51–60 of 461 posts
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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).
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This makes me wonder why physical retail stores don't follow Apple's approach by developing an app so shoppers can self-check out.
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…
Similar to how PG and RTM created Viaweb (a web application that allowed non-technical people to build online e-commerce sites), are there any sites/tools which allow non-technical people develop non-trivial retail/online purchasing iPhone/Android apps?
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.
Yeah, they could have managed the holiday season better. They could have a better strategy for ecommerce. So what? It doesn't fundamentally change anything. It maybe delays the inevitable for a year or two? But in the end, B&N is almost certainly going out of business.
EDIT: I guess there are two other possibilities:
1. B&N finds another B&M strategy that works beyond just selling books. But it's not clear what, given their financial situation, existing stores, employee base, etc. Either way, lots of layoffs between here and there.
2. They pivot to selling books online solely. This actually seems likely, at least for awhile, because it's a decent brand, and they're already doing this, so this would just mean shutting down all their stores. But all these employees are still losing their jobs in that scenario.
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.
As far as I've seen, every chain bookstore has tried this, and most have subsequently gone belly up. It's a little like RadioShack going into cellphones. Maybe you can keep your head above water for a minute, but there's an existential risk in pivoting away from your raison d'etre.
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.
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.
I haven't bought a book at a retail outlet in probably 10 years. There's just nothing about the retail experience at B&N that's even worth the effort to drive there and park. It's not salvageable.
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> 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…
Admittedly, I'm driving the conversation towards a general problem from this specific example. But I think that even if I accept the premise that right now, things are OK, we still need to prepare for the future that's coming. Automation is coming for truck and taxi drivers, for restaurant workers, for the last remaining factory jobs. It's even coming for relatively skilled workers in some fields. It's not directly what this post is talking about, but it's the context in which this post takes place, and we shouldn't avoid it.
> 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?
Amazon employs more people than B&N, but B&N is by no means the first or only company they have destroyed, and there are more to come. And as soon as Amazon can make the same amount of money while employing fewer people, they will do so. Every company does. The cycle repeats, only this time more people lose and fewer people gain.
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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.
I skipped over those because I think they're totally irrelevant. See the "rearranging deck chairs on Titanic" part of my comment. Yeah, they could have managed the holiday season better. They could have a better strategy for ecommerce. So what? It doesn't fundamentally change anything. It maybe delays the inevitable for a year or two? But in the end, B&N is almost certainly going out of business. EDIT: I guess there…
In American Capitalism, we prefer arrange them into a large pile for the captain to climb up on top of so he direct the drowning of the women and children as he waits for the private helicopter to warm up.
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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.
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…