Being a studly single man with a busy social calendar, I was naturally in Barnes & Noble last night sipping on my Starbucks, sitting in one of in the big comfy chairs, and treating it more or less like a library. An attractive young girl about my daughter’s age, and as cute as a button, passed by with a T shirt that read “I’m a SMART blonde”. It was an amusing evening.
After about an hour of sipping and reading I put the books back and went on my way. I don’t feel too guilty because my daughter (using a credit card I gave her) easily makes up for it with her B&N music purchases, but the fact remains that while I occasionally purchase a magazine, I rarely purchase books there. My Amazon credit card gives me Amazon dollars that I use on their site when I want to make book purchases.
Is it so wrong to sit comfortably and peruse the latest titles all the price of a cup of coffee? Am I abusing their hospitality or is this just part of the grand B&N plan? Am I playing them … or am I getting played somehow?
I used to work at B&N when I was just a young thing. People came in with backpacks full of materials and used our books while they were studying. They lounged in chairs, sometimes for hours, reading in peace. They brought stacks of magazines back to tables to read.
We were taught never to bother any of these people except to occasionally ask if they needed help finding anything. We, as employees, didn’t care about the readers, as long as they didn’t make a mess, and put the books back when they were finished.
I think it’s part of their business plan. They hope you’ll start reading a book and be so enthralled you’ll have to buy it. They probably do lose some sales on papers and magazines, but they get repeat customers who will come to them when they do need to buy something.
Not at all! For every person that treats B&N like a library w/ a cafe (I’m one of them!) and never buys anything, there are 10 that DO end up buying something. As long as they get people coming in, B&N wins, overall. Plus they also make $ off of the overprices coffee, pastries and snacks.
I vote bad. Not horrible, especially since you buy coffee while you are there, but not good.
The primary reason I say this is because you buy your books from Amazon. If you never bought books, it would be less bad.
Any time you take use customer service heavy retailers for browsing but do your purchasing at other stores (or online) you are taking advantage. If there is a significant price differential between where you browse and where you buy, it is probably caused by customer service/merchandise damaged by browsing/brick and mortor store. If you use the services of the more expensive place but spend your money at the cheaper place- watch out- over time the cheaper place may be the only place available, and they still won’t provide the service you used to get at the more expensive place.
That said as a principle- I’m not sure how much that model really applies to shopping at Barnes & Noble versus Amazon and I’ve been guilty of reading more than the first chapter or two of a book I didn’t plan to buy at a bookstore more than once.
I’d just like to say that if you read a whole book and don’t buy it, the author doesn’t get paid for your entertainment. B&N may be okay with it, and you may be okay with it, but the people that write the books? Not so okay with it.
I once interviewed for a management position with B&N. My background was very fast paced retail where we drove sales through interacting with customers and suggestive selling. I had a lot experience training and devloping employees and motivating them to serve the customer.
B&N could not have cared less. Like Lissa said, their employees are taught to specifically “not” interact with patrons unless asked, and loitering patrons were regulars.
They were less interested in someone with a management/business background and preferred more a retired librarian, literature major, or reclusive book lover.
While their business model still baffles me (don’t really know how you can support that big of a store when you only ring up 15 sales in an hour), it must work somehow since they have these stores everywhere.
You shouldn’t feel bad. As others have said, your behavior is part of their business plan. Between music sales, and their share of the Starbuck’s profits they seem to manage.
Nothing wrong with what you’re doing, in my opinion. As others have said, B&N encourages this type of thing because they believe that it benefits their bottom line in the long run.
So, treating it like a library is fine, IMO. What is not fine is treating it like your living room. I’ve been to some of these stores where three or four young people (wow, i’m really starting to sound old) will plonk themselves down on the carpet with a bunch of books and have a little party. The problem is that they are often sitting right in front of the shelf that i want to look at. Of course, i have no qualms about asking them—sometimes not especially politely—to get out of my way, but it’s pretty annoying.
I vote bad, not for the “freeloading” aspect (if this is freeloading so is going to the library), but because you’re touching things that other people might want to buy. You’re bending the spines and destroying the pristine nature of the book. If you’re reading paperbacks, it’s even worse, because they never look the same after they’ve been read.
I heard from a B&N worker that workers are allowed to take home new hardcovers for up to two weeks and as long as they’re not damaged they put them back on the shelves. It’s stuff like this that’s made me switch to buying online (or using the library, because at least I KNOW those books are germy and might have been involved in disgusting activities). If I want to buy a new book, then I want to buy a NEW book, not one that’s been pawed over with coffee-stained fingers.
So again, if you want to treat B&N like a library, why not go to the library? They have the same magazines, a better book selection, and some of them even sell coffee (mine does).
I hope your fingers are clean. Once I saw a man browsing through a book at B&N. The book looked intriguing (it was a biography of T. S. Eliot, in whom I am interested). After this guy put the book back on the shelf, I picked it up. His smeary, greasy fingerprints were all through it. It looked as if he hadn’t washed his hands after having eaten pizza or something else that had a lot of oily residue. Not very many people want to buy a new book that looks like a used book.
But if i’m in a B&N looking to buy a book, i will not buy one that has grubby fingerprints on it, or one that has a broken spine or dogeared pages. I always check the books closely before i take them to the counter, and if there’s something wrong with them i don’t buy them.
This probably loses B&N a bunch of sales, but they have obviously factored that into their business model.
Allowing this is part of B&N’s buisness model. Barnes and Nobel are a buisness and they allow it upon their property so it is totally fine. If anyone has a problem with it (in that it might cause damage to books or that it is unfair to authors) their quarrel is with Barnes and Nobel and in no way with the people doing whar B&N allow them to do.
Do authors get paid for books B&N buys but don’t sell, or do they only receive a percentage of the profit for books that get sold? At libraries, it’s understood that the library is the buyer of the book, and the author gets a cut of that, so reading the book in the library is no different from reading it at home, as far as the author is concerned. If B&N orders a ton of books, and the author gets a full cut of that whether they sell or not, then I’ll need to emend my statement slightly…
But, a single copy sold to a library will be read by hundreds of people. A copy bought by an individual will be read by only a handful. Since the author is paid by the number of copies sold, and not by the people who read a copy, the library results in reduced income for the author.
Besides which, as others have said, Barnes and Nobles policy is to not only allow, but encourage reading without buying. If somebody is depriving authors of money, it’s Barnes and Noble.
That logic doesn’t work. Just because Barnes and Noble allows it, doesn’t mean we can’t bitch about the moron who spent three hours reading the last copy of some esoteric book we wanted, left greasy fingerprints all over the pages, and then didn’t buy it.
So, it’s okay for people to go into CD stores and listen to music on headphones all day and never buy any CD’s? The recording companies are okay with that?
