
The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble - spiralpolitik
http://audreyii-fic.tumblr.com/post/170886347853/the-entirely-unnecessary-demise-of-barnes-noble
======
phil21
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 of a much higher margin item.

The checkout line was at least 50 people long and probably estimated at over
an hour. Two cashiers working out of 8 or so possible registers, and as far as
I could tell a singular employee on the floor itself.

I put my selections back and walked out the door. Granted it was near peak
shopping season - but that was inexcusable. There were quite a lot of really
pissed off looking people in that line.

So that is to say my experience lines up with the article. They entirely
botched their Christmas season and it wasn't the employee's or consumer
demand's fault. Just that one store bled hundreds of dollars in lost sales
just from the 5 minutes I watched people walk in and immediately out after
seeing the line.

~~~
eludwig
>>Two cashiers working out of 8 or so possible registers

And the worst part about this is that each cashier seems determined to
relentlessly pester me with annoying questions at the register! Did I want to
join this loyalty program? Did I realize that I could save $5 by signing up
for so and so. Do I want to get on the B&N mailing list? Really aggressive
questioning.

Oh my God. I realize that the cashiers have been ordered to do this (I assume)
but knock it off already! This is so consumer unfriendly. I just want to pay
and go. I'm sure that this also delays checkout times significantly over the
course of a day.

This is one of the main reasons I use Amazon when possible. Retail checkout in
the US has become a one-way grilling. You end up leaving the store feeling
like a murder suspect.

~~~
skywhopper
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 that comes up with these
programs or their growth targets. Upper management comes up with a target and
they push their stores to meet it, because their CMO went to a conference
where he was wined and dined by the company that sells the software to run the
loyalty card system and believes their stats about how it saved company X and
now that they’ve spent the money the ROI has to meet internal targets or risk
embarrassing the CMO.

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

~~~
pboutros
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.

~~~
nkrisc
Perhaps if those lower in the hierarchy and society as a whole are constantly
burned by businesses failing due to incompetent leadership, they might start
to expect or demand something different. Socialism? Anarchy? Some kind of
socially conscious capitalism? I don't know what form it will take, but it
might be something different than what we have now.

~~~
tnzn
Isn't "conscious capitalism" what's being sold to us since the 70's, through
the "new spirit of capitalism" ?

Anyways props to ur comment hah

------
Bucephalus355
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 in human history. Their survival so far is impressive at
least, and they did try with the Nook, but Amazon was always a software
company so BN has a difficult and late challenge.

If anything, the best strategy for now with BN is to increase cash-flow, cut
expenses, etc 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. Although Google is smart
and already broke themselves up years ago to avoid just this fate, Facebook is
still in denial......

~~~
mgkimsal
The Sears situation is just sad. I'm not sure why shareholders are putting up
with it, except... most probably have just accepted the narrative that sears
is dead, and are OK with the sell off and ... yeah, treason isn't a bad word.
But... selling off assets you control to another company you also control
would seem like... oh.. what's the term? Conflict of interest? I don't
understand in the slightest why this has been allowed to go on. I can't
imagine if, say, Target's CEO started cutting store budgets, then closing and
selling the bad performing stores and real estate to another company the CEO
owned, and then made a profit repurposing those stores to other companies.
It's truly bizarre.

~~~
madengr
Sears was/is a total mess. Went there to buy something (before they closed the
local store) and it took 10 minutes to checkout, with the clerk fumbling
between the iPad, a CRT register, and credit card scanner. What a cluster F.

------
joekrill
> 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 down the entire office.

I just don't understand _why_. Who treats people like that? It's not like
these decisions just suddenly pop up out of the blue one morning and a
decision to fire people has to be made immediately. Clearly companies have to
mull over this type of stuff for quite some time. I don't understand why you
reassure people like that only to completely up-end their lives. Knowing that
B&N pulled this crap, I'll definitely be avoiding them moving forward.

So moral of the story is, when I company has to start assuring you that you
_most definitely_ won't be let go any time soon, it's a pretty good indicator
that it'll be happening very soon.

~~~
PostOnce
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 income when they're laid off and
having nothing else lined up, in this case it could be a class action.

We have no compassion as a society anymore (if we ever had any), its been
supplanted by greed.

~~~
xefer
There is such a law:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraining_Notification_Act_of_1988)

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.

~~~
jandrese
Or they can just say "try and sue us, we'll be in bankruptcy before you get
the papers filed anyway".

------
InclinedPlane
I remember back when Circuit City fired all of its floor staff and replaced
them with entry level (and bottom run wage) workers. Oddly, they went out of
business not long after that.

You can't race to the bottom in retail, the bottom is already taken by walmart
and online stores (like amazon). You can't be cheaper or more convenient, you
need to offer something they don't. For bookstores that means you have to have
good selection, a good environment, author signing/speaking events, and so
forth.

The retail apocalypse is not being driven primarily by lack of revenue,
there's plenty of meat on those bones for companies to survive on in
perpetuity, and many continue to thrive. Rather it's being driven by poor
business decisions. Hedge fund driven leveraged buyouts that load down retail
chains with enormous levels of debt. Complicated expansion schemes designed to
enrich some particular set of owners or executives at the cost of business
health. And so on. B&N is just another example of how retail chains have
becomes playthings for the business elite. Business fundamentals are
irrelevant. The fate of the business itself or the workers are irrelevant. All
that matters is how many golden eggs they can cut out of the goose's body
before it dies.

~~~
reedx8
I think your point about offering what your competitors are not is spot on: a
hub that facilitates community and study, events with widely known authors and
public figures, and so forth. Portland's Powells book store in the Pearl
District nails this, with multiple stories of books that seemingly never end
and centered right in the middle of the hustle and bustle of the city. I hope
B&N replicates this because I would hate to see them go and it's why any book
I buy is only from one of these chains.

~~~
paulcole
I hate to rain on your parade but Powell’s isn’t exactly thriving. There were
layoffs about 5 years ago and they’ve scrapped big renovation projects and
even plans to move the main store because of revenue problems.

~~~
DaveWalk
I think this is a very important point; independent bookstores in general
aren't "thriving" in the normal Wall St sense of the word. I wonder: is their
whole resilience is due to more of a downshift in expectations? I.e., earn
enough to make a living but not to expand? To give your employees a liveable
wage but no healthcare?

------
burlesona
Yes this is creative destruction, but Amazon is able to sell at a loss because
Wall St. sees the infinite dollar signs at the end of this road when they’ve
literally killed off all competition. Selling at a loss is anti-competitive
and should get them hammered by anti-trust, but somehow the US government has
decided that, in this generation at least, monopolies are fine as long as they
don’t raise prices.

As a customer I like Amazon, but as a citizen they deeply worry me.

~~~
criddell
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.

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

~~~
criddell
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).

------
ryanwaggoner
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 option. You can't lose money indefinitely,
you can't compete in the sector you grew huge in (because it's rapidly dying),
and so what's the end game here? Yes, they could handle this better, and maybe
they overpay their executives (although what experienced executive would even
want this job unless the pay was awesome?), but this is just quibbling.
Whether it happened now or happened in six months or two years, this is
inevitable.

Now, it's definitely sad when people lose their jobs, but that's kind of the
devil's bargain we've made with capitalism.

Some of the startups that grow out of HN will be in new sectors that only add
to the economy, but many will replace, supplant, cannibalize, and dominate
companies and industries that aren't strategically or operationally capable of
adapting. That means a LOT of people are going to lose their jobs in the
process.

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.

~~~
yock
> Now, it's definitely sad when people lose their jobs, but that's kind of the
> devil's bargain we've made with capitalism.

It's not so much a "bargain" as it is how we discover which jobs are useful.
Capitalism is very efficient at exposing useless labor, and this is a good
thing. Having a bunch of humans laboring at jobs no one needs or wants is
wasteful.

~~~
b1daly
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,
and reflect a technical understanding of a vastly over simplified model of
reality. Such models do provide insight into real life, but they are
analytical tools, nothing more.

Economics, as field of study, has a big problem with the concept of “value.”
The price of things tends to stand in for the value of things, as it is easily
measured.

You don’t have to look hard to see the absurdity of taking this compromise too
far. Look at military spending. Since dollars are spent buying a weapon, and
workers get paid, profits are made, the “value” of the sale gets added into
GDP. Then we take that missile, and blow it up. If we kill our enemies, then
maybe one could say we got our money’s worth. If we kill only innocents, then
I see it as more of an “anti-value.” What if it just blows up in the desert,
and makes a multi-million dollar hole in the sand? Sort of a modern, high tech
version of paying one group of workers to dig holes, and another to fill them
in, is it not?

~~~
yock
> 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?

~~~
b1daly
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.

------
dragonwriter
If management is assuring you repeatedly that there will be no layoffs, it's a
good sign that layoffs are coming.

If management is assuring you repeatedly that specific people will not be laid
off, it's a good sign that those people will be laid off.

At least this is what always seems to happen, IME.

~~~
bearjaws
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...

~~~
totalZero
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.

~~~
freehunter
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.

~~~
mwexler
And until this is not the exception but the rule, we continue to be amazed by
stories like this.

------
LogicX
Taking a thought from another thread...

What if B&N merged with wework?

Wework just bought meetup.com - now you have more locations for meetups. B&N
often has pretty good locations, and covers areas of the country wework
doesn't akready have prescence. There's already a coffee shop built into B&N

If you implemented a cashierless checkout process, and had ship from location,
you now can compete with Amazon, and the retail prescence is an attractor for
weworkers and meetups.

I'm not sure of the B&N commercial real estate holdings, but wework seems to
be all into that.

Of all the possible fates of B&N - If I saw that happen, I'd be be pretty
pleased with it.

~~~
freehunter
Remote working spaces have amazing untapped potential IMO. Right now they're
mostly concentrated in downtowns of major metro areas which might be nice for
the heavily concentrated populations living there, but sucks for anyone in
residential neighborhoods outside of the downtown core. Take Chicago for
example: there are six WeWork locations within 200 miles of the city, and the
furthest distance from one to the other is less than 2 miles. If you live in
Schaumburg or Skokie or Aurora or Joliet, to get to your closest "office" you
have to commute downtown just like everyone else, every morning and back home
every evening. And in my metro area of 1.5m, there are no WeWork locations at
all, the closest is over three hours away. There are some other co-working
locations in my city's downtown, but I don't want to commute downtown every
day.

I think there's potential for co-working spaces in residential or suburban
areas, but it's a smaller market so it'd be pricey... unless you already own
space in the suburbs. Like Barnes and Noble does. And they already have
Starbucks available at most of them, and many of them are in areas with plenty
of food choices around for lunch. Many of them are near plazas with nice
places to walk and get some fresh air.

We're just getting started with co-working spaces, there's a lot of untapped
potential in smaller markets yet.

------
ballenf
Amazon's primary customer has shifted to the 3rd-party seller, i.e., it's not
profit off water coolers that allows low prices.

Looking at Amazon's financials, they make more profit off of selling
advertising (lightning deals, search ads & "related" sponsored listings) than
margin off sales.

It really shows when you look at the lightning deals and find product after
product with artificially inflated reviews. Amazon has zero interest in fixing
this because customers are its product not its customers.

Hard to see how a traditional retailer can begin to compete with this.

~~~
paulcole
> Amazon has zero interest in fixing this because customers are its product
> not its customers.

If you think 3rd party sellers are Amazons customers and get much better
treatment than end buyers, boy are you barking up the wrong tree.

~~~
ballenf
Not just any 3rd party seller, only the ones willing to systematically spend
ad dollars to promote products.

But even non-spending sellers send a lot of transaction revenue Amazon’s
direction. You don’t get good treatment however because you're a disposable
commodity. Treating you well doesn’t increase revenue.

~~~
robryan
Yeah, they have no trouble finding the next person in line or cutting their
own deal to replace the supply they have kicked off for anything remotely high
volume.

------
purplezooey
I likes this article. This point, though, seemed off:

 _I would double-down on what we can offer that Amazon can’t: enthusiastic
staff that can find and upsell books..._

But it's already been proven, sort of, that this isn't what people want, at
least in sufficiently large numbers. That kind of underscores the difficulty
of recovering this franchise.

~~~
metaobject
"... find and upsell books"

What can be easier than using the Amazon search bar? And as far as upwelling
goes, Amazon's ML-driven 'suggestions' algorithm results often seem to
interest me.

~~~
mattkrause
For the books you already know you want, I agree that Amazon is hard to beat.
However, it’s hard to replicate the “discoverability” of a brick and mortar
bookshop. Even without having a specific title in mind, I can always find
something that looks interesting, just by walking around. Sometimes a blurb on
the cover draws me in, sometimes it’s a recommendation by the staff, and
sometimes seeing a title or author jogs my memory.

Meanwhile, logging into my Amazon account recommends several books (out of
order) in a series, some updated versions of textbooks I once bought, and a
few titles I recognize from the NYT best seller list but have no interest in.
Since I recently bought one, there are also a good dozen screwdrivers for what
Amazon assumes is my burgeoning collection of flatheads.

Also, books don’t cost very much, but they are a big investment in terms of
time. Thumbing through the actual book is a great way to make sure you like
your prospective purchase. This isn’t quite the same online—Look Inside is
carefully metered out so you can maybe get a sense of the books style and
level, but it’s often not enough to draw me in.

------
loorinm
Reading that Storytime guy’s tweet, I really wondered:

Has this guy never taken a look at his situation and noticed something off?

He works in a relaxing huge retail store reading books to kids for free, and
makes above min wage and keeps his job for the next 20 years and supports 5
kids???

That’s insane, and completely abnormal. No one else with that same type of job
has that kind of life.

It reminds me of someone I know who lived in an in-law with no rent control
and no law against eviction, for 15 years, paying 60% of market rate. And then
was completely stunned and devastated when the landlord gave 60 day notice.
Really???

~~~
greedo
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 that this is abnormal. $35k/year isn't a high
salary.

~~~
DaveWalk
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.

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

------
so33
In Canada, Indigo is a chain of bookstores just like B&N. To counter the
threat of Amazon, they have dedicated a large amount of their stores’ square
footage to a lifestyle concept that sells aesthetically pleasing stationery,
home goods, and gifts. AFAICT this has allowed them to keep afloat and they do
still sell quite a bit of books.

~~~
megaman22
As far as I've seen, every chain bookstore has tried this, and most have
subsequently gone belly up. It's a little like RadioShack going into
cellphones. Maybe you can keep your head above water for a minute, but there's
an existential risk in pivoting away from your raison d'etre.

~~~
bobsil1
Ironically, Amazon Books stores have big floor area for electronics.

~~~
megaman22
Is that ironic? Amazon has also become _the_ electronics retailer as well. I
don't recall the last time I've bought anything at Newegg or Monoprice, or
BestBuy. It's basically Amazon or bust, at this point - if I desperately need
something right now, I'll gamble on Walmart maybe having it in stock, but
chances tend not to be good, and the selection awful.

------
joshpadnick
The thing that frustrates me most about the slow, drawn out demise of first
Borders and now Barnes & Noble is that there has never been a bold vision for
the future. The mega-bookstore was a great model in the 1990s, but post-
Internet, they really needed to leverage their space to do something magical.

One idea I would have loved: Browse your books in store, but buy them for Nook
or Kindle -- at the same prices you pay on Amazon. Maybe that's even a loss
leader and you upsell $5 lattes.

Or perhaps they double-down on really awesome kids sections, where you want to
try out a book on you kid before buying. Or maybe they aim to make the store
more like a "community center" and build in meeting rooms, or make certain
stores specialized in a particular topic (e.g. the "tech" store downtown).

But running the same, tired playbook year after year ultimately is, just as
the author suggests, a way for current executives to milk the cow until it
falls over. I hope when my son is old enough to enjoy sitting down to read on
his own, I'll still have a nice book store to enjoy with him.

~~~
pseingatl
Great idea. Don't carry physical books at all; maybe just a postcard-size
flyer to advertise a particular text. Buy the postcard--which could be signed
by the author--and get a code to download the book. Turn the spaces into, a la
FNAC, exhibition spaces, deliberately permitting 'cataloging' of similar
products.

Keep in mind that the publishers don't really have skin in the game. Theirs,
at least in the U.S., is wholly a consignment business.

Put in an Espresso Book Machine for those who want paper copies.

Make the stores membership only: blend bookstores and libraries. Offer an
experience not obtainable elsewhere.

------
stillsut
I feel for the grown man who dresses up in costumes to read stories for
children. I respect him. And yet if there were some subjective corporate
performance metrics he had to game to keep his job, I think other employees
may know how to work the system better than him. A lot of the best employees
are bad at office politics, because they simply love what they do. If there's
something to be said about mass-layoffs, it's that they're maybe better than
targeted and subjective firings.

I think B&N was a wonderful place and concept while the underlying forces were
working: it seems like a lot more people want to work with books than there
are/were jobs at Independents or Libraries, and B&N got them into a business
with the cashflow to support dozens of people on the floor. Are there enough
jobs in the brick and mortar book business for everyone without B&N? Probably
not right now, but there might be a new franchise concept at some point? Time
for one of these people to start it.

------
tzs
It would probably help some if their website didn't GIVE YOU LINKS to places
you can buy the book you are looking at for less.

I was looking up a book I'm thinking of buying, and right below the customer
reviews section on the page they have a Google ads block, and the first ad was
for the book at thriftbooks.com. The ad touted it for cheap used there, but
clicking it also shows they have it new, too, for $25 (B&N online price is
$30).

Below that is another block of Google ads with pictures of the book and links
to other sellers. Those ads show the new price right in the ad. Two are $25
(the aforementioned thriftbooks.com and biblio.com) and two are more than
B&N's price.

WTF? Why would they do this?

PS: Here's a picture showing this:
[https://imgur.com/a/Pg5eL](https://imgur.com/a/Pg5eL)

~~~
greedo
I can't reproduce this on any browser...

~~~
tzs
If you have a decent ad blocker, it blocks those. I only get them if I turn
off uBlock Origin.

~~~
greedo
Wow, you're correct. Yet another example of the stellar leadership from
Riggio...

------
ikeboy
>As a side note: people often want to know why Amazon’s prices are so much
lower than B&N’s, and why B&N doesn’t price match. There’s a lot of different
reasons, but the biggest is that Amazon loss-leads their books: that is, sells
them at a loss, then makes up the money with expensive add-ons, like Echos or
Kindles or other non-book stuff.

Well no, Kindles are breakeven and Amazon makes it up by selling more books
(digital ones with good margins though)

------
zerotolerance
Barnes and Noble had a huge high-margin section, just like Best Buy did...
their ridiculous physical video and music section. I think the availability of
streaming services did as much to hurt those "book" stores as reasonable
competition from Amazon.

~~~
EamonnMR
Is best buy going out of business too? I had a surreal experience while trying
to buy a camera lens at Best Buy. The employee in the camera section first
directed me to phone camera addons (cool, but not what I wanted) then once
explained that I wanted camera accessories (I gestured like I was taking a
picture) I was eventually lead to the camera section. I was able to find the
Nikon lenses eventually, and the employee returned... I was hoping he'd
explain to me what lens would be good for zooming in, but instead he fiddled
with the floor model until he managed to take a picture with it, showed me the
picture and said, triumphantly, "camera." I gave up and left.

~~~
DaveWalk
I was wondering about Best Buy too. Does anyone know what's going on with
them?

Last I heard (2017), they were trying hard to be more "on-demand" in response
to Amazon. They were quite fully aware of people "demoing" items in store and
buying them online, so they dropped prices and updated their e-commerce. If it
worked is a separate question entirely...

------
ukulele
I can see how the author views this as company mismanagement, but I'd offer a
possible counter:

Online is killing retail, full stop. High touch sales models everywhere have
lost profitablity due to "showrooming" \-- curation and upselling aren't
profitable for B&N, and they won't ever be again. To adapt, management needs
to move to a lower touch model based on thin margins, web sales, and simpler
stores. To do this, they need cash and they need to make staff cuts.

Everything in the article fits perfectly with this course of action.

~~~
trynumber9
Except, you know, lying about the upcoming layoffs.

~~~
tytytytytytytyt
That fits in just fine with the above, at least as far as my understanding of
businesses and what their goals are is...

------
grey-area
The industry is experiencing a secular decline.

There is no way back to profit for booksellers and publishers, because fewer
people are buying paper books, nowhere near enough to sustain the existing
industry, and authors can simply publish direct via schemes like Amazon.
They've tried overpricing ebooks, taking things off Amazon, setting up their
own online readers/stores (nook). Every publisher is now having real trouble
making money, every bookseller also, and significantly cutting jobs - the
industry is being turned upside down at every level and no-one except some big
brand name authors has a viable business model. Those that are not affected
because they live in a profitable niche like academic publishing will meet the
same challenges soon, because they are driven by the introduction of computers
and the internet, which has radically changed how people write, and how they
read.

Of course the management handled this incredibly badly, and have extracted
huge fees for passively overseeing the death of the company, and the story is
correct in saying it is not bleeding out, but the demise of Barnes and Noble
and other booksellers like it is not, it is the inevitable consequence of the
shift of content online, and the huge and ongoing disruption across a range of
industries that the internet and free copying of information has brought.

Ironically this may lead in the short term to the resurgence of small
bookstores who sell second hand copies of books, at least until a generation
grows up which has never bought a paper book, just as they have never bought a
paper newspaper or magazine. But in the long term I think new mediums will
arise more suited to the medium of production and transmission - now everyone
in the world can access the store of the world's knowledge in their hand,
mostly for free and share their thoughts with others, again for free - this
will radically change our perception of culture, and our consumption and
production of stories, so the disruption is just beginning.

~~~
randomsearch
Book sales are increasing in the UK and US

[https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/books/dat...](https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/books/datablog/2017/mar/18/the-
fall-and-rise-of-physical-book-sales-worldwide-in-data)

~~~
grey-area
I've worked in the publishing industry in the UK - it is experiencing long
term decline. To illustrate this, see the multitude of publishers merging,
cutting staff and closing imprints. Very few publishers are making money any
more. The story is the same for bookstores - there is one significant UK-wide
chain now (Waterstones).

The article you cite doesn't even show healthy figures - it shows a bump in
2015, then fall to almost zero growth in 2016 for the UK, and a dramatic
decline in growth for the US from 2015 to 2016. Hardly signs of a healthy
industry. This is just the kind of cherry-picked data the industry has been
deluding itself with for years. The figures produced by the industry are
unreliable, and the interpretation of those is equally suspect, as evidenced
by the article you've found. They've tried to manipulate stats by doing things
like pricing ebooks higher or just below physical books for example.

Barnes and Noble will close soon (as this article predicts), as will all the
other big brick and mortar booksellers, and soon after that mass-market paper
books are doomed as Amazon has little incentive to promote them over ebooks,
and no interest in sustaining publishers.

------
ornel
Why all the fuzzy love for Barnes and Noble? They intentionally destroyed
independent bookstores in many places with their superstores. Good riddance!

~~~
NoGravitas
I think it's because the implicit value is:

Independent booksellers > B&N > Amazon

------
greedo
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.

~~~
mratzloff
Any examples?

~~~
greedo
Around 2000-2002, you could walk into most B&N stores and find nice
comfortable chairs to sit in. These chairs encouraged book lovers to grab a
book, sit down, read a few pages, and actually enjoy the book buying
experience. So what did B&N do over the next couple of years? Get rid of the
comfortable chairs, and replace them on a 1:2 basis with hard, uncomfortable
wooden chairs. Then slowly phase these chairs out completely.

This did a couple of things; discourage people from reading books on the book
floor, while encouraging them to read in the Cafe, where the books and
magazines get damaged easily. But the core idea of having an inviting
bookstore died that year.

Another issue was the Cafe relationship with Starbucks. The Cafe's use
Starbucks components, and often follow their recipes. They have tons of
"Starbucks" branding as part of this relationship. BUT you can't use a
Starbuck giftcard at a B&N Cafe. Try explaining this to someone who received a
giftcard over the holidays. They order a coffee after waiting in line, and get
hassled about the form of payment. It wouldn't have been hard for B&N
management to work out a deal with Starbucks for handling these cards, but B&N
never did.

Also, bookstores have the ability to send a majority of their inventory back
to the publisher (yeah, crazy legacy stuff). Inventory levels are largely
decided by Corp HQ yet despite modern inventory mgmt software being a thing,
they continually botched it. So you would get huge shipments. Then when cash
flow for the company would get tight, they'd have you pull the books off the
shelves and send them back to the publishers. This would be a continual
process that consumes tons of time, time that would be better spent on
customer service.

Corp HQ would also decide to change the store layout frequently. The staff
would pack up all the Sci-Fi/Fantasy books, move them to a completely
different part of the store. Customers would come in, head to their favorite
section, and be flummoxed. Since so many labor hours were spent doing this
type of thing, (and the aforementioned book pulls), there weren't as many
employees on the book floor to help. I called it the Titanic chair
shuffling...

Staffing levels were always a problem. On busy holiday weeknights, you might
have 4-5 people working. One manager, one head cashier, two in the cafe, and
one on the book floor. Employees need breaks, so often you would end up with
one cashier, and one person on the book floor. If you get a rush of people,
that line at the register can get awfully long. B&N only pays lip service to
the customer experience.

A lot of these types of decisions add up overtime to create a crappy customer
experience. B&N never could compete with Amazon on pricing, and never should
have. They should have embraced the book buying experience, and made customers
love coming in. But that's a long long game to play, and their management made
continually bad choices (like Nook) that distracted them, took capital they
didn't have, and confused customers.

~~~
mratzloff
Thank you for such a detailed response!

------
a-nikolaev
Just wanted to say that in NYC, the quality of book selection at Barnes and
Noble is just amazing. In my opinion, it's way better then the hyped Strand,
for example. So, maybe, go to your local B&N some time and just buy a book?
Support brick-and-mortar bookstores, while we haven't succumbed to Amazon just
yet.

~~~
tzs
It would help with this if B&N would fix their website to make it less
annoying to try to find out what is at your local store.

Suppose there are several books you are thinking of buying. You want to know
which of those are at your local B&N. You go to their website and search for
the first book. On the book's page you click the "Check Store Availability"
link.

That pops up a form to enter your zip code. You do, and it brings up a pop up
that shows the availability of the book in the nearest few stores.

So far so good.

Now you want to check the second book. You find its page, click the store
check link. And you get the zip code pop up again...and it isn't even smart
enough to pre-fill the zip code. You have to enter it again!

This is just irritating.

At the very minimum it should pre-fill the zip.

Better would be to skip that pop up completely if it already knows the zip and
go straight to the results. This would not inconvenience people who want to
change the zip to check a different area's stores, because the results pop up
has a zip entry field for doing that.

Better than that would be to, once it has the zip, automatically show on the
book pages whether or not they are available in nearby stores.

Even better than that would be to also put that on the search results pages
and on the browsing results pages, like Best Buy does. At Best Buy it tells me
right there if it is available for pick up today at my local store. If not, it
tells when it can be if I order online for local pick up.

Once they do all that, they should add a way to filter results to only show
locally available items. Best Buy again is a good example. On search and
browsing pages, there is a tab that limits it to only items you can pick up
today in your local store.

------
bbarn
Barnes and Noble and Borders effectively destroyed the independent book stores
of the nation, because at the time they had a better business model. I don't
have a lot of sympathy for their business model getting the same treatment
from the internet sales model.

------
djsumdog
So the bigger question, if this trend continues and B&N goes the way of
Borders ... what happens to all your Nook purchases?

I only have 2 or 3, but I feel like I need to figure out how to rip the DRM
off and export all my highlights/notes sooner rather than later.

~~~
biggodoggo
I've heard from friends that [https://calibre-ebook.com](https://calibre-
ebook.com) is the "go to" solution for this kind of thing

~~~
AlphaWeaver
Calibre is fantastic, and open source too! It's primary a library management
system with all the features you could ask for, but there are also open source
plugins to remove DRM that make it a go-to for creating libre libraries.

------
debt
That was seriously well written.

I don't normally read Tumblr posts but the pacing and the way they peppered
the images throughout; very well-made piece.

------
jamiesonbecker
'The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act of 1988 (the "WARN
Act") is a US labor law which protects employees, their families, and
communities by requiring most employers with 100 or more employees to provide
60 calendar-day advance notification of plant closings and mass layoffs of
employees, as defined in the Act.'

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraining_Notification_Act_of_1988)

It's sad that old-school books are dying. I love books, especially older hard
cover books; but, if you know your business and industry are dying, then you
owe it to your team who got you there to engineer a soft landing. That's
simply the ethical thing to do.

~~~
twtw
"The WARN Act also is not activated when the following coverage thresholds are
unmet:

If a plant closing or a mass layoff results in fewer than 50 workers losing
their jobs at a single employment site;"

~~~
jamiesonbecker
Good catch, thanks.

------
kuang_eleven
A sidenote in the article, but I'd like to know why people think that Amazon
treats books as a loss-leader... Last I checked in tech news, it was the
common assumption that Amazon retail in general has razor-thin margins or
might even be losing money, but AWS was making money hand over fist.

------
mrbrowning
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 moving on in a post facto justification
of the actions of some corporate raiders that never even considered
alternatives beyond stripping a company of its assets for their own sake. I
just wish we could be honest about what actual competition, what actual wealth
creation, looks like, because this isn’t it.

~~~
comicjk
What experience in literature are you referring to? Do many people ask Barnes
and Noble employees for book recommendations?

~~~
mrbrowning
Well, that’s the point of the article, isn’t it? The long-time employees that
were laid off were almost certainly there out of love of their wares, and the
parent business could have put the work into making value out of that
distinguishing fact. But beyond that, they had institutional knowledge, both
of how the business works and what their customers want. I know it’s hard to
imagine that retail work could involve any amount of skill or knowledge, but
this is no doubt a loss of value.

~~~
tytytytytytytyt
> and the parent business could have put the work into making value out of
> that distinguishing fact

The fact that you can easily make vague pontifications about what else they
might have done doesn't mean that any of those things are actually viable for
the business.

> I know it’s hard to imagine that retail work could involve any amount of
> skill or knowledge, but this is no doubt a loss of value.

But probably not enough value to be worth keeping them on staff, unless they
did the layoffs on whim, like you seem to think. It is possible that they
examined a lot of scenarios and are privy to a fair amount of relevant details
to which the public isn't.

~~~
ascorbic
It seems to have worked to Waterstone's in the UK, which was similarly on the
point of death, and recently managed to return to profit with that sort of
strategy. [https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/03/balancing-
the-...](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/03/balancing-the-books-
how-waterstones-returned-to-profit)

------
notyourday
When B&N decided not only not to compete with Amazon on books ("No, we will
not price match these books". "Pay money to join our club to get a discount")
but become a wacky showroom of wacky products ( sushi making kit, anyone?
Would you like a reading lamp? Oh, wait, no, it is not a reading lamp, it is
just a lamp that you could use for reading. How about our Nook thing? Not that
we can run anything electronic ) it signed its own death sentence.

B&N stores were overstaffed.

------
jeffdavis
(Taking the article at face value for the sake of argument.)

I have to imagine there's going to be a smarter way to finance and manage
companies that don't have huge growth prospects. Sure, creative destruction
and all that, but isn't there some size at which a bookstore works profitably?

So figure out that size, which is maybe smaller but still a chain, and get
organized around that concept. Is that unrealistic somehow? Does it really
need to be financed in public markets?

------
icedchai
I'll be sad to see my local B&N disappear, but it's not unexpected: the
writing has been on the wall for years. I generally hang out in the cafe,
drink coffee, read magazines. If I see a book I like, I'll probably buy it on
Amazon.

------
bawana
Did retail ever deserve to live anyway? What kind of life and satisfaction
does one get by selling someone else's work? It's easy, low skill and is just
plain 'busy work'. Perhaps we are entering the golden age where one's worth is
more closely related to the value they add to other peoples lives through
their real work as human beings - not as middle men (middle people?) The
trades for example are thriving. The food industry is burgeoning. Tourism is
growing.Good riddance to mind numbing dehumanizing work - the assembly line,
the stock clerk, the delivery person.

------
gambiting
The real tragedy here is that US has laws which allow employers to fire
someone on the spot. What a travesty - 20 years at work and they can get rid
of you in a day? Just wow.

~~~
madengr
Legally, there is a difference between layoff and fire. Depends on the state,
but employers of a certain size have to give warning that a layoff is coming.
The article says they were given notice their positions were going away; that
is probably legally enough. Even firing requires documented poor behavior.

~~~
amyjess
From what I understand, this wasn't considered a mass layoff because each site
only lost a handful of workers. The definition of a mass layoff according to
the law is that the "mass" applies to each site that experiences layoffs.

------
ngvrnd
Our local B&N lost me when they eliminated the "New Releases" section of
science fiction & fantasy novels.

------
lmroz
It's time for BN to suck it up and put signs around the store saying 'Found a
book you love here but are choosing to buy it from a competitor? Please use
our referral code: xyz".

------
mdip
The writing is on the wall for Barnes and Noble, and I can't help but see what
they've done here as mirroring what Circuit City did just before they shut
everything down. IIRC, they ditched their most experienced sales-people, who
were also the highest paid, and not soon there-after, they were done.

That said, I don't entirely agree with the assessment of the author. She
_sounds_ like one of the employees that was let go and her view of things
might be colored by that. She seems to be over-valuing the contribution these
employees made to the bottom line of the business. She may or may not be
right; I can't, personally, speak to that -- where I live, there hasn't been a
Barnes & Noble nearby in a long time. In fact, the place I work is _located on
the second floor of what once was a Barnes & Noble_. When there _was_ one a
couple of miles from my home, I rarely purchased anything from them other than
coffee.

This is anecdotal, of course, but I don't know that pulling employees from the
floor and putting them to work boxing and shipping orders from the store was
such a bad idea. If it did, indeed, decrease shipping time and costs, it would
have been a _fine_ use for that staff assuming they could find enough people
to buy books online when those people could often save money at Amazon. In the
_decades_ that I did spend time at Barnes & Noble, my interactions were
limited to the "kinda-Starbucks" folks and the (rare) store teenage cashier.
Maybe I am a very specific customer[0]; I went there because of the selection
of obscure programming books. I'd often need something not available at my
library. They'd have a few options and I wanted to review them before having
the library order it.

I buy the argument that it's not necessarily Amazon that was B&N's downfall --
it hurt, a lot, I'm sure and I know former B&N customers who now exclusively
purchase via Kindle -- but there are a lot of people like me, who didn't buy
books from _either_ place. In a twist of irony, I own a second-generation Nook
with the e-paper/color screen. I have never owned a Kindle.

Here's my take on where B&N fell over:

(1) Failure to recognize who the competition actually was. Amazon needn't be
mentioned; it's obvious. But the big one for me was my local home-town
library. They are just as close, a little bigger, just as nice (sans Fivebucks
coffee), but I don't have to spend _anything_ there and being a speed reader
(skim/scan style, not the gimmicky nonsense), I get through my book during the
borrowing window. They also have an automated self-checkout and self-dropoff,
so I wait in far fewer lines. So I'm already inconvenienced by having to
_gasp_ drive somewhere, but my library handles the experience _entirely
better_.

(2) Very expensive real-estate: I mentioned that my employer is in a former
Barnes & Noble location. Our office is in an incredibly desirable area. I have
no idea what the cost is, but I know that homes with fewer bedrooms than I
have and half the square footage go for twice the price of my home (and homes
just a few miles up the road) in _less_ desirable parts of this suburb. The
stores are very pleasant to be in, with expensive furnishings in expensive,
convenient areas. These things don't come cheap. There's a reason the mom-and-
pop book-sellers are located on the dumpier side of town, often have "use
other door" signs posted on 8.5x11 paper with ink-jet Comic Sans all caps
print and the books are jammed together on shelves stacked floor to ceiling
separated by aisles that are barely large enough to meet ADA requirements...
books are low-margin items. Every time I visited a Barnes and Noble for
Fivebucks coffee I wondered how, on earth, they stayed in business.

(3) Staffing costs had to be high. Ignoring the whole thing about the CEO and
executives making stupid amounts of money[1], the staff requirements to
provide the level of customer service required of those customers who _do_
need help, especially those who purchased a Nook and mistakenly thought that
driving over to B&N would be helpful in solving their problems, is impossible
to do profitably. And I don't think that the quality of their staff would have
been the same as the mom-pop bookstores described in point #2. The few
mom/pops that I've been to are staffed by book-obsessed individuals; those
individuals are often also the owners of the place, and the owners of the
place are often the only employees. Thinking back about a decade, when I last
went to a B&N, I'm not _entirely_ sure that I _never_ needed help, but I am
sure that I _never_ received any. I don't ever recall seeing an employee
anywhere _other_ than at the coffee shop or behind the counter ringing people
up. Where they _had_ employees, they had to _few_ of them. It always took
_forever_ to get out of there with a (rare) purchase; even a (less rare)
coffee purchase. I think they are the record holder for me of saving me money
through waiting . . . how bad did I want that coffee? 15 minutes, bad? Or that
2600 magazine that had the cool payphone photo that I wanted to keep; do I
really want to wait in line behind those 9 other people for the one cashier
who's ringing everyone up in their (pointless) common-feeder line?

(4) Inventory costs had to be high. I went to B&N _only because I knew they
had a huge selection_ , yet I rarely purchased anything from that
selection[2]. I would have never walked _into_ the store if they didn't have
that selection, though. It's a _lot_ easier for Amazon to handle that problem.
My local library, as well, is _massive_ and actually larger than the B&N was
(though they had a more limited programming book selection). Back to point #1,
their competition has far fewer difficulties doing what they do.

Of the problems I can see, fixing any of the bottom three would be customer-
hostile in (probably) equal ways -- different impacts, but would take enough
away that they'd lose a lot of business. Staffing -- the third -- is the only
one that can be done quickly and have an immediate impact on the bottom line.
The problem, though, is that it's like borrowing money at a higher interest
rate to pay off debt[3]. They'll lose high- and probably medium-maintenance
customers, and they'll lose customers sympathetic to the employees'
circumstances which will drive them into cutting more. It's a downward spiral
and they're so close to the bottom, I don't see them having a chance at this
point.

[0] Generally, I ended up there in search of books related to programming,
networks and other computing topics. They had the largest selection and I
could crack the books open and see if they were worth burning the time on,
which I would often then do in their coffee shop over a few weekend days. I'd
occasionally look over the fiction titles under topics I like, but I don't
read fiction, I listen to it and I generally did that by grabbing the CDs or (
_gasp_ ) tapes from the library.

[1] I'm not disagreeing; it's absurd given that they're failing at their
actual job, it's just obvious enough, IMO, that it doesn't require more
detail.

[2] PSA- I feel that way about Microcenter, somehow they have almost
everything that I can find on Newegg, and they manage to be nearly
competitive, price-wise, with them. I don't want them to vanish, though, so I
make it a point to do as much of my geek spending there, in-store, even if
they are a little pricier; plus ... instant gratification is nice.

[3] Or, as is said all too often by people who aren't thinking about what it
is they're actually saying, the equivalent to "digging yourself out of a
hole".

------
mwexler
Anyone know the source of that awesome breakdown of comp for the execs? That
is, I know it's from the filings, but it's a pain to manually assemble, so
that's a powerful image...

------
nikanj
Building a cash reserve in the business is important, if you're hoping to sell
the business in a leveraged buy-out.

Basically, someone buys B&N by using the B&N cash-at-hand as collateral.

------
cafard
The one in Bethesda, Maryland, is closing. Whenever I have looked in--usually
because I'm in Bethesda to see a movie or to take my car to the dealership--it
has been busy.

------
indubitable
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 net income is what
matters. That's what's left over after paying cost of goods, salaries, rent,
taxes, and so on. Basically what's left over after the mandatory expenses to
keep your company running. And that's only $3 billion. 'Only' sounds funny
preceding $3,000,000,000 and is undoubtedly what leads to complaints against
Amazon (and here as well) that they're just being greedy, not paying employees
enough, and so on.

But that's not really accurate. Amazon has 566,000 employees. If they gave
each employee a $1000 raise. For those working your average 2000+ hour year
that's a whopping $0.50/hour raise. Yet that marginal raise amounts to
$0.56billion, or 1/6th of their entire remaining revenue. Interestingly enough
1 executive earning $1million in compensation is, by contrast, only 1/3000th
of their remaining revenue. This critical calculation on the number of workers
to fill any given role is why compensation and things can seem so lopsided.
The sheer magnitude of the number of workers at many of these companies is
very counter intuitive.

And this is the case for most large small margin companies. Back to Barnes and
Noble, in 2016 they had a net income of -$24.5 million with 26,000 employees.
Try to keep those figures in mind when considering this. I think the post that
described any real solution for them as akin to 'shuffling chairs on the
Titanic' is very apt.

\---

 _If anybody has a counter point here, I 'd love to hear it. From my
perspective it seems people are replacing reality with ideology, whether
intentionally or not. We want to blame companies for being greedy, even when
in reality the numbers don't really support such views. All jobs are
disappearing, when we have 4.1% unemployment (even the U6 is down to 8.2%!),
etc. I used to feel very similarly, but the numbers simply don't support these
incredibly cynical views._

~~~
bleezy
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.

~~~
indubitable
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.

\----

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.

------
Overtonwindow
What's sad about Barnes and Noble is that the book industry never saw the
ebook and online buying coming. So they kept the price of books high,
pressured by big name authors who were use to the big royalty checks, and they
can't move away. Imagine if B&N could compete on price with Amazon, and the
booksellers had to take what the market is willing to pay.

~~~
Finnucane
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 required to get them to clean up
their data.

In those days, B&N was rapidly expanding their superstore system, and trying
to drive out the independents by, you know, discounting. And we said, hey,
once they've gotten rid of the competition, those discounts will go away. And
they did.

~~~
ghaff
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 around forever out of business. Ten or twenty years
later, they were complaining online when they were effectively driven out of
business by Amazon.

~~~
Finnucane
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.

~~~
ghaff
Oh, Kodak did plenty of things wrong. But the technology wasn't really there
for a mass market digital camera for almost 25 years after that. And replacing
a consumables business that was so big Kodak owned their own chemical company
at one point was going to be difficult in any case. Fujifilm transitioned much
better but they were much smaller and also had their own struggles.

------
dwighttk
Are any of these executives ex Walmart executives? I'm thinking a Elop ->
Nokia sort of operation...

~~~
itronitron
hmmm, maybe they are going to sell the brick and mortar stores to Amazon?

------
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.

------
madengr
Don’t ever count on “loyal and faithful service” on keeping your job. I’ve
seen engineers with 25 years of service laid off with 5 minutes notice. The
only relationship you should have with an employer is extracting as much pay
and benefits in exchange for work.

------
itronitron
that's a real freaky Santa gif

------
Maro
I don't agree with the basic premise of the article wrt job security. B&N does
not owe you a job. Nobody does.

You got to work at the same company for 20 years? You should be happy and
gracious. All things come to an end.

I'm 37 and the longest I've worked at a company was 3.5 years, and that was my
own startup. I average about 2-3 years/company. I'd kill to find a company/job
where I can stay for 5 years without becoming a dinosaur. But I can't, because
it's the startup/tech sector, things move fast, even here in Europe. On the
flip-side, you could chose to be more static, risking increased irrelevance,
in which case you'll be more upset upon losing your job. But that's the
risk/tradeoff.

~~~
tytytytytytytyt
Plus these sound like mostly entry level, no-qualification jobs. I can't
imagine why anyone would feel like they had any real measure of job security
at jobs like those.

~~~
michaelmrose
Because treating people to lots of free kindness, ra ra spirit, free cheap
food, team building is a great way to retain people so long as the wages you
pay them are enough to get by. If you persue this strategy successfully your
business will be chock full of people who love you and think you all are
family even though you don't pay them much..

People that need more monetarily will of course notice that raises are minimal
and long term growth meh but many people have modest needs or spouses that
make more money and they have no particular reason not to collect the same
money adjusted for inflation and stay comfortable.

