The Beginning of the End for B&N?

Interesting article I stumbled on today I thought I'd share:

Barnes & Noble is killing itself

It's not just B&N, though - UK supermarkets are doing the same thing*.

In effect, it's retailers struggling to survive a digital world where everyone orders online, so are left trying to kill costs as a way to save the business, instead of investing in digital technologies.

The sad thing is that the CEO's will no doubt get ta big bonus for "saving costs", even though their business strategies are ridiculously stupid and short-term.


* I work at Sainsburys, and all Team Leaders - the people the company hand-picked and promoted for being the most dedicated, passionate, and experienced staff - will be got rid of in June. However, apparently Tesco and Morrison's already did that (and Morrison's still hasn't properly developed online shopping, except for a minority of people in the south of England).

Brian G Turner said:

It's not just B&N, though - UK supermarkets are doing the same thing*.

In effect, it's retailers struggling to survive a digital world where everyone orders online, so are left trying to kill costs as a way to save the business, instead of investing in digital technologies.

The sad thing is that the CEO's will no doubt get ta big bonus for "saving costs", even though their business strategies are ridiculously stupid and short-term.


* I work at Sainsburys, and all Team Leaders - the people the company hand-picked and promoted for being the most dedicated, passionate, and experienced staff - will be got rid of in June. However, apparently Tesco and Morrison's already did that (and Morrison's still hasn't properly developed online shopping, except for a minority of people in the south of England).

Click to expand...

I know, it's pretty interesting. But specialty book stores seem to making it out okay (as in small eclectic shops that are community based) so it'll be interesting to see how things change. Or are Amazon going to just buy all these brick and mortar and convert them? A friend of mine goes to the experimental store in Silicon Valley. I think I'll take a trip out and check it out some time.

Brian G Turner said:

It's not just B&N, though - UK supermarkets are doing the same thing*.

In effect, it's retailers struggling to survive a digital world where everyone orders online, so are left trying to kill costs as a way to save the business, instead of investing in digital technologies.

The sad thing is that the CEO's will no doubt get ta big bonus for "saving costs", even though their business strategies are ridiculously stupid and short-term.


* I work at Sainsburys, and all Team Leaders - the people the company hand-picked and promoted for being the most dedicated, passionate, and experienced staff - will be got rid of in June. However, apparently Tesco and Morrison's already did that (and Morrison's still hasn't properly developed online shopping, except for a minority of people in the south of England).

Click to expand...

It’s not just in retail, ten years ago I and other people with more than a number of years service were offered redundancy from the tax office. We were replaced with call centre staff who started on the bottom of the pay scale. I dread to think how many years worth of tax knowledge and experience were jettisoned in an attempt to save money, and to be seen to cutting staff numbers. I haven’t forgotten hearing the cheers from the Labour benches when it was announced in parliament by a Labour minister that Revenue Staff numbers were to be cut by 10,000. MP’s cheering people being made unemployed, makes you sick. So getting rid of long term staff to cut costs isn’t new, and as has been shown by the Revenue it works so well. /SARCASM

Brian G Turner said:

In effect, it's retailers struggling to survive a digital world where everyone orders online, so are left trying to kill costs as a way to save the business, instead of investing in digital technologies.

Click to expand...

B&N's fundamental problem is that they refused to push the Nook because it would cut into their brick-and-mortar business. It could have been a legitimate competitor to the Kindle, at least in America: it's not so long ago that I was selling more books on B&N than Amazon, but in the last couple of years it's sunk to practically zero, because readers don't want to be tied to a store that may disappear at any time.

The sad thing is that the CEO's will no doubt get ta big bonus for "saving costs", even though their business strategies are ridiculously stupid and short-term.

Click to expand...

I am ever more convinced that the MBA was a Soviet plot to destroy the West.

EJDeBrun said:

Or are Amazon going to just buy all these brick and mortar and convert them?

Click to expand...

As I understand it, Amazon makes most of its money from 'The Cloud', which is rapidly becoming a commodity business. So they may put brick-and-mortar stores out of business just in time to collapse themselves when the profit all disappears from the 'The Cloud' market.

Brick and mortar retailers are crumpling under the online onslaught right across all segments, not just books. I find it hard to believe the management of hundreds of companies in dozens of countries are all incompetent.

This is just another way that technology is dramatically transforming society. And Amazon has such built such unassailable advantages - in economies of scale, in pricing, in delivery, and most importantly in the enormous amount of consumer data it can exploit to hone its operations - that it isn't even a fair fight. High end specialty retailers, along with some food and beverage outlets, will survive a while longer. But in the not-too-distant future, 90 per cent of everything we buy will be delivered by drone in Amazon boxes.

MWagner said:

But in the not-too-distant future, 90 per cent of everything we buy will be delivered by drone in Amazon boxes.

Click to expand...

The drone part I doubt, not the rest of it. Especially out here in the boondocks where almost every retailer outside of Mom and Pop stores is an hour drive away.

Edward M. Grant said:

B&N's fundamental problem is that they refused to push the Nook because it would cut into their brick-and-mortar business. It could have been a legitimate competitor to the Kindle, at least in America: it's not so long ago that I was selling more books on B&N than Amazon, but in the last couple of years it's sunk to practically zero, because readers don't want to be tied to a store that may disappear at any time.

Click to expand...

So short sighted. The Nook was a much better design than the Kindle. People who love reading were clearly involved in the development, at least in the early models. And their read in store system was such a lost opportunity. They could have licensed that to, say, Starbucks (which are already in pretty much every BN store) and essentially turned every Starbucks on the planet into a B&N kiosk. That kind of integration bringing digital content to a physical space should have been a killer feature.

The other aspect is that the overheads on highstreet shops keeps going up. Rental, rates, tax etc.... They all keep going up and up so a lot of retailers are giving up because the physical store cannot even survive on a modest footfall of customers; and when you manage to get an online business going it tends to start to look rather daft having a store when the online is making up the profits.

Amazon still has some odd gaps in its market; a lot of hobby and niche product lines are still not there; however what isn't there is often running an ebay store instead.

Thing its even within niche groups there's only really room for a handful of major online retailers for any one interest. Once you've cornered the market with an online store and you've at least got national distribution then you don't leave room for others to push in unless they can seriously undercut your prices. Amazon is the extreme example of this, being able to serve the nation where in the past multitudes of shops would.


Thing is you can even see a change in store staff as well; many are short term staff who have little actual interest in learning their trade or product lines. I've seen, polite but clearly not sales driven, staff in many stores who really don't seem to want to serve the customer. They are polite, but they sort of drift around doing things but dont' really want to engage with the public and help drive sales - if anything they can only just read off the product description on the back of the box.
To me this also means that many retailers are not fostering good customer relations like they once did; they don't make the customer feel valued and as such the customer loses loyalty to the store

It's getting off-topic, but retail is really on the way out except in very specialized cases. One of the main benefits of physical, local stores is that you can see what you're buying before you buy it, but VR is going to make that irrelevant. Then local manufacturing is going to kill most of what survives.

When I'm living on an asteroid in fifty years, I'm not going to be logging into Amazon to order stuff shipped a billion miles to me, or moon-walking across the surface to the crater-corner store. I'm going to be designing it in VR and making it with my super-advanced 3D printer.

Why buy kids "first books" when you can buy them tablets with wi-fi and point them at Project Gutenberg?

In fact we should already have a curated selection from Gutenberg, there is a lot of junk in there.

The Prince by Machiavelli just got added.

I will admit to a certain nostalgia for bookstores considering the hundreds of hours I must have spent in them but a tablet can hold more books than I ever bought and do text-to-speech so I can walk down the street listening to a book.

We just can't intelligently manage change. Capitalism is obsolete. LOL

Don't look at me.

I used to own a Nook - until they decided that they didn't need to support their UK customers any more.

Edward M. Grant said:

It's getting off-topic, but retail is really on the way out except in very specialized cases. One of the main benefits of physical, local stores is that you can see what you're buying before you buy it, but VR is going to make that irrelevant. Then local manufacturing is going to kill most of what survives.

Click to expand...

You mean you can tell if the grapes of melons are soft in VR. I always open the carton to see if any of the eggs are broken.

I buy many things online - but never perishables with a short(ish) shelf life.

Food is increasingly going to come out of a vat. Maybe not melons, but you won't buy steaks in a couple of decades, you'll just print one in the kitchen.

But, yeah, food stores are likely to be some of the last ones standing.

I think we are a very long way from the home 3D printer future. 3D prints are neat devices but the materials still come at a high cost to put into them; higher still if you want it to print anything (its very far from the replicators of star trek). I can see them being a neat home device for geeks, but overall I can't see them being used to "print home products" for a very long time - if ever really since you'd still have to go out and buy the raw materials to feed into it (and the nature of 3D printers has some limits on what shapes they can produce easily).

Edward M. Grant said:

Maybe not melons, but you won't buy steaks in a couple of decades, you'll just print one in the kitchen.

Click to expand...

A couple of decades? Very dubious!!

Overread said:

I think we are a very long way from the home 3D printer future.

Click to expand...

Hopefully by the time we're living on asteroids, we'll have solved the material problem. : )

Parson said:

A couple of decades? Very dubious!!

Click to expand...

Also you probably won't print them. Maybe have some kind of culture kit, where you put your steak starter in a solution and let it grow in a machine that monitors the temperature and keeps out contamination. Like a bread maker, but for steak. A steak maker.