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The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

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Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#431

Post by thaumasiotes »

qerolt wrote: post #359
lostcolony wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get the entire Enchanted Forest series (the name of the series that Dealing with Dragons is the first of; four books in total) for $20-30. As a male I enjoyed it, and one of my best female friends also remembers it fondly. I'd also throw in Sabriel, as a YA fantasy novel that I really liked, that had a female protagonist who kicked ass (rather than was there to support a male, or something else equally stereo…

I second the Sabriel series. I tend to think Garth Nix is a kind of Neil-Gaiman-starter author. Elements of gothic/horror stuff, but never really too scary for kids (or at least, not for me when I was that age, it tends to depend on the kid in question)

Just as a counterpoint, I have read the Sabriel series, but I was unimpressed.

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#432

Post by loorinm »

DaveWalk wrote: post #417
greedo wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment is so uniformed. Relaxing? The guy is a receiving manager. That's a physically tough job, requires a high level of organization, and he still takes time to help on the book floor by doing storytime. A receiving manager at B&N makes around $15-17/hour. If his partner works, that's a reasonable enough amount of money to live, but not in a high COL location. How is this abnormal? What's abnormal is thinking…

I couldn't agree more with this. I think it's the OP that hasn't taken a close enough look at the B&N employee's "situation" and just spouted off an opinion.

I just said that guy had an abnormally great situation compared to most retail jobs.

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#433

Post by natecavanaugh »

emodendroket wrote: post #317
natecavanaugh wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Next thing, you're going to tell me Santa is real ;). Every Walmart I've ever gone to, their checkout system is terribly slow. Their self checkout is better but still gets overwhelmed easily.

Do you have a Walmart Super Center? I wonder if it has to do with store size.

I do. There are actually a few different kinds of Walmarts around that I have visited, and it's generally the same story. I think it's a time based thing, not so much size, IMO. It seems like no matter how large or what they offer, their prices draw crowds, and they both understaff, and either under train, or make sure to put the slowest humans on Earth as the cashiers.

But the time criteria is best said in terms of when to go, since that's a much narrower window than when not to go.

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#434

Post by gaadd33 »

b1daly wrote: post #229
ryanwaggoner wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting, but I'm pretty skeptical, and I don't even think it's relevant here, unless you were hiring executives for large but dying companies? Here's more food for thought: the five biggest companies in the US are all data-driven tech companies that are renowned for paying ridiculously high compensation. Why wouldn't they apply your framework to both save on hiring costs and boost performance?

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.

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#435

Post by itronitron »

indubitable wrote: post #106

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…

I think people are more bothered by the stupidity of BN leadership than by their greed. Corporate is defining policy which is actively contributing to significant drops in store sales and then laying off all of their full-time retail employees which will further drive down their revenue. They used to be a very strong brand.

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#437

Post by jacobr1 »

metaobject wrote: post #52
awalton wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The app would likely be more expensive to develop and maintain than hiring a few seasonal part-timers per store (2000 people at, let's face it, minimum wage for a month is about $4M that immediately converts to sales numbers just by being conscious enough to operate a register - that's cheaper than ~10 software devs in America (at least two of which are specialists - iOS/Android devs), a manager, an office, their equ…

My software development experience lies far outside of the web/mobile app development world, so perhaps this idea already exists... Similar to how PG and RTM created Viaweb (a web application that allowed non-technical people to build online e-commerce sites), are there any sites/tools which allow non-technical people develop non-trivial retail/online purchasing iPhone/Android apps?

There plenty of limited functionality (trivial in your words) style WYSIWYG style app builders. But for non-trival apps the best I've seen is https://www.dropsource.com/ They do seem to be solving this problem but not focusing on complete non-technical people, just people without direct mobile experience.

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#438

Post by grogenaut »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #363
grogenaut wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah that's the one I'm thinking of. There are 2 starbucks one block up the hill to the transit center too, so basically 3 on that square block. It was too far down the hill for me to go to when I worked there.

Bellevue is saturated with starbucks, but very few that were open until 10PM like the one in B&N was (actually, only the Lodge and the original Bellevue store are open late). It was the place for students to hang out studying, but now...there really isn't much to replace it.

I always went to rock bottom and awkwardly worked at the bar.

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#439

Post by kolinko »

visarga wrote: post #149
ivraatiems wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It sucks, but I'm not sure there's a better option. Maybe the best we can do is try and structure a society where getting laid off from a decent job isn't so damaging and scary on a personal level. Maybe we need to acknowledge that we're moving towards having a society where "everyone has a job that earns them their living" is untenable, because there will be less work for humans to do than humans to do it, and we…

> Maybe we need to acknowledge that we're moving towards having a society where "everyone has a job that earns them their living" is untenable No, we need a society that guarantees everyone a job, a job that will generate the income necessary for survival. We shouldn't give up agency and become simple wards of the state, waiting hand stretched ahead for the UBI to fall from the crumblings at the tech billionaires tab…

You might read up about the history of the communist block, where such a system was in place. The government was literally obliged to give every single person a job, and it caused a ton of problems.

Seriously, UBI is better than inventing jobs just so that people could have jobs. At least in this system, you can get cash, and become a home maker, an artist, or invent some other occupation for yourself that you wouldn't otherwise have. Unlike the "guaranteed job" program, where you would be pushed to do barely useful stuff, that not only would break your spirit, but would not give you time to do something truly productive.

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#440

Post by duderific »

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…

> I just don't understand why. Who treats people like that?

The people making the decision to do the layoffs are distanced from the people being laid off by one or more levels of hierarchy, so they never have to look the employees in the eye. It's left to middle management to do the dirty work.

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