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.
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.
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.
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?
Indeed. I live in an area (Seattle) that has multiple excellent local bookstores (specifically Third Place Books and Elliott Bay). What sets them apart is they have a good selection of books, they have an environment that is conducive to hanging out and reading (Third Place especially), they have lots of recommendations from staff and local book clubs, and they have regular events like book signings and author Q&As, etc. I just checked the closest B&N and they have one non-kids author event between now and the end of March, in contrast the local Third Place has 15, Elliott Bay has even more. Stepping into a B&N it just feels like a generic, lifeless experience, there is basically nothing to recommend it over simply buying a book online. But there's still money and life in selling books at retail, you just have to do it well.
(And yes, for the record Powells is a world class bookstore, every time I visit I always enjoy it and it's always packed.)
> 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.
I made the effort to visit a B&N earlier this month because I was looking for good translations of texts from Ancient Greece (Homer, Herodotus). I wanted the ability to compare different books to determine what I would actually enjoy reading, as opposed to trusting online reviews. There were two options for each. Herodotus sort of makes sense, but Homer ought to have several translations. It’s considered a masterpiece, after all.
This was probably the final visit to a chain bookstore for me. I will still pop into mom and pop shops on occasion just to browse, but I no longer believe that I can find the things I want in a megastore.
Don't believe it's wrong to say you are a very niche customer. Their selection of Hemingway isn't much better, but that's because they've got limited floor space.
Not sure how they could solve your specific issue unless they had much bigger locations.
Is it so unrealistic? When I wanted a copy of _Beowulf_ in 2003 or so, what I did was I wandered into my local Borders and found it, and compared 5 or 6 different books; I ultimately settled on Heaney's translation which I liked the bits I read the most of, and then picked the volume with the most additional historical essays providing context. And _Beowulf_ is surely less read than Homer.
The problem with bookstores is your inventory only ever increases. They probably made some cost calculation that carrying multiple translations of Homer translated to a few more sales a year. It's a hard business. I've wandered in there and found esoteric history, the kind that I was surprised they even carried. You add Homer #2, something like that gets axed.
Maybe they could stop selling the kind of books that are really big for a year and then nobody ever reads again, but it can't be easy.
That was 15 years ago, though -- a veritable millennium in the internet age. Although Amazon was around, a lot of people still accessed the internet over a cable modem (or even dial-up!) or some other technology which didn't provide ubiquitous internet access. Most people surfed the internet from their desktop, as opposed to using their phones from a wide variety of places from the couch to the toilet.
(a) higher sales volume and higher profitibality meant that they could afford some loss leaders.
(B) online not being as popular meant they were still a market for niches. Today niche interests are almost all entirely online
(C) The one big thing people are ignoring is that with the abundance of alternate media, books in general are almost certainly being read less. It's not just sales but actual consumptions of books that have likely dropped. The number of readers of certain niches has almost certainly reduced.
>> Rather it's being driven by poor business decisions
Agreed. It's that plus a healthy dose of panic and a refusal to accept reality - that contraction of revenue is necessary to stay alive - that causes these companies to make idiotic Hail Mary decisions that never pan out.
That, or, as the author makes clear at the end, the execs do not care about saving the company and just want to make as much as they can for themselves before it all falls apart.
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.