Can anyone comment on the accuracy of the deductions and claims of this post? It’s just one person, so I’m not taking it all as gospel yet, but it does make me think.
Is the Amazon empire coming soon, thanks to B&N’s execs caring more about raiding the company for all the money they can get rather than the business? What will happen to books and publishing then? Maybe an AT&T type action in the next 20 years?
The problem is it’s a “forest” eye view. The poster sees lots of inefficiency and the executives getting rich as usual. But the basic business - buying books, then selling those same books - may not be all that strong. B&N does offer an ‘experience’, you can read the books in the story, enjoy starbucks, etc. And it shows various get-togethers and events held in the store. Doesn’t mean those events pay the bills. B&N stores are also very massive in size and cost, yet each square foot is selling a book that only makes a few dollars profit for the store.
Contrast this with Amazon. Amazon doesn’t pay any of these expenses, (no massive air conditioned stores, they are their own warehouses, no starbucks, no customers touching the merchandise before sale) and has an arguably better way to find a good book through their Amazon reviews. Amazon reviews benefit from the “network effect” : other online stores have online reviews, but not as many people shop there, so the Amazon version of the review is more likely to be honest and accurate, because thousands more reviews are posted.
The poster theorizes that Amazon sells at a loss, but doesn’t provide any evidence for this. Most likely Amazon *doesn’t *sell at a loss, just a very slim profit margin. Basically they buy a book and shelve it, and then when it’s sold a robot brings the shelf to a worker, who boxes it, and that’s the extent of Amazon’s costs for the sale.
Reason Amazon’s profit margins are slim is all the fixed costs - the massive infrastructure and R&D staff who built the mechanism to make this all work. But their marginal cost per sale is very low, and I suspect on each individual book they sell they are at least breaking even.
So B&N’s ultimate doom seems inevitable. And the executives know this and seem to be taking the opportunity to steal a bit of silverware before the ship actually sinks.
I think the author acknowledges your point more than you think; (s)he does say in a follow up that no one with actual business sense would be dumb enough to take over the company now. As I think about it, I think the “unnecessary” part may be less about turning the company around completely and more about shoving the dying patient off a cliff to get the insurance money a week faster.
Considering the fact that small independent bookstores are in the middle of a resurgence, I doubt Amazon really killed B&N.
Let’s face it, Amazon is piss-poor place to browse for books. It’s slow, inefficient and limits the information you can see.
Amazon reviews are joke. At best, they confirm what other review sites and word of mouth are saying. At worst, they are written by people who never even read the book.
If you know what book you want, it’s great. If you are just looking for something new to read, you can browse dozens of titles in a bookstore in the time you can look at five in Amazon.
And the Starbucks in B&N was a profit center.
OTOH, browsing books at B&N doesn’t help you find books if they don 't have any kind of selection. I go there looking for something new in a specific subject, say, drag racing, and they don’t have anything. I look on Amazon, and they have hundreds. I find no trouble in browsing Amazon.
Sure the reviews aren’t helpful. These days, that’s true of everything.
Plus B&Ns prices on DVDs are at least twice the going rate anywhere else, let alone Amazon.
I like to support brick and mortar stores. I give B&N a chance. but if they don’t have anything I want, what am I supposed to do? Buy something I don’t want just to keep them open?
Same here. I generally find just roaming bookstores to be an inefficient way of browsing anyways. If you want to waste some time, it’s fine, but if you are looking for something to read? Much rather read some book reviews and then search for those books on Amazon.
It is arguably wise for a retail store to make specific items a little bit hard to find. That way a customer who has a certain purchase in mind is forced to browse at least a bit before finding what they came for. B&N took this strategy way too far. I always enjoyed going in there for a cup of coffee and a browse. But if I knew what I wanted and needed to get on with other errands it was the most frustrating place on Earth. As the holidays approached walking through the door felt more and more like volunteering for a hostage situation.
Amazon, ftw. If I want to browse through books I’ll go to the library.
But yes, dying stores are a smorgasbord for the exec.s. Vultures abound in capitalism;are you seriously surprised by this?
I’ll point out that it was the rise of Barnes & Noble, Borders, and other book chains that undermined independent booksellers with their large shelf inventory, loyalty plan benefits, locations in malls near other common shopping, frequent events, and in-store coffee shops. Amazon has actually benefitted small bookstores by giving them access to a national customer base (especially used textbook and specialty stores) with their online commerce technology, while the major book chains were stuck with larger overhead and inventory requiring selling at list price on books that Amazon.com and third-party sellers with less overhead could offer substantial discounts.
Amazon is actually a great place to look for books on a particular topic, especially if you are looking for something on a niche topic or a less-than-bestselling author. Even other bookstores often end up using Amazon.com as a reference to look for information on titles. The reviews are uneven and not vetted so you can’t really take rankings at face value (and is subject to bias because most people who write a review tend to one extreme or another) but actually reasing through reviews can provide insight, and most current entries have a table of contents and select portions of material to puruse. I personally like the aesthetics of being able to physically handle a book, but it is easier to compare a bunch of books on Amazon.com, and even if a book os out of stock the entry is still available.
Stranger
The odd part is that Amazon bought a huge number of brick and mortar stores with their purchase of Whole Foods. I’ve been saying for a while they should buy Barnes and Nobel. They could use them as showrooms for all their consumer electronics like Alexa and the Firestick, they could service them with their warehouses doing same day pickup, serve as a returns location. Have browsing for all the most popular titles, same day pickup for the less popular ones or for most popular items.
Either that, or like one would say to a cat “Kill it already, stop playing with it!”
I hope they don’t close, because if they do the only bookstore within half an hour of my house will be, shudder, Books-A-Million.
In buying Whole Foods, Amazon isn’t just buying a bunch of storefronts or even a brand; they’re buying a perishable goods supply and distribution network which supports their nascent Amazon Fresh delivery system. Buying Whole Foods makes a lot of sense from the standpoint of logistics. Buying B&N with their high overhead and large inventory of nonperishable goods (many of which will end up as unsold waste) makes no sense, especially as the majority of Amazon.com sales are not books and bookstore items.
Stranger
There’s one company is getting into the brick and mortar bookstore business. 
It’s my understanding that B&N isn’t really in the business of selling books at all any more; that they make their money from the coffee shop and that the books are just a way of getting people into the door to consume profitable coffee and baked goods.
Yeah – we’ve got an Amazon Books down the street from us. I’ve been in there
I hate it.
They have a limited number of books and no bargain areas. You get the latest bestsellers and a smattering of Classics. Give me a Barnes and Noble any day over this – there’s much more variety in your browsing, more opportunities to find the unexpected and unusual.
I will grant that Amazon does give you access to unusual and rare things and to an online used book market, but most of this is only really useful if you know about the books in the first place. I found my copy of Sir Gerald Hargreaves play Atalanta through Amazon, after years of looking, but only because I knew it existing. It’s extremely unlikely that I’d have bumped into it in some random bookstore or used bookstore.
As for that “resurgence” in independent bookstores, I’m not seeing it. I live near Boston – “The Athens of America”. If there’s anyplace that ought to have bookstores, and where new ones should be springing up, it’s here. They’re not. This city and the surrounding ones used to have untold riches of bookstores. Now they’re all gone, devastated in the Great Bookstore Die-Off. The remaining ones were all established before the die-off. Aside from college bookstores, many of which only sell relevant textbooks, the only bookstores in the city are the Barnes and Noble in the Prudential Center (one of the very few I know of anywhere that’s inside a mall), Trident Bookseller/Café on Newbury Street, and a couple of used bookstores of long standing downtown (Brattle Books and Commonwealth have been around forever, and Bromer Books). This in a city that used to have one every few blocks. There was one used bookstore that tried to make a go of it down near Roxbury, but they died. The New England Mobile Book Fair (a misnomer – “mobile” it’s not) has had to close down its monumental warehouse-like building because it can’t afford it anymore, and has moved into a very seriously reduced storefront in a mall a few blocks away. I don’t know how long it’ll be able to survive there.
There are a few good independent bookstores in the Valley of the Sun. In addition, as with our overabundance of used “record” stores, we have several great used book stores. These also buy, sell and trade.
Well, I’ve been seeing the few independents and used book stores (often one and the same – a lot of indies seem to be selling a mix of new and used) springing up only to die off, or moving, then dying. There used to be two stores in Amesbury – a new and a used. They’re both gone. Concord MA is down to one bookstore from the many it had, and that one’s been around. Portsmouth NH’s many many used bookstores all died off. Now there are three stores, amazingly – but two are used-only and the third is used plus new. Salem MA’s many used bookstores were shut down during the 90s. New ones – The Tangled Web and Cornerstone Books struggled to start up, ran for a few years, then died. The weird “piles o’books” Derby Sqyuare bookstore finally died. New owners camne in, cleaned out the often rotting stacks of books, and turned it into Wicked Good Books, which seems to be surviving with its mix of new and used. the Jane Austen/Poe book and gift store down the street started up, then died. There are two comic book stores (!) but the only other bookstore not part of a Museum in Salem isn’t really a bookstore - it’s an antique store that also has antique books. There’s probably a profound symbolic statement in that.
[QUOTE=RealityChuck;20790440
Let’s face it, Amazon is piss-poor place to browse for books. It’s slow, inefficient and limits the information you can see.
Amazon reviews are joke. At best, they confirm what other review sites and word of mouth are saying. At worst, they are written by people who never even read the book.
If you know what book you want, it’s great. If you are just looking for something new to read, you can browse dozens of titles in a bookstore in the time you can look at five in Amazon.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t find this to be true at all. Two areas of interest to me are silent movies and movie history. B&N is easy to browse for this topic because it takes less than a minute to go “nope, nope, nope, nope”. They don’t carry it. They’ve got about 7 books on embroidery, 4 of which I read or already own. Amazon has dozens of books on the topic. Takes longer to find because there’s more of them to go through.
I find the reviews at Amazon to be quite helpful. I always start with the 1 star reviews. If they complain that the language is bad and they don’t like anyone in the story, I know that this might be a good choice for me because that’s what 1 star reviewers say about Carl Haissen and Tim Dorsey books. I look for one star reviews that have good grammar and make sense. I don’t want to read books about talking animals or YA fiction or any kind of sci fi. I don’t want to be preached at and I don’t like the fusion of mysteries and cookbooks. I can weed that crap out in a hurry with Amazon reviews.
Let’s face it, Netflix is a poor place to browse for movies. It’s slow on my ancient smart TV, inefficient, and limits the information you can see.
Netflix reviews are joke. At best, they confirm what other review sites and word of mouth are saying. At worst, they are written by people who never even watched the entire movie.
If you know what movie you want, it’s great. If you are just looking for something new to watch, you can browse dozens of titles at Blockbuster Video in the time you can look at five on Netflix.
And the popcorn at Blockbuster was a profit center.
(tongue in cheek, just saying, for most people the advantages of the new way are so much better than the old way that the old way is unsustainable. You might have a point in that physical bookstores have some advantages, but in general Amazon beats them all for most people. I can search parameters for genre and popularity and find titles that suit my interest far faster than in the store. There’s no human standing around to give advice, but that person had to be paid, and thus it makes Amazon/Netflix much cheaper.)
Those are essentially vanity stores in upscale shopping locales that just serve to reinforce the brand image in the public mind (as if that is necessary), and like B&N, probably make the bulk of their revenue on foodstuff and novelty items rather than books. It’s not a chain of hundreds of stores in every shopping mall and plaza, and Amazon certainly isn’t reliant on them as a significant part of their revenue stream. Even if they are a complete loser, the operating costs is a rounding error on Bezos’ accounting ledger, and the ability to have a physical location to host ‘events’ like book signings that bring awareness and push sales is justification enough.
Stranger
The thing is, the way I used to browse for books is that I used to flip through pages to see their insides. I’d see if any paragraphs or diagrams or pictures caught my eye. It’s much harder to to that online.
Also, in a bookstore you can discover a book that you had never heard about, that you had no idea existed, because you see it displayed. It’s hard to find a book on Amazon that isn’t related to something you’re searching for.