81–90 of 461 posts
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, t…
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…
This makes me wonder why physical retail stores don't follow Apple's approach by developing an app so shoppers can self-check out.
Barnes and Noble would be decimated by that.
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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.
Ironically, Amazon Books stores have big floor area for electronics.
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> 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? 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…
we still need to prepare for the future that's coming I disagree, honestly. Not because I don't think all the things you're saying will happen will happen, but because of all the things that are also going to happen that we're not talking about, because we don't know what they are. Yes, tons of jobs are going away (although I think it'll be 10-20 years for most of these, not 3-5 years like many seem to think), but wh…
You say that in 10-20 years, tons of jobs are going away. You say it seems very unlikely the American political system is going to address it without violence in any successful manner.
But you also say that you think we will adjust and adapt and thereby keep the work a job, make a living system that we have. I don't see how that optimistic result follows from the pessimistic future you predict. And I think we're talking about the same problem - a period of volatility due to a lack of available work and a refusal to acknowledge the failures of our current system - but looking at different resolutions. I don't accept violence to restore status quo as the only possible solution.
This is what I think: Your predictions are relatively spot on, if nothing changes, but we have the opportunity to change them if we act now. If we install a government dedicated to addressing these problems, if we begin to think seriously about solutions rather than spending time repeating the same arguments about whether the problem exists at all, we can fix it. Yes, we've failed to do this on other things (e. g. climate change, North Korea, etc.) until it was more than a little too late, but the fact our society still exists and functions suggests that we must have had some success, too.
Remember that it's only in the last couple centuries that we transitioned from most countries being monarchies or what we'd now call dictatorships to most countries being at least some level of democracy. It's only in the last couple centuries we've tried systems of economy and government other than direct rule by a ruling cast. Some of those systems didn't work (full communism, fascism); some have worked out quite well thus far (modern capitalism, democratic socialism a la much of Europe), and of course many are in the middle. We can work out systems which are better still, and we can transition into them without violence or (too much) societal strife, but only if we can at least acknowledge that it's necessary or even just wiser to do so than to try and maintain the system we've got just because it's what we have.
TL;DR: You're right that we don't know what's coming, but, in my opinion, it's a mistake to assume we can't decide for ourselves if we move quickly.
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He's saying the arguments of the post are irrelevant. Sure they could have hired seasonal workers for the holidays, and maybe had better results, but either way they are doomed. 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.
You don't think there is space in the United States' market for even a single major brick-and-mortar retailer of books? I find that pretty hard to believe.
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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 da…
“Even sweeter, those vendors don't sit on my order for a week for funsies like Amazon does if you resist their PRIME offering.” What’s the deal with this? I turned off prime a couple of years ago and it certainly feels like they’re intentionally slow processing orders. For books, I only buy used and try to pick nearby sellers. Often the media mail shipment will show up in 2-3 days. Pretty great.
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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.
He's saying the arguments of the post are irrelevant. Sure they could have hired seasonal workers for the holidays, and maybe had better results, but either way they are doomed. 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.
The last book I bought at B&N wasn't so long ago. They pulled it off the shelf and had it waiting for me when I arrived. I appreciated being able to preview it to decide it was worth buying.
I don't have a local B&N anymore, but a local independent book shop is pretty good. They've ordered new books for me to preview too.
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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…
> 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? 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…
Not every company does, every public company does. It seems hard to believe in this day but there are some privately owned family-run businesses that care deeply about their employees and aren’t looking to cut labor costs as a means of profitability.
Well no, Kindles are breakeven and Amazon makes it up by selling more books (digital ones with good margins though)
What's sad about Barnes and Noble is that the book industry never saw the ebook and online buying coming. So they kept the price of books high, pressured by big name authors who were use to the big royalty checks, and they can't move away. Imagine if B&N could compete on price with Amazon, and the booksellers had to take what the market is willing to pay.
Never saw ebook book buying coming? What? In the '90s we were selling books for the Palm Pilot. I remember when a sample of the Rocket showed up at the office. We thought, hey, now maybe people will start buying ebooks! I also remember when Amazon first started selling books online, and they were getting their data from Books in Print. Despite the name, BIP lists a lot of books that are not in print. Some effort was…
It didn't work out, of course, but that's something very different than missing the coming tide of ebooks altogether.
> Imagine if B&N could compete on price with Amazon
One of the points of the article is that they can't*, because Amazon has other lines of business and B&N does not. So Amazon can use the revenue from those other businesses to swallow losses on book sales in order to drive out competition.