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The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

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Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#241

Post by sametmax »

joekrill wrote: post #235

> The people who lost their jobs had been actively assured this would NOT happen for the past several months. My last employer did this. Not so much the exact scenario, but they constantly assured us they were fully committed for the long-term to our satellite office that they opened. They went out of their way to reiterate this quite regularly and put a good of effort into it. Until one day they showed up and shut d…

You do understand why.

You know that people won't work as much. Will disengage. Will cause trouble and cost you money, time, efforts.

This is resources consumed.

Some companies value saving resources over human decencies. This is magnified when there is crisis and resources are in shorter supply than before.

There is no mystery to it, no complexity to it.

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#242

Post by b1daly »

yock wrote: post #61
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…

> Now, it's definitely sad when people lose their jobs, but that's kind of the devil's bargain we've made with capitalism. It's not so much a "bargain" as it is how we discover which jobs are useful. Capitalism is very efficient at exposing useless labor, and this is a good thing. Having a bunch of humans laboring at jobs no one needs or wants is wasteful.

What is it wasteful of? What if someone working such a job feels better about being alive, because they have a role to fill in a community? Why is having people doing forms of “make work” worse than letting people waste away into despair? Would you feel good about having your aunt thrown to the curb, because she has no marketable skills?

The ideas of “efficiency” as they are used in economic theory are very narrow, and reflect a technical understanding of a vastly over simplified model of reality. Such models do provide insight into real life, but they are analytical tools, nothing more.

Economics, as field of study, has a big problem with the concept of “value.” The price of things tends to stand in for the value of things, as it is easily measured.

You don’t have to look hard to see the absurdity of taking this compromise too far. Look at military spending. Since dollars are spent buying a weapon, and workers get paid, profits are made, the “value” of the sale gets added into GDP. Then we take that missile, and blow it up. If we kill our enemies, then maybe one could say we got our money’s worth. If we kill only innocents, then I see it as more of an “anti-value.” What if it just blows up in the desert, and makes a multi-million dollar hole in the sand? Sort of a modern, high tech version of paying one group of workers to dig holes, and another to fill them in, is it not?

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#243

Post by romanovcode »

loorinm wrote: post #183

Reading that Storytime guy’s tweet, I really wondered: Has this guy never taken a look at his situation and noticed something off? He works in a relaxing huge retail store reading books to kids for free, and makes above min wage and keeps his job for the next 20 years and supports 5 kids??? That’s insane, and completely abnormal. No one else with that same type of job has that kind of life. It reminds me of someone I…

I was thinking he was way too emotionally attached to his job.

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#244

Post by mattmanser »

wnevets wrote: post #205
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…

Just another case of business being penny smart and dollar dumb. "Traditional" media did the exact same thing when faced with competition from the internet. They reduced the quality of their service & product when they saw a reduction in customers which only fueled a further reduction in customers, rinse and repeat til death.

It looks more like the idea that paying CEOs lots of money because they are worth it really isn't working.

Because they aren't worth it.

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#245

Post by mattmanser »

Bucephalus355 wrote: post #2

Barnes and Noble did some dumb things as this article points out, but they are NOWHERE near what the CEO of Sears is doing. That is corporate malpractice, gross negligence, and perhaps high treason all rolled into one. Literally look up anything online for “Sears CEO is terrible” and you will get links from NY Times, WaPo, etc. Also with BN, I mean they were going up against one of the biggest most powerful companies…

For context, in the UK our Barnes & Noble equivalent was turned around and now is increasing sales:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/18/waterstones-an...

Note that they have decreased staff numbers, but increased efficiency.

For example my local store had 2 people on the main till at Xmas[1] but the wait was short as they were turning them over very fast. I walked in 2 days before Xmas and was out within 10 minutes.

Also, at the bottom of the article, they say they're opening new stores, 5 last year, 15 more planned this year.

[1] Another poster said they'd walked out of a B&N store with 50 people in a queue and 2 servers at Xmas.

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#246

Post by b1daly »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #53
emodendroket wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your contention implies that there are no differences of import to how a company is managed, if business failure is inevitable. Sadly, I think this is not that rare of an opinion amongst a certain class of managers who disproportionately consider their own welfare, above all.

You don’t have to think that hard to realize the callous absurdity of this viewpoint.

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#247

Post by tzs »

a-nikolaev wrote: post #159

Just wanted to say that in NYC, the quality of book selection at Barnes and Noble is just amazing. In my opinion, it's way better then the hyped Strand, for example. So, maybe, go to your local B&N some time and just buy a book? Support brick-and-mortar bookstores, while we haven't succumbed to Amazon just yet.

It would help with this if B&N would fix their website to make it less annoying to try to find out what is at your local store.

Suppose there are several books you are thinking of buying. You want to know which of those are at your local B&N. You go to their website and search for the first book. On the book's page you click the "Check Store Availability" link.

That pops up a form to enter your zip code. You do, and it brings up a pop up that shows the availability of the book in the nearest few stores.

So far so good.

Now you want to check the second book. You find its page, click the store check link. And you get the zip code pop up again...and it isn't even smart enough to pre-fill the zip code. You have to enter it again!

This is just irritating.

At the very minimum it should pre-fill the zip.

Better would be to skip that pop up completely if it already knows the zip and go straight to the results. This would not inconvenience people who want to change the zip to check a different area's stores, because the results pop up has a zip entry field for doing that.

Better than that would be to, once it has the zip, automatically show on the book pages whether or not they are available in nearby stores.

Even better than that would be to also put that on the search results pages and on the browsing results pages, like Best Buy does. At Best Buy it tells me right there if it is available for pick up today at my local store. If not, it tells when it can be if I order online for local pick up.

Once they do all that, they should add a way to filter results to only show locally available items. Best Buy again is a good example. On search and browsing pages, there is a tab that limits it to only items you can pick up today in your local store.

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#248

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#249

Post by ohtwenty »

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.

there's a big bookstore nearby that does a few things right: (1)the staff know a lot. It's not just about 'I liked this book give me something like it', it's about where you don't even know where to start. I've walked in there a dozen times looking for gifts for people aged 4 through ~60, with mostly a vague description of what they're like and what interests them and they know a bunch of choices that fit. Amazon, Google, etc can build profiles on you and figure you out, but they cant figure your friends and gifts out (or even more out of the box recs, or have a more thorough look at what does or doesn't interest. (2) they have coffee. Yay. (3) they have two sections of interesting sales: books that are soon to be out of store (but still on the website) that are on clearance, prices going from €80 to ~€10 or whatever. Great sales. Or just old secondhand things, with books in there that are unique, rare etc, and you would be hard pressed to find online, or if you could you're mostly back at the discoverability issue IMO.

So they know their strengths for meatspace stores, and supplement that with a good online presence (e.g. same day delivery in this city).

This is Scheltema in Amsterdam btw

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#250

Post by auxbuss »

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…

Try Frances Hardinge. The Lie Tree [0] won loads of awards. I'm not in the target age range obviously, but my favourite is Cuckoo Song. Her earlier books are definitely for a younger audience. All Hardinge's books have young female protags.

Philip Pullman's, His Dark Materials trilogy [1]. The protag, Lyra, is one of the most interesting young female protags in literature. (This is one of those trilogies that you can reread at different stages of your life and get new things from each time.)

Patrick Ness's, Chaos Walking trilogy [2]. (Read the dead tree versions, because the use of typography adds a lot.)

Also, checkout Malorie Blackman.

You might also want to take a look at the Carnegie Medal longlist [3] (released yesterday) for ideas.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lie_Tree

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Dark_Materials

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_Walking

[3] http://www.carnegiegreenaway.org.uk/press.php?release=pres_2...

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