my partner feeds outside at the moment. Can't be worse than what the cat picks. Amazon's recommendations are just so utterly, utterly useless.
If you are a nerd/engineer, it *is* fun to see the tech of their delivery chain in the warehouses.
Do your own thing. And overdo it!