Sorry, Barnes & Noble, I really want to like your store, but you aren't even trying

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

On Tuesday evening I went to Barnes & Noble, looking for some nice photography modeling books. I went there because this is the kind of book you need to hold in your hands and flip through before buying.

I found two neat books:
Photographing Women: 1,000 Poses
Shooting in Sh*tty Light: The Top Ten Worst Photography Lighting Situations and How to Conquer Them

The 1000 poses book is a hefty hardcover, like a coffee table book, so I was a little concerned that it might be pricy.
The back cover said $54.99
The “Sh*tty Light” book was $34.99

Now, I really liked these books, but those prices were a bit much, so I used Red Laser on my phone to scan them in.

Surprises of surprises: 1000 poses was available at Barnes & Noble(!) for $33.41, and the other one was $21.34, also at BN.

…at this point I knew where things were going, but I tried.

I went to customer service and spoke with a nice woman who said “I’m sorry, but we don’t match those prices.”
Me: “But this is B&N.”
Her: “You have to understand, we are two separate parts of the business, the store and B&N dot com”
Me: “But I as a customer see one name, B&N. That is your brand. Why is there such a huge difference in price?”
Her: "You see, we have higher expenses than they do. We have to pay rent, utilities, staffing, blah…blah…blah…blah…

[lots of going on about how the huge price helps her store but not one thing about how it is good for the customer]

Her: “Many people feel it’s a better experience because you can hold the book in your hands and walk out with it today. If you order it online you will have to wait for it in the mail.”
Me: “But this is egregious.”

I like brick and mortar stores. I buy my instruments from my local music store. I buy my photography equipment from Allen’s Camera over the river in PA, because they know their stuff, they spend time with me, and they search the item at B&H Photo online while I watch and then match the price.

But the B&N lady didn’t even try. I said that I would have bought the two books even if they were five or six bucks more each. If the 1000 poses book was $10 more, I would have considered it. If she had whipped out a 25% off coupon I might have considered it.

The 1000 poses book was over $20 higher in the store than at bn.com. That’s about a 60% premium!
What happens to a customer who pays $54.99, goes home, and finds it at bn.com for $34? They feel like a chump. They feel like they have been played for the fool. Is that how you want your customers to feel?

Me: “But I didn’t show you a competitor’s price. If I had shown you Amazon’s price, then you could have laughed at me. I showed you your own company’s price.”

She kept talking in circles explaining how her store and bn.com have as little to do with each other as her store and Amazon. But they want to enjoy the value of the brand name. They want to have their cake and eat it too.

I felt bad for her. How could she defend such a ludicrous policy?

Me: “I’m sorry for bothering you. I know you do not make this policy. Have an excellent evening.”

It pains me to see the brick and mortar store dying, but they aren’t going to get very far with “pay way more here than at our online store to keep us alive”
I did some reading online and found that this is indeed their policy. What a shame.

I ordered the 1000 poses book on Amazon that night. It arrived this morning :). I’ll get the sh*tty light book later.

2

It can be even more bizarre than that. I brought an in-store coupon to a local Barnes & Noble last year. And they said it didn’t apply at that location because they were a university Barnes and Noble and that’s a separate organization from the regular Barnes and Nobles. (But the manager decided to go ahead and accept the coupon anyway.)

3

This makes me wonder how many people know and care about the current controversy with Amazon (apparently) trying to screw over a publisher over prices.

4

I compare prices between Bestbuy.com and Bestbuy the store. Sale items usually match. I’ve seen differences for other items. Typically a few bucks at most.

5

Amazon can give you the lower prices because they have been operating at a loss since they started. Once they’ve sunk all their competitors, you think they’re going to keep prices that low?

6

Online businesses don’t have the overhead of a retail business. A warehouse holds more inventory and costs far less per unit of area to rent or buy. You have fewer employees who don’t have to interact with the public, and so are more productive per unit of time. You can have far fewer locations because everything is shipped.

So, what you’re paying for at Barnes & Noble is: 1) The actual store. Mall locations aren’t cheap, and stand-alone stores are even more expensive. 2) The employees. Demand for service is extremely variable and unpredictable, so they have to hire for peak demand, which means that some of the time there are so many employees that boredom is a factor in retention. (Trust me, I worked retail when I was young. There were times where I seriously wanted nothing more than to have some customers so that I could stop being so fucking bored I wanted to blow my brains out.) 3) “Shrinkage” which is the industry term for theft. Yes, people steal books. People steal anything. 4) The infrastructure that supports the stores; management, shipping, inventory control, etc.

Simple example. Book costs $20 wholesale. Warehouse overhead per item is, say, $3. Retail is easily 2x or 3x that. So, the least the online branch can charge and break even is $23 (let’s ignore shipping) and the retail store has to charge at least $26 to probably $29 depending on location just to make sure they aren’t losing money on the sale.

And yeah, Amazon isn’t going to continue to sell at a loss when they have a lock on the market. They will, however, continue to vigorously fuck authors and publishers whenever they have a chance. This is not a good thing if you want to continue to read competently-written books by people who care about their product.

7

I hear Barnes does not speak to Noble at all these days.

8

There’s a good bit of irony in the web site Barnes & Noble undercutting the prices of their own brick and mortar stores. Which only pushes them to extinction even quicker.

9

How is that even possible to do? Checking it out, it seems they don’t really run at a loss, per se, they just hover around the line, alternating between small gains and small losses. That makes more sense. A company that was always losing money for 20 years would be hard to believe, let alone one whose stock is as high and desirable as Amazon’s.

I’m sorry if I seem nitpicky, but I figure some other people may ask that question.

10

I recall news articles from years ago that reported Amazon’s losses. They had losses several years in a row. The investors knew from the beginning it would be a money loser for awhile. They were betting on big profits later. Take the loss today and get rich 10 years from now. Takes investors with very deep pockets to do that.

I’d be very surprised if Amazon isn’t profitable now. Wouldn’t they qualify for the same wholesale discounts that Walmart enjoys? They have the revenue from Kindle sales. Very little cost in dl a book to someone. They have the movie dl’s similar to NetFlix.

They even borrowed Ebay’s idea and started allowing outside sellers in the Amazon marketplace. Your mom & pop bookstore may be selling books on Amazon.

11

What makes this even more ridiculous is that you can buy a book from bn.com and pick it up at a local store. I checked, and this option is available for both books listed by the OP.

12

Now that right there is inexcusable stupidity.

Clerk: “No I’m sorry I can’t match the price of the website, because that’s a totally different type of store than the actual stores.”
Customer: “What about this option to buy it online and pick it up right here at this store? Are you going to physically hand me this copy of the book?”
Clerk: “Well yes, or one from the back. But it’ll be available right away.”
Customer: “So what if I log into the website right here in front of you on my tablet/phone/laptop, buy the book on the website, and choose to pick it up.”
Clerk: “Errhm… yeah, we’ll give it to you.”
Customer: “But you can’t sell it to me at the online price directly.”
Clerk: “Nope.fnord”

Just ridiculously dumb.

13

If Amazon wanted to be wildly profitable, they would be. The difference between their revenues and their expenses would absolutely support profits. However, instead of paying profits to shareholders, they reinvest that revenue into the business itself, making the business more valuable in the long run (or so they hope). It’s an OK strategy, but I wonder how long Amazon stockholders will be OK with never receiving dividends. I know I’d be likely to sell off my holdings and get into a stock that pays dividends.

14

Barnes and Noble also requires a $25 annual feein order to get their sale prices in their brick and mortar stores. Sort of like the like the “membership” cards most pharmacies and supermarkets give customers, but…$25.

I was a frequent Borders customer, and when they closed I visited B&N for my hands-on book fix. But screw them, I’m not paying them to get a better price. That’s tacky and greedy.

I miss Borders. I spent hundreds of dollars there every year, but B&N hasn’t seen a dime from me. And after reading the OP, they never will.

15

Can you back that up with a cite?
I found Amazon’s gross profits over the past 5 years are between 20.3 and 28.8%.

As Appleciders says, they reinvest, leaving net figures of between a loss of 1.9 and a profit of 4.2%

As for the main question, I live in an English town. We have two small bookshops, each with a limited selection of books.
I buy from Amazon because:

  • the prices are cheaper
  • there is a massive range of books
  • there are helpful reviews and suggestions (which the poor shop assistant cannot provide)
  • I can do it all online
16

Heh. I thought this was a zombie thread and that B&N went out of business a while back. Turns out that was Borders. But hey.

17

Amazon’s losses in the early years was widely reported. Here’s a 1999 article. I can remember reading articles like this almost annually back then. Nobody knew if Amazon would suddenly go under or not. They didn’t get it turned around until maybe 2003?? Not sure.

Bezos had a clear vision back in 1999. He’s pretty much accomplished his goals and more. Except didn’t Amazon auctions close? :smiley:

18

Jeff Lichtman and drewtwo99, it turns out that things are crazier than that. If you order a $10 book online and have it delivered to your local store, you may find that they charge the $20 cover price of the book.

Consumerist: Barnes & Noble’s Online Price Match Policy Still Confuses Customers, Drives Them Away
Consumerist: Is Barnes & Noble Hurting Its Stores By Not Price-Matching Its Own Website?

Those two stories tell of people who found out that even if you buy online and choose “pick up at my local store” you will then be charged the store price.
But if you then have the store ship the books to you, for free, you get bn.com prices.

And the employees know this is bogus: “Tim pointed out this inefficiency to the CSR, who repeated the cashier’s statement that ‘everyone complains about this.’”
What a crazy setup. The fact that they will ship to your home using bn.com from the store says “We are one!”. The fact that they won’t sell it to you for the same price says “We don’t know those guys.”

Acsenray, I find it hard to believe that Amazon has been operating at a loss since 1994. Leaper, different issue. I agree that Amazon is engaged in unpleasantness as well, but this rant is about BN.

Sleel, your post is the essence of what BN hopes I would understand and have sympathy to. It is their problem, not mine.
BN is placing their two units in competition with each other, and that means I get to choose. Guess which one I choose. The fact that their business model gives me the feel that they are gaming their customers makes me look to any competitor without B&N in their name. To be fair, any large business will have complex policies and do everything they can do to gain a competitive edge (cf. jumping through hoops for mail-in rebates that take three months to be paid–I understand why they do it, but that doesn’t make it right), but today’s rant is about BN.

Why can’t they even try? As I said before, I go to Allen’s Camera for all of my photo needs because I like the guys, I can browse through the shop, and they always match legitimate online competition.
They have an online store, and their online store and b&m store are one and the same. That’s the way to do it. (nitpickers will point out all the differences between the businesses - size, products, location, but … Allen does it right).

After reading the Consumerist articles, I imagine that my interaction with the woman was probably a daily experience for her, and perhaps that’s why she acted the way she did.
She was very polite and friendly, but I felt like she was smiling while thinking “How could you possibly be so silly as to imagine we would match our online prices? Isn’t it obvious why we can’t do that?”
If she had said “I understand, and sometimes it is difficult to explain such a large difference. Let me see what I can do.” I would have felt that she at least had empathy.

Let me put it differently. Last year I had to call multiple layers of Hilton’s customer relations department to resolve a clerical error on their part. I was met with such indifference that I made it a point to speak with a supervisor and tell them how their CSRs just didn’t care and didn’t reflect the polish of the brand. The supervisor calmly said something like “Sir, I hear you saying that you feel that X, Y, and Z were handled incorrectly, and I’m sorry that you feel that way.” In other words, he didn’t empathize and he was almost mocking me.

The BN lady and the Hilton guy had the same attitude: friendly indifference tinged with mockery.

A little bit of empathy and a reasonable attempt to remedy the situation would have made all the difference in both situations.

19

Hoo boy. You realize that they’re trained to respond like that? Repeat the customer’s concern and apologize. The fact that you think a perfectly standard customer service practice is “mockery” makes me question the rest of your post.

I don’t see what’s so outrageous. If you want to mail order a book from Amazon or BN.com it costs a lower price. If you want to handle, preview, and walk out the door with a book, you pay brick and mortar prices. Would you have been happier if BN.com had the same high price as the store? No, you would have just bought it from Amazon.

20

Not everyone does this.

I wanted a saw from Sears. i checked the website, and that saw was on sale. I went down to the store, but the in-store price was more. I asked a clerk, we looked it up on-line (using Sears’ own terminal) and the clerk sold it to me for the web price.