Barnes & Noble Set To Be Sold To Elliott Management For About $683M

Post by barking » Sun, Jun 09, 2019, 10:43 PM UTC

ellius wrote: post #164

barking wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going off topic. I looked up that book on Amazon and one critical review said it was the same thing repeated over and over and he could sum up the book's advice in one paragraph: Make a decision as if you are betting all of your money on your choice. Don't take shortcuts based on your inborn biases and seek contrarian opinions and experienced counsel. Don't blame bad luck on bad outcomes; figure out how you could hav…

Yes and no. You could summarize 'The Wealth of Nations' the same way and it would also sound pretty basic and not worth the 800+ page read. I agree in general that 'Thinking in Bets' is conceptually thin, in the sense that there's a high text-to-ideas ratio, but there's some value in reading all of that. Duke does a good job of describing her own thoughts and experiences, in a way that makes you want to actually appl…

Post by kashyapc » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 2:35 PM UTC

Xylakant wrote: post #156

kashyapc wrote: post #145

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C'mon, that's too high a bar. I was there a few months ago (went twice in a week and spent some non-trivial time). While, Dussman has unparalleled selection of books (it's a 4-storied bookstore after all), they are also a gargantuan gift store (the 5th floor, and throughout the other floors). They have a dizzying array of expensive crap to lure consumers. I was there in November, and by Jove , was it teeming with sho…

Notably they don’t consider themselves a bookstore. Their claim is “kulturkaufhaus” which roughly translates to “culture shopping center.” They have a large section of DVDs, Music and other stuff. Their comic book section is pitifully small, though.

Post by jschwartzi » Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 5:50 PM UTC

drivers99 wrote: post #172

jschwartzi wrote: post #108

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It actually costs them a ton of money to physically label the prices on each book. B&N adds their own sticker over the top of the MSRP when they receive the book. Changing the sticker every time the online price is changed would cost them a small fortune. If you're ever wondering why the online price differs from the in-store price by a significant amount, usually it's not because the retailer is trying to gouge you.…

B&N doesn’t put their own price stickers over the MSRP / barcode. In certain sections they would have an X% off on the top-right of the front cover like new and best seller hard-covers, and specific prices on the discounted/remaindered looking stuff, but that’s also on the front cover. The main sections divided by topic (which is all full price) don’t have any stickers. They just sell stuff at full price and then app…

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 4:15 PM UTC

omnimus wrote: post #150

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #116

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Half price books has solved this in a rather ingenious way: they just sell the book for half of what the MSRP is on the cover. No need to tag anything, decent markup, and the price data is already there/doesn’t need to be created. It’s little efficiencies like this that make HPB one of the most successful brick and mortar bookstores out there.

Selling books for half does not sound lik "decent" markup lol.