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The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

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441–450 of 461 posts

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#441
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They'd probably be better off finding an executive who works for 100k/yr but believes in the company.

I doubt it. Belief and passion may be necessary, but they're not sufficient. How do you pick this person? Based on the strength of their belief? Because if it's based on their experience and track record, you're back to where you started: this person likely has better alternatives and is smart enough to want to be compensated for the opportunity cost they're incurring. Also, it's all well and good to say this when it…

> How do you pick this person? Based on the strength of their belief?

Apparently the qualification that they care about is "Willing to take $10 million in payments while laying off 1800 to save $40 million". Competence at the CEO level doesn't always have to look like malevolence.

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#442
post #416
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha, you literally just came upon the realization for the economic use cases for unemployment benefits and also the main reason our government has one. You should read some economic textbooks as the world will make a whole lot more sense once you do.

> Haha, you literally just came upon This breaks the HN guidelines in two ways. First, it's uncivil. Second, it falls far short of this: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." Could you please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow those rules when commenting here? It does take an effort, but it's an effor…

> This breaks the HN guidelines in two ways. First, it's uncivil.

Did you read my other responses because I 100% agree with him. I was just laughing because he made a textbook economic argument but didn't actually mention economics.

> "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."

What? I am 100% in agreement with OP. What argument do you think I am making?

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good CEO, of which there are a few are worth the money. There are a few cases (Steve Jobs comes to mind) where a new CEO has come in and turned a failing company around, or a new CEO has come in and tanked a great company. If a company finds such a great CEO who leads the company into making billions, then they are worth a lot of money as reward for their efforts. Business schools have studied this. One of the stro…

The thing is Steve Jobs was taking a $1 salary. Even if you can find a great CEO with a great plan with your company, I don't think paying him 10M$ instead of 500k will make him more efficient or be necessary to retain him. Also I don't think the CEOs salaries are a results of competition for the best (like tech workers), but CEO being generous with themselves (and their peers as they're all in each others' board).

Jobs demanded a $40 MM private jet and large equity increases from the board.

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Amazon sell at a loss? I'm pretty sure they've been profitable for a couple years now. And how could Amazon be a monopoly? They have larger competitors.

Amazon has a certain side business that makes most of their profits.

That may be true, but their retail business still is profitable. Last year they made around $1 billion of profit from selling a lot of stuff ($120 billion in sales).

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#445
post #342
post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, a…

> Why is having people doing forms of “make work” worse than letting people waste away into despair? How would you suggest choosing who gets to do the "make work" versus who must toil away at the necessary? How would you suggest compensating those whose work is more vanity than value if no one pays them for their output?

If someone is lacking marketable skills, and is forced to take a “make work” job, I would hardly call that a “vanity” project.

This was done in the Great Depression, to try and keep the economy going.

There are ways to create work that is valuable, but the market value is below what anyone can afford to live on. So the government could subsidize salaries, in addition to hiring people.

Getting back to my comment about military spending: I see it as a destructive waste. How does that get decided? It’s decided by people operating in a complex political-financial-industrial-military complex.

If we, as a society, can decide to waste lives and wealth on idiotic military action, we can decide to spend wealth on helping our own citizens.

That’s all government spending.

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#446
post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The five biggest companies in the US by revenue or profit are not data-driven tech companies. None of the top ten US companies, by revenue, fit that description. http://fortune.com/fortune500/ Ranked by profit, only Alphabet squeaks into the top ten at number five. http://fortune.com/fortune500/list/filtered?sortBy=profits&f... I’m not seeing much correlation here between rank of CEO compensation and company performa…

The top 5 in the S&P 500 are 4 tech companies and JP Morgan Chase. The top 5 by market cap are all tech companies.

S&P 500 is primarily a ranking by market cap. It’s a measure of how much the market values a stock. I can see it being a component of size (how “big”). There’s no doubt that the big tech companies are colossal entities.

The market cap of a company is largely based on a bet of the “size” of a company in the future.

Tesla is the most “valuable” US auto maker, by market capitalization. This illustrates that market cap is inherently related to predictions which have a large speculative component, which can be influenced by pure market phenomena.

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#447
post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing here validates B&N's decision. 30 years ago I was a part-time employee at a big box store from October to January. Large retailers long ago figured out how to ramp up their workforce temporarily to adequately handle the sales season that accounts for the largest portion of their sales every year. For any retailer to blow the Christmas sales season by not adequately staffing it, which has been basic retail man…

They are removing expensive full time employees for whom they pay benefits for. The article said they had planned on doing this anyways, they just did it after a bad season. As for not adequately staffing it, you simply can't. You cannot get a decent workforce via part time seasonal work. the way it worked before was part timers just took extra hours in peak periods, but Obamacare killed this by forcing any part time…

> you simply can't

And yet, virtually every retailer for the last 3+ decades has, in fact, done so as a matter of normal operations.

It has nothing to do with Obamacare. The employment norm was not to only schedule full-time hours for part-time employees (which, even before Obamacare, violated a lot of employment law). Aside from laying off full-time employees after the cycle (which they justified by the crap sales during Christmas), B&N refused to staff-up as normal for virtually every other retailer in North America, to accommodate the most predictable sales cycle in the world... basically in order to justify the firing the full-timers.

This was a hit job by insiders looking to profit off the corpse.

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#449
post #354

My wife has worked for B&N for 21 years. I met her there, and worked there for a bit over a year. I've followed this company since then, and the amount of sheer stupidity exhibited by upper management is astounding. Decisions from the regional and main corporate offices that were just amateurish. Money wasted, time wasted, people wasted. I'm amazed they've lasted this long.

Any examples?

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#450
post #410

I think many people tend to grossly overestimate the profit levels of large companies. Let's take Amazon since they're arguably the reason for the failure here and a company I think many perceive to be lush with money largely because of 'greed.' It also hits on notions from this paper like companies just not hiring enough employees, even if only at certain times. Amazon currently grosses $178 billion. However, their…

You are being downvoted because Amazon is a bad example. They are intentionally not profitable so that they can lower prices to drive others out of the market and reinvest all revenue into R&D and horizontal expansion. They could net way more than $3B if they wanted to.

I could not care less about downvotes, but I enjoy discussion. And I certainly think people would like to disagree with me, but it seems none are really able or willing to form coherent counter points - which I think puts a very sad frame on the disagreement. So I thank you for changing that, though I think there's something you may not have considered in your logic.

At the most basic level we can view a company's profitability as a price vs demand curve. If your price is too low then you're leaving money on the table. If it's too high then you're also losing money since you could earn more by charging less to more people. And I'm sure you'd agree that all companies are really trying to maximize that curve.

But the thing here is that competition is not some tertiary element not considered in our basic price vs demand curve. It's in most cases the single biggest driving factor of the demand function. When there's no real competition, you can increase your prices quite recklessly - see Time Warner or Comcast. But the amount that Amazon can increase their prices is strictly limited due to competition. If you're going to buy an electronic component do you buy it at e.g. New Egg or Amazon? It doesn't really matter if its the same thing - you're just going to go with wherever is cheaper in net (e.g. factoring in rewards/shipping/etc), even if that price difference is really quite small. The point here is that while you may think that Amazon could raise their prices let's say 5% and see a 1-2% growth in profit, but this is a question that they are undoubtedly constantly researching - and they disagree.

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And in any case this is literally the case for most all small margin businesses. For instance WalMart has 2.3 million employees and $13.6 billion net. Our $1k/year raise costs them $2.3 billion, or 1/6th of their entire available income. The only companies that are truly lush with money are companies that sell their product at extremely high markups, or companies whose product enables the minimize labor, such as software. For instance Apple, as an example of the former, nets $48.4 billion with 123,000 employees. A $1000/year raise there would work out to 1/400th of their available revenue. Google/Alphabet, as an example of the latter, had a bad year last year, but generally net around $20 billion on 72,000 employees. Their $1k raise works out to about 1/278th of their available revenue. It creates an ironic result that few people would complain about the wages Google or Apple offer, yet they actually offer their employees a far less 'fair' share of revenues than do the companies that people consider greedy.

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