Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

audreyii-fic.tumblr.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 461 posts

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#41

Post by emodendroket »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #36

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 o…

I don't feel that you've really engaged the arguments of the post, particularly the failure to hire any seasonal employees for the holiday season and the "ship from store" change.

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#42

Post by seanmcdirmid »

iopuy wrote: post #20
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A quarter of B&N now devoted to toys. They also earn more in their cafe than they probably do selling books.

Is this a fact or something you just assume?

The floor space is anecdote, but I have yet to see a B&N that didn’t conform to that in the last few years. As for the cafe profits see articles like http://www.nrn.com/onsite/barnes-noble-expand-food-and-bever..., downscaled cafes already bring in 10% of all sales for the store, the profit margins on those must be much higher than books.

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#43

Post by aaron-lebo »

gwern wrote: post #34
aaron-lebo wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't believe it's wrong to say you are a very niche customer. Their selection of Hemingway isn't much better, but that's because they've got limited floor space. Not sure how they could solve your specific issue unless they had much bigger locations.

Is it so unrealistic? When I wanted a copy of _Beowulf_ in 2003 or so, what I did was I wandered into my local Borders and found it, and compared 5 or 6 different books; I ultimately settled on Heaney's translation which I liked the bits I read the most of, and then picked the volume with the most additional historical essays providing context. And _Beowulf_ is surely less read than Homer.

Not really sure.

The problem with bookstores is your inventory only ever increases. They probably made some cost calculation that carrying multiple translations of Homer translated to a few more sales a year. It's a hard business. I've wandered in there and found esoteric history, the kind that I was surprised they even carried. You add Homer #2, something like that gets axed.

Maybe they could stop selling the kind of books that are really big for a year and then nobody ever reads again, but it can't be easy.

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#44

Post by ivraatiems »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #36

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 o…

> 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.

Maybe we need to acknowledge that we're moving towards having a society where "everyone has a job that earns them their living" is untenable, because there will be less work for humans to do than humans to do it, and we have to find a different kind of social contract to survive on.

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#46

Post by ryanwaggoner »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #33
ukulele wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing the level of customer care at a bookstore with that of an Apple store is pretty unfair. Apple makes hundreds or thousands of margin dollars per customer; a bookstore is probably closer to $10.

A better comparison would be Starbucks considering the margins. Not everyone needs to have Apple margins to compensate their retail employees above minimum wage (considering the $14 million dollars Barnes and Noble executives have siphoned off already).

considering the $14 million dollars Barnes and Noble executives have siphoned off already

I don't know, $14mm for the executive team of a company with tens of thousands of employees and 600+ stores doesn't seem crazy to me. Maybe you think that smart, capable, experienced executives grow on trees, but you're wrong. And what smart, capable, experienced executive would ever want to take this job when they probably have much better options with companies who aren't dying?

Would you want to go be lead developer on the Nook team right now, knowing that you probably won't have a job for long, that your equity will be declining in value, that it'll be miserable unless you can miraculously figure out a way to turn things around? Would it be unreasonable for you to only be interested in doing that if you were getting paid very well?

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#47

Post by macintux »

emodendroket wrote: post #38
awalton wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The app would likely be more expensive to develop and maintain than hiring a few seasonal part-timers per store (2000 people at, let's face it, minimum wage for a month is about $4M that immediately converts to sales numbers just by being conscious enough to operate a register - that's cheaper than ~10 software devs in America (at least two of which are specialists - iOS/Android devs), a manager, an office, their equ…

Of all the criticisms one might make of Walmart, being slow to check people out I'd say would be about last on my list.

Must depend on where you are, unless you’re making a broader point about their awfulness.

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#48

Post by purplezooey »

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.

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#49

Post by thesmallestcat »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #36

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 o…

It's destructive, and Amazon can get away with being a crap book store now. I've ordered many thousands of dollars worth of computing books from them over the years. In the past six months, and especially the past couple months, "new" books come with massive creases, scuffs, and dents. Or a bad print with hard-to-read text. A copy you'd never buy in person, or B&N would knock something off the price because of the damage. When you paid $80+ for the book, it sucks.

I haven't been returning the books for two reasons: When you get ten books in the mail and eight of them are damaged, and some of them are immediately useful, are you really going to go through Amazon's return process for all of them, photograph each one, package, ship, etc.? Second, I just know that if I do this, it will contribute to some poor schmuck losing his job at a fulfillment center, or some LAZR driver getting taken off their route, because DATA-DRIVEN.

Now I just order used books, sadly most of the vendors are on Amazon so I can't really take my business elsewhere. At least I don't feel quite as ripped off when my "Like New" book arrives in "Good" condition. Even sweeter, those vendors don't sit on my order for a week for funsies like Amazon does if you resist their PRIME offering.

Has anybody else been receiving damaged "new" books from Amazon lately?

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#50

Post by ryanwaggoner »

ivraatiems wrote: post #44
ryanwaggoner wrote: post #36

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 o…

> 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. Maybe we need to acknowledge that we're moving towards having a society where "everyone has a job that earns them their living" is untenable, because there will be less work for humans to do than humans to do it, and we…

Maybe, but it seems a weird argument to make during record low unemployment. Yes, I'm aware of labor force participation rates, and that the pay for many of these jobs is too low, AI is predicted to destroy jobs, etc, but that's not what we're talking about, right?

Amazon employs way more people than B&N, the company they put out of business. Maybe those jobs should be better (OK, they definitely should), but that's different from saying there are no jobs, isn't it?

Post reply on HN