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The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

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Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#331

Post by freehunter »

totalZero wrote: post #262
bearjaws wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will never understand why people become loyal to their employers. You can be proud of your work, career, without being married to your employer. This is the inevitable conclusion to a bookstore competing against Amazon, but they still act surprised...

A long history of good things adds up in one's mind. If your employer has benefited you, it's hard to maintain a mentality of pure rational self-interest.

Yep. Some employers are really good to their employees, even if they do layoffs and downsizing. One place I worked had an employee with terminal cancer, in the later stage he told them he'd never be able to come back to work but they kept him on the payroll anyway so he didn't lose his health insurance, right up until the day he died. Doesn't mean they didn't also close unprofitable locations and lay employees off sometimes too.

Businesses are cold-hearted machines, but they are staffed by humans. And sometimes those humans make good decisions.

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#332

Post by pboutros »

nkrisc wrote: post #322
skywhopper wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only are they ordered to do it but corporate puts requirements on the store as to how many joins they are expected to get each day, and cashiers have their own individual quotas and they get chewed out if they don’t meet them by managers who get chewed out for not meeting them. The fact that this behavior reduces sales throughput, employee productivity, and customer satisfaction are not worked into the analysis t…

Sounds like a company that would keep such an executive on board deserves to fail.

Blaming the executive here makes sense. But saying the "company deserves to fail" ignores the livelihoods of everyone below that person in the hierarchy, who gets fired because mgmt has different incentives than the workers.

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#333

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

nkrisc wrote: post #322
skywhopper wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only are they ordered to do it but corporate puts requirements on the store as to how many joins they are expected to get each day, and cashiers have their own individual quotas and they get chewed out if they don’t meet them by managers who get chewed out for not meeting them. The fact that this behavior reduces sales throughput, employee productivity, and customer satisfaction are not worked into the analysis t…

Sounds like a company that would keep such an executive on board deserves to fail.

The failure of brick and mortar book stores is a net negative to society. Deserves to fail, maybe, but it'll suck when they do.

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#334

Post by toomuchtodo »

vinceguidry wrote: post #314
spookthesunset wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh. The older and more experienced I get the more I realize I work to put food in the table and to pay for my life outside. Working for “passion” is for suckers. As the dude in that one YouTube video about consulting says, fuck you. Pay me. Pay me what market rate is and don’t give me sob stories about passion or making sacrifices to work on some life changing BS. Pay me.

The ability to command market salary often depends on your willingness to move for a job. The labor market is not like the stock market. So if you're supporting a family you may want a new approach for thinking about your career.

I'm supporting a family on a semi-remote job (work from anywhere, employer covers my airfare to our offices as needed), and when I unexpectedly parted ways with my previous employer last year, I doubled my compensation in 2 weeks. "F* you, pay me" is a legitimate operating philosophy as an employee when your skills are in demand. Also important to live below your means and have a 1+ year runway of savings to enable you to negotiate from a position of power, but that's a conversation for another thread.

Better said above, "Working for “passion” is for suckers."

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#335

Post by 83457 »

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…

I'm always amazed also at how slow cashiers can be. I worked at walmart nearly 20 years ago and briefly they had a bonus for speed. All of the "career" retail cashiers got pissed because new employees who had only been there for a couple months started making more than them, being twice as fast. Visiting walmart and some other stores when there are long lines can be excrutiating as I see cashiers just not caring about speed while wasting time of people in line. Customers should not be able to scan a full cart of items in self-checkout faster than the average cashier.

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#336

Post by frandroid »

mgkimsal wrote: post #293
bluedino wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Retail checkout in the US has become a one-way grilling. At one point Best Buy was trying to get you to sign up for MAGAZINE SUBSCRIPTIONS at checkout. Who thought that was a good idea?

> Who thought that was a good idea? A bunch of corporate people who never had to ask someone face to face about buying stupid shit after they've already decided what they want, and a bunch of corporate people who never actually shop at their own stores.

Have you ever heard of "rhetorical questions?"

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#337

Post by FLUX-YOU »

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…

>I put my selections back and walked out the door. Granted it was near peak shopping season - but that was inexcusable.

Scaling retail is hard. Especially if you're against "be on call 24/7 for minimum wage without additional on call compensation".

They could buy self-checkout terminals, though, but I imagine they don't want assets like that and would rather let the business fail. That's the writing on the wall (if not the stock trend)

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#338

Post by Finnucane »

ghaff wrote: post #108
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…

Yeah, it like how Kodak "never saw digital coming." Actually they had PhotoCD long before digital cameras were a widespread thing. You can recognize a shift to electrons and still not figure out a way to make a large chain B&M business work. Smaller scale, but one of the first larger bookstores around me to discount books on a consistent basis effectively helped drive a lot of the smaller bookstores that had been aro…

But, rather infamously, a Kodak engineer cobbled together a rudimentary digital camera out of parts lying about in the lab, c. 1975, showed it to management, and they were like, who would want that.

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#339

Post by sp332 »

watwut wrote: post #198
blhack wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Isn't majority of books for them? Anyway, try Asimov if she is closer to 14. 14 is when that stuff is still interesting. Edit: why the fuck would someone downvote this?

Asimov is an incredibly broad writer. He has some stuff aimed at younger readers, but still managed to be uncomfortably sexist with the Norby novels. Robots of Dawn involves sex with robots. I'm not that familiar with the Foundation series but I've heard Foundation's Edge uses sex to drive the plot.

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#340

Post by justherefortart »

Now go prove you "deserve" unemployment.

American labor laws are pathetic, yet we collectively keep voting for this shit over and over to appease the wealthy ownership class.

Wonder if we'll ever wake out of this stupor that everyone can lift themselves by the bootstraps. Seems unlikely in my lifetime.

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