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The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

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Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#121

Post by Kluny »

blhack wrote: post #39
rayiner wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the rest of the year, the stores are empty. Which validated the company's decision: why have a bunch of full time employees, when what it really needs is part time and flexible employees to handle holiday surges (probably caused by waiting for Amazon shipping to not be an option).

Not the one near me (in Phoenix, near Arizona State University). It's a major anchor in a shopping center, and is busy every time I'm ever in there. The employees are also really helpful. This Christmas, I was trying to find some books as a christmas gift, and the staff made a bunch of suggestions based on books that they had actually personally read. Sidenote: finding appropriate books for 8-14 year old girls is rea…

Patricia C Wrede, Mercedes Lackey, Tamora Pierce, Ursula K Le Guin, Judy Blume and Anne McCaffrey are some authors who have outstanding books for girls in that age range, in case you find yourself with the same problem again.

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#122

Post by mattkrause »

metaobject wrote: post #76
purplezooey wrote: post #48

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.

"... find and upsell books" What can be easier than using the Amazon search bar? And as far as upwelling goes, Amazon's ML-driven 'suggestions' algorithm results often seem to interest me.

For the books you already know you want, I agree that Amazon is hard to beat. However, it’s hard to replicate the “discoverability” of a brick and mortar bookshop. Even without having a specific title in mind, I can always find something that looks interesting, just by walking around. Sometimes a blurb on the cover draws me in, sometimes it’s a recommendation by the staff, and sometimes seeing a title or author jogs my memory.

Meanwhile, logging into my Amazon account recommends several books (out of order) in a series, some updated versions of textbooks I once bought, and a few titles I recognize from the NYT best seller list but have no interest in. Since I recently bought one, there are also a good dozen screwdrivers for what Amazon assumes is my burgeoning collection of flatheads.

Also, books don’t cost very much, but they are a big investment in terms of time. Thumbing through the actual book is a great way to make sure you like your prospective purchase. This isn’t quite the same online—Look Inside is carefully metered out so you can maybe get a sense of the books style and level, but it’s often not enough to draw me in.

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#123

Post by commandar »

mistersquid wrote: post #8
phil21 wrote: post #6

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.

Walmart and Sam's Club have exactly that with their Pay & Go app.

You scan the UPCs on things as you put them in your cart. When you're done, you select pay and it displays a barcode on your screen. The checker at the door has a handheld device that they scan the barcode with, it gives them an item count, and you're on your way.

I've only ever used it at Sam's where there's always a door checker. I've heard it can be more of a pain to use at Walmarts because the door people don't always have the handheld around and have to go hunt it down.

Really, it shouldn't be surprising that they'd be a company willing to experiment in this field. Cutting labor costs to an extreme (which is actually one of the reasons I avoid Walmarts, but that's another rant) is pretty central to how they operate. And they became the behemoth they are by innovating in logistics. People often forget that they were a key figure in driving the adoption of product barcodes in the first place.

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#124

Post by throwaway9980 »

thesmallestcat wrote: post #86
throwaway9980 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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.

I think it's sort of like first-class flying. There's no logistical reason for not boarding the plane rear-to-front, but you can get people to pay for the privilege of being first, so why not? Non-Prime customers are second priority, and expected fulfillment is adjusted accordingly.

It’s a good analogy. I must be hopelessly optimistic to think there will be a reckoning for businesses that intentionally provide a worse experience.

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#125

Post by pfisch »

ruytlm wrote: post #100
ryanwaggoner wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 what new sectors, opportunities, jobs, etc. will be created? How many of the people whose jobs are destroyed will be able to move into the jobs that are created? In something like 30 states [0] 'truck driver' is the largest single occupation; where would those skills be re-applied?…

I think we are pretty far from truly replacing truck drivers. There will be a long period where the truck driver is in the car but not really driving, maybe even a very long time depending on if it is enshrined in law.

Even if the truck did drive itself, would it also load/unload and deal with flat tires and other vehicle damage conditions? I don't think these problems are insurmountable but I do think they will further extend the life of the truck driver profession.

I mean trains and subways don't even drive themselves right now somehow, so I think truck drivers will be fine.

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#126

Post by paulcole »

reedx8 wrote: post #21
InclinedPlane wrote: post #4

I remember back when Circuit City fired all of its floor staff and replaced them with entry level (and bottom run wage) workers. Oddly, they went out of business not long after that. You can't race to the bottom in retail, the bottom is already taken by walmart and online stores (like amazon). You can't be cheaper or more convenient, you need to offer something they don't. For bookstores that means you have to have g…

I think your point about offering what your competitors are not is spot on: a hub that facilitates community and study, events with widely known authors and public figures, and so forth. Portland's Powells book store in the Pearl District nails this, with multiple stories of books that seemingly never end and centered right in the middle of the hustle and bustle of the city. I hope B&N replicates this because I would…

I hate to rain on your parade but Powell’s isn’t exactly thriving. There were layoffs about 5 years ago and they’ve scrapped big renovation projects and even plans to move the main store because of revenue problems.

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#127

Post by chx »

smacktoward wrote: post #90
Finnucane wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not to mention that B&N went in big on ebooks. B&N's Nook platform was the only competitor comparable to Amazon's Kindle ecosystem. 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…

I am just a single data point but still I have a story to tell: I had a B&N Nook. Then I didn't and I still was buying Nook eBooks. You know why? Because DRM was a fig leaf. They had their DRM solution which was so easy to strip it's not even funny -- they encrypted your books with a key based on your name and credit card number (this might've originated with ereader.com). Then in 2015 March they changed algorithms and it was not so easy any more and I walked.

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#128

Post by chipotle_coyote »

Overtonwindow wrote: post #31

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.

pressured by big name authors who were use to the big royalty checks

Um. Goodness. Traditionally, publishers set a wholesale price and a "suggested" cover price. Retailers set the retail price, what the customer is actually going to pay -- but the royalties paid to authors are based on the publisher's suggested cover price. If the book lists for $24.95 and the author's contract stipulates 17% royalties on hardcovers, it doesn't matter if you, the consumer, pays $24.95, $18.75 or 25¢ -- the author is going to get $4.24.

Amazon, like Walmart, can afford to price physical books at or even below wholesale price, because they're making the money up in other ways. B&N and most other booksellers can't compete on price with Amazon because they can't do that. Amazon has long been weirdly close to the old joke of "we lose money on every sale, but we'll make it up in volume"; the vast majority of their profit comes from AWS.

Also, B&N was actually selling books online before the consumer internet, via Prodigy. They were selling on the web by 1997, and the Nook ebook reader was introduced in 2009, only two years after the Kindle. Whatever their historic and current faults have been, being entirely ignorant of the electronic world isn't really one of them.

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#129

Post by indubitable »

Buge wrote: post #99
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…

At some point the government could decide Amazon (or other big tech companies) are monopolies, and break them up.

A reasonable litmus test for monopoly is whether they would fail if they started exploiting their customers.

Time Warner and Comcast pass this test. They refuse to compete and then aggressively raise prices, seemingly to no end, knowing full well their customers have no choice. Microsoft's Windows 10 also passes this test with extreme anti-customer behavior that relies exclusively on consumers tolerating only due to a lack of choice.

Now back to Amazon. If they started ramping up their prices they would fail, fail hard, and fail practically overnight. There's a difference between a company being incredibly efficient and passing, with great success, that efficiency onto consumers and monopolies. Another general trend in monopolies is that they generally rely on tertiary forces to prevent competition. For the telecoms, this is the lack of access to wiring or even simply poles. For Windows, it's native execution of decades of third party software as well as the vast majority of all consumer software written today. There's no barrier to competing with Amazon, you're just not going to do it as well as them. It's the same reason WalMarts destroy small local businesses.

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#130

Post by wvenable »

ukulele wrote: post #55

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…

Retail seems to be killing retail though -- it's a death spiral. Going to a lot malls right now is depressing. And I need to buy things, mostly clothing, but the selection and quality has gone down significantly in the last decade.

I'm not sure this being made up in online sales.

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