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

281–290 of 461 posts

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#281

Post by watwut »

hluska wrote: post #273
watwut wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other answer to that question "Maybe someone took umbrage with the idea that Asimov stops being interesting after 14?" did added something to the conversation. Young girls are primary demographic for reading. While it is true that 8 years old are not there, 14 years old already are. Majority of what is in bookstore is appropriate, maybe boring, but I don't recall running into something super inappropriate while r…

First of all, you not only edited your original comment to ask why you were being downvoted, but then you made an entirely different reply to ask the same thing. Repetition like that is dull and adds nothing to a conversation. Second, I don't think that 8 year old girls and 14 year old girls should be grouped together. I have an 8 year old stepdaughter and she talks to her stuffed animals. She knows (at least, I hope…

1.) I did not grouped them, parent did in the question. I picked upper range for answer.

2.) I did not objected to your downvote further. I was honestly curious when I asked those questions. (And also appreciated the answer about glib interpretation.)

For the rest, thank you for answer. I guess I have every different opinion about amount of harmful books for kids in bookstores or maybe we have different bookstores around here. At that age, I was freely selecting books from adult section in local library without any supervision or control. I assumed that other girl is the same.

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#282

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

mattmanser wrote: post #244
wnevets wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They're worth it to themselves.

This is what you get when your business culture rewards quick profit-taking by a small sub-class of actors over long-term business building that benefits customers and employees.

It's more profitable - personally - to asset strip a struggling company, even if it still has prospects, good will, and loyal employees, than to put in the creativity and hard work needed to make it prosper.

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#283

Post by kalleboo »

barsonme wrote: post #79
aorloff wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For any company that can, increasing cash flow is a great way to proceed assuming you don't muck around with the balance sheet. Unfortunately, I don't see a way for BN to really do that, the sun set on their business a long, long time ago. Sure they could morph into some kind of WeWork/Starbucks thing, but its not like that's an open playing field begging for competition either.

For the record, I do like that idea. I recently started working remote, and while I like my office it's nice to go to a coffee shop and get out of the house for a while. But, the WiFi usually sucks and it can be too noisy. A quiet place with decent WiFi and coffee would be superb. I don't know what books other professions need, but it'd be pretty neat to go and checkout TAOCP (or something) and do some work for a whi…

That sounds like the city library where I'm from. The view is also pretty nice: https://c1.staticflickr.com/6/5338/9521653521_94e44e88ef_b.j...

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#284

Post by tzs »

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…

> [...] and wait for the legal and cultural environment to turn against some of the tech companies. Personally I don’t think Amazon has done that much wrong, but I imagine they will suffer some collateral damage from the move against first, Facebook, followed by second Google

It may be too late. Even if Amazon stopped selling books, people have gotten used to buying their books online. They will just switch to AbeBooks.com, Biblio.com, Thriftbooks.com [1], or others.

[1] I had never actually heard of Thriftbooks before today. I found them when I looked up a book on Barnes & Noble's website, and on the bottom of the page at B&N they had Google ads for other place selling the book, and Thriftbooks was one of them (and they were cheaper than B&N). B&N sure did not get their money's worth for the $1.4 million they paid their CMO in 2017.

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#285

Post by losvedir »

mrbrowning wrote: post #109

Bezos cheerleaders and their ilk never seem to be willing to acknowledge that creating wealth is much harder than extracting it, and either out of bad faith or naivety will misidentify ventures that specialize in the latter as being exemplars of the former. In this case, we have the incalculable loss of so many person-years of experience in a deep topic, literature, that’s being shrugged away as a case of the market…

> Bezos cheerleaders and their ilk never seem to be willing to acknowledge that creating wealth is much harder than extracting it

I am utterly confused by this statement. Are you implying that Bezos isn't one of the largest creators of wealth in the history of the world?

When I think of all the time and money hundreds of millions of people have saved by the revolution in online shopping and shipping, not to mention AWS, my mind boggles.

As you say, you can also generate wealth my extracting it (e.g., mining) but Amazon has not done that at all. The entirety of the wealth they've generated comes from increasing efficiency and productivity. That is, to go from trees and dyes to a book in my hand used to cost $Y and now costs $X. $Y - $X is the wealth created by the efficiency gains in those processes.

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#286

Post by Feniks »

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…

Yeah internet shopping is decimating physical retail. The old multi story bookstores were you could find all kinds of stuff are dead. What's left is stores selling only the best sellers.

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#287

Post by InitialLastName »

goldenkey wrote: post #259
gaius wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

finding appropriate books for 8-14 year old girls is really freaking hard. Start with The Hunger Games and if she likes it that’s next year sorted too, buy her a bow.

Why not Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter? Less violent and more inspirational.

Also a more realistic setting/plot.

"hey, let's suppress rebellion in our outlying provinces by drafting their children and making them fight each other."

"wouldn't that cause rebellion?"

"Yep"

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#289

Post by gone35 »

hluska wrote: post #269
goldenkey wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does add to the conversation because we have a somewhat binary outcome for a binary recommendation. If recommending Asimov is wrong, why? Don't just downvote opinions you disagree with. Explanations are noble.

I don't think recommending Isaac Asimov is wrong. Some people really like his writing (myself included). If you would read my reply again, you'll note that I said, "I downvoted you because of the suggestion that "most books" are appropriate for (and interesting to) 8-14 year old girls." Frankly, I don't think that's controversial enough to have to explain. First, it's flat out wrong to group 8-14 year old girls toget…

[...] I'm a 40 year old man who reads voraciously yet "most" books are neither appropriate, nor interesting to me.

There. Just a friendly suggestion: I think you may be a bit over-extrapolating from your personal experience and your sense of "common sense", to make overgeneralized statements about things as arguably complex and idiosyncratic as "appropriateness" or "interest" in books. (Hence, perhaps, the pushback from other readers.)

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#290

Post by xefer »

PostOnce wrote: post #251
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…

they do it so employees don't quit beforehand, so that they can keep using them to make money until the last second, while not giving them any opportunity to find a new job so they don't miss rent the week after they're fired if it's not illegal it should be, and I'm sure there is some ground for a civil lawsuit in the fact they they assured them they would not lose their jobs, thereby costing them thousands in lost…

There is such a law:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini...

I'm not sure what the terms of these employee's termination actually is. The article leaves the impression that they were essentially tossed onto the street, but it could be that they were all given the required 60-day notice.

Post reply on HN