
Barnes and Noble Ousts Its CEO After Less Than a Year on the Job - decampj4
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-16/barnes-noble-ousts-ceo-boire-postpones-riggio-s-retirement
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mindcrime
I'd almost like to have this job. I'm a huge Barnes & Noble fan, as I have
been shopping with them for 25 or more years now. I want to see B&N survive
and thrive, but I continue to be perplexed by some of their efforts.

Dedicating more shelf space to games, toys and educational stuff is actually,
IMO, a good part idea to a point. But I believe they have to A. focus on being
a book store first and foremost, which means their have to be plenty of
interesting books on the shelves for people to buy, and B. do a better job of
integrating those initiatives to cross-sell across domains. And HUGELY
important, they need to come up with a better "clicks and mortar" strategy to
integrate their web presence with their physical stores. And bn.com simply
needs to deliver a better experience in general, across the board.

From talking to friends who work there, it sounds like local store manager are
given fairly little autonomy in terms of deciding what items to shelve as
well. I think this is a mistake as the demographics around different stores is
going to vary and the inventory should vary correspondingly. Giving the local
managers (who _should_ be more in touch with the local community) some
flexibility should help. That and, of course, using analytics and BI / "big
data" techniques to help map inventory to store locations.

I'm also liking that they've started selling "maker" themed items.. rPi's,
Arduinos, drones, etc. But right now that stuff is just kinda sitting there.
They should find more ways to tie things together by collaborating with local
makerspaces and schools to have "math and science night" or little mini maker
faire type events. They already do _some_ of this, but I think they could do a
better job of both promoting the Maker movement and selling more merchandise
at the same time. Of course they also need to be _somewhat_ price competitive
and right now I think a lot of their maker stuff is running a bit on the
expensive side.

Anyway... I guess I've ranted enough. And I've spent way more time than is
healthy thinking about what I'd do if I were CEO of B&N. :-)

