The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

Because it takes more than just an app. Plus, that app isn't that easy.

They’ve been chasing cost reduction for many years, reducing investment in total and in that specific case I’d bet they have considerable worries about shoplifting.

The app would likely be more expensive to develop and maintain than hiring a few seasonal part-timers per store (2000 people at, let's face it, minimum wage for a month is about $4M that immediately converts to sales numbers just by being conscious enough to operate a register - that's cheaper than ~10 software devs in America (at least two of which are specialists - iOS/Android devs), a manager, an office, their equipment and their benefits packages that takes a year to 18-months to produce anything at all). Maybe outsourcing it would be cheaper... but even then, your conversion rate is going to be lower than just hiring a damned cashier.

And apparently B&N was against even spending for that, even during heavy sales periods. If I were a shareholder before I wouldn't be after reading this news - I'd be going and buying Amazon stock. And a lot of this explains why Amazon has been crushing Wal-Mart - people are just done with going to stores and waiting in lines, looking around at empty cashier stations in frustration when they can point, click, and have something on their doorstep the next day with less effort.

Apple has a sky high budget for shoplifting. They have no issue with somebody walking out with an iPhone case because it implies they bought an iPhone.

Barnes and Noble would be decimated by that.

Walmart and Sam's Club have exactly that with their Pay & Go app.

You scan the UPCs on things as you put them in your cart. When you're done, you select pay and it displays a barcode on your screen. The checker at the door has a handheld device that they scan the barcode with, it gives them an item count, and you're on your way.

I've only ever used it at Sam's where there's always a door checker. I've heard it can be more of a pain to use at Walmarts because the door people don't always have the handheld around and have to go hunt it down.

Really, it shouldn't be surprising that they'd be a company willing to experiment in this field. Cutting labor costs to an extreme (which is actually one of the reasons I avoid Walmarts, but that's another rant) is pretty central to how they operate. And they became the behemoth they are by innovating in logistics. People often forget that they were a key figure in driving the adoption of product barcodes in the first place.

Many train stations in the Netherlands have book and magazine shops with "self checkout". Basically a scanner & screen like you see at Ikea. Works great in rush hour when these places are packed with people buying morning newspapers and such.

Institutional knowledge and loyalty. Your entire staff can’t be flex workers if you expect customers to be treated properly (see: Apple retail for how it’s done well).

Even still, see how Amazon’s flex/contractors handle deliveries (ie atrociously, as there is no incentive to care) vs UPS (a union shop).

You have to align incentives. Your employees’ success is your success. Otherwise, close up shop and go home. You’ve already lost.

That doesn't seem to really validate the company's decision not to hire any seasonal workers.

Not the one near me (in Phoenix, near Arizona State University). It's a major anchor in a shopping center, and is busy every time I'm ever in there.

The employees are also really helpful. This Christmas, I was trying to find some books as a christmas gift, and the staff made a bunch of suggestions based on books that they had actually personally read.

Sidenote: finding appropriate books for 8-14 year old girls is really freaking hard.

Nothing here validates B&N's decision.

30 years ago I was a part-time employee at a big box store from October to January. Large retailers long ago figured out how to ramp up their workforce temporarily to adequately handle the sales season that accounts for the largest portion of their sales every year.

For any retailer to blow the Christmas sales season by not adequately staffing it, which has been basic retail management for at least three decades, actually does argue for malpractice on the part of executives. It's a criminal level of incompetence, and I'm not sure whether "criminal" means "criminally negligent" or "fraudulent".

Self-checkouts

Why don't most retailers hire workers as independent contractors? They could fire without legal consequences?

It looks more like the idea that paying CEOs lots of money because they are worth it really isn't working.

Because they aren't worth it.

A mentor of mine once said something that really stuck with me: "Any company that chooses to fight a new type of competitor by slashing prices has already admitted defeat"

This is the case of the least denominator in management"thinking". If managers were legally liable to shareholders for obviously bad decisions that benefit to the managers, it might occur less. Only Sweden makes regular management liable in this way, even on criminal penalty. I see all manner of arguments why this could be used to excuse sclerosis in innovation, but frankly I don't see it that way.

Or executive are smart about the dollar in their pocket, they don't care if they kill one company because they'll just find another nice executive job in another one.

>> Retail checkout in the US has become a one-way grilling.

At one point Best Buy was trying to get you to sign up for MAGAZINE SUBSCRIPTIONS at checkout. Who thought that was a good idea?

>Oh my God. I realize that the cashiers have been ordered to do this (I assume) but knock it off already!

Why should they? If they don't they will get fired. Business goes up or down that cashier doesn't get paid more or less...they have no incentive to risk their job for a customer. These companies are so obsessed with squeezing a nickle out of 5% of their customers because they can _measure_ that. Its 'impossible' to measure losses like you with any granularity, so it doesn't matter. They 'can't' incentivize it.

B&N isn't the only one to do this but they are one of the most persistant. I visit the store once or twice a month and have been since Borders tanked. Every time I buy something, I get this spiel. Dozens of times now. Usually, I cut them off with a curt "no" when I sense they're ready to start the question. I sort of feel bad because it isn't the clerks fault but I'm really annoyed at just being asked over and over. I'm tempted to have a badge made up I can pin to my shirt that says "Thank you. No.".

A couple of days ago I attempted to pay for snacks at a convenience store with cash. The clerk sheepishly directed me to answer a series of questions about discount cards via the pinpad! When I asked if this seemed like a good idea, she could only sigh and glance skyward.

Apparently the corporate morons have figured out how to pester the customer even against the better judgment of clerks. Fortunately I have a choice in which convenience store enjoys my custom.

Not only are they ordered to do it but corporate puts requirements on the store as to how many joins they are expected to get each day, and cashiers have their own individual quotas and they get chewed out if they don’t meet them by managers who get chewed out for not meeting them. The fact that this behavior reduces sales throughput, employee productivity, and customer satisfaction are not worked into the analysis that comes up with these programs or their growth targets. Upper management comes up with a target and they push their stores to meet it, because their CMO went to a conference where he was wined and dined by the company that sells the software to run the loyalty card system and believes their stats about how it saved company X and now that they’ve spent the money the ROI has to meet internal targets or risk embarrassing the CMO.

TBH, the problem is they put this stuff in the checkout dialogue. They could put it on posters etc, but they put it in the way of the purchasing utility (checkout) so you can't avoid it. and it gets in the way, slows you down.

JCrew is relentless with this lately. They ask you if you’d like an “email receipt”, which is code for re-subscribing you to their daily barrage of emails. Then they hand you a paper receipt as you walk out.

I aggressively avoid buying books on Amazon, mostly for the reasons listed in the article, but between BAM and B&N, I will always go to a local bookstore instead. They don't grill me for PII at the register, for one.

Overall the whole experience is way better. Finding a book is a tiny bit harder (emphasis on tiny), but honestly, I'm not in a hurry when I'm in a bookstore, so I don't care.

I have this same experience with B&N as well, getting grilled on a milion questions is annoying.

Another thing is I like knowing what kind of readers have read similar books to me, and their opinions of said book. I prefer to just buy everything on my kindle, its easy and convenient. Not a big fan of hard copy textbooks much anymore

What retailer doesn't make sure they have all checkouts open when you have 50 customers in line?

Tesco stores in London are removing from self checkout kiosks cash payment. A middle size store in the City, two sides of a aisle, left accept cash, on the right the machines only accept cards. The card only kiosks were all vacant. On the left, backing up a frustrated queue tailing behind me another twenty people at least, were a dozen self checkout kiosks, all confounding anyone's ability to pay for any goods. With the random completion of the process, the queue for the cash kiosks became chaotic. It was about 11pm. The store was otherwise almost empty. In other words, people were able to"do all their shopping" quickly, and then spend considerably more time being pissed off, probably like me, also unable to price see several items before getting to the kiosk, which is not a uncertainty I much care for.

At the kiosk, I realized I needed a carrier bag, and asked for one, none being visible. "A ten pence one is fine!" I said hopefully, the mandatory five pence ones nowhere. "We've only those." He said, pointing to one pound fifty fancy bags. Off I went, my basket left behind me. No sale.

Last night. Another Tesco store. This one has had random kiosks changed to accept card only. So I asked, as I approached the head of the queue and was told... This store doesn't accept cash. Another abandoned basket.

I have been able to complete less than half of every attempt at shopping in the second of those two stores, walking out each time over two years. Sainsbury's stock was paying ten percent dividends,last I looked. I see a classic long - short position.

There was an article posted 2 weeks ago on HN about how (some) stores are scaling back on self-checkout because it's causing their theft rates to rise: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16293747

I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed that. I had the same experience and it made the store seem a bit scammy lately. A lot of the cheaply made books also seemed geared toward older people: they were either about the 1940s-1960s, or were the kinds of public domain classics a grandparent would buy a grandchild (Robinson Crusoe, The Arabian Knights) in outwardly fancy but actually poor quality editions.

It's especially a shame because Barnes & Noble classics editions from 10 or 15 years ago are actually very nice.

Super interesting. For the bibliophiles out there, I wonder how bad this is getting industry-wide? Does it happen at indie book sellers, Wal Mart, and Amazon too?

Certainly I have put down books that were made way too cheaply, and I have impulse-purchased books that are exceptionally well-designed.

Or, alternately, the company could do what every other company in existence does and what B&N has always done and have people work during what they know will be the busiest time of the year instead of sending everyone home, destroying the company and letting the CEO pocket the savings.

Scaling retail is hard to get perfect to the same precision of auto-scaling AWS, maybe, but scaling to an acceptable (measured in profit and customer satisfaction) level really isn't. Or rather, the solution is known.

Especially in December - during prime holiday shopping hours - you staff up. It's more profitable to have a little bit of employee slack time than to have customer satisfaction way down and customers walking out without buying things.

This is a bad take - the whole "oh retail will die without self-checkout terminals" overlooks the realities of retail, what consumers want when they choose to go into an actual brick and mortar store, and how businesses can succeed. And it does so in a way that perpetuates the implication that we have to treat employees like computers to be successful.

Or just set up self-serve stations. Literally every item has a barcode.

By "inventory nightmare" you mean "theft", right? Because that's the real problem. There are already self-serve lines in many stores, but they still have to watch people to try to prevent theft. And it turns out people are really, really slow if they aren't trained as a cashier.

Sure, the cellphone eliminates the slowdown, but it also eliminates the primary way they currently prevent theft.

Amazon is working on a store that works a lot like you said, with your cellphone, but doesn't rely on the customer doing anything other than logging in. After that, tons of cameras take care of the rest.

more self-service kiosks would be an easier solution rather than building an entire new system.

If you used your phone, then it would easy to shoplift. Buy 7 items, but "forget" to scan the last two. Self-service kiosks at least prevents this with weight sensors, cameras, and a human kiosk manager.

Some Coop supermarkets in Switzerland allow this.

For the record, I do like that idea. I recently started working remote, and while I like my office it's nice to go to a coffee shop and get out of the house for a while. But, the WiFi usually sucks and it can be too noisy. A quiet place with decent WiFi and coffee would be superb. I don't know what books other professions need, but it'd be pretty neat to go and checkout TAOCP (or something) and do some work for a while. Like a library meets coffee shop meets BYOD internet cafe, or something. Idk.

I figure the board must be getting their pockets lined as the CEO guts the company as fast as possible. It's going to be sad but completely predictable when Sears goes under.

Sears was/is a total mess. Went there to buy something (before they closed the local store) and it took 10 minutes to checkout, with the clerk fumbling between the iPad, a CRT register, and credit card scanner. What a cluster F.

But I'm not suggesting they tell everyone the company is in dire straits and they are on the verge of getting fired. Just don't willfully lie to them on a daily basis and tell them that things are amazing and their jobs are totally secure. In my scenario, we weren't actively asking questions regularly. But they were offering the (mis)information on an almost daily basis.

There is such a law:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini...

I'm not sure what the terms of these employee's termination actually is. The article leaves the impression that they were essentially tossed onto the street, but it could be that they were all given the required 60-day notice.

Great points, this is very much also true on my experience. Once the decision is made to lay off, often work is done to make sure that they don't use company resources to get their next job. It's quite accepted in business circles, but from the outside it really sounds heartless.

Also, I suspect, so they can have some control over who leaves.

When employees start leaving on their own, the first to leave are going to be the highly skilled but underpaid ones. They are attractive, relatively inexpensive to attract away, and have relatively little incentive to stay. They're also the ones the company most wants to hold on to, for similar reasons.

I'm not saying they need to let the world know. But don't actively tell them on a daily basis that the company is in excellent shape and everyone is safe and secure for the foreseeable future.

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.

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.

On a side note, have you checked out this new translation of The Odyssey? https://www.amazon.com/Odyssey-Homer/dp/0393089053/

I haven't read all of it yet but I read a good chunk and it's pretty excellent.

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.)

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.

Amazon has a certain side business that makes most of their profits.

I skipped over those because I think they're totally irrelevant. See the "rearranging deck chairs on Titanic" part of my comment.

Yeah, they could have managed the holiday season better. They could have a better strategy for ecommerce. So what? It doesn't fundamentally change anything. It maybe delays the inevitable for a year or two? But in the end, B&N is almost certainly going out of business.

EDIT: I guess there are two other possibilities:

1. B&N finds another B&M strategy that works beyond just selling books. But it's not clear what, given their financial situation, existing stores, employee base, etc. Either way, lots of layoffs between here and there.

2. They pivot to selling books online solely. This actually seems likely, at least for awhile, because it's a decent brand, and they're already doing this, so this would just mean shutting down all their stores. But all these employees are still losing their jobs in that scenario.

He's saying the arguments of the post are irrelevant. Sure they could have hired seasonal workers for the holidays, and maybe had better results, but either way they are doomed.

I haven't bought a book at a retail outlet in probably 10 years. There's just nothing about the retail experience at B&N that's even worth the effort to drive there and park. It's not salvageable.

The "ship from store" argument does not make sense.

Many healthy retailers use omnichannel, ship-from-store, buy-online-fulfill-in-store, etc. These methods can improve fulfillment, increase inventory utilization, and reduce stale inventory.

If a retailer wants to draw down inventory, then just cut replenishment. I believe Target Canada was accused of doing so. Implementing "faux omnichannel" and the associated IT, store processes, etc. would be much harder.

Maybe, but it seems a weird argument to make during record low unemployment. Yes, I'm aware of labor force participation rates, and that the pay for many of these jobs is too low, AI is predicted to destroy jobs, etc, but that's not what we're talking about, right?

Amazon employs way more people than B&N, the company they put out of business. Maybe those jobs should be better (OK, they definitely should), but that's different from saying there are no jobs, isn't it?

> we have to find a different kind of social contract to survive on

I do believe we already have that. Open any kind of news website and it'll be all over you.

This new social contract is entertainment. I know it is right now considered "work" as well, but to think about it, most of it doesn't contribute in any other way that helps other people (most often - workforce) kill time. Celebrities, tv & internet personalities earn not because they do only because they are.

Some time ago being a celebrity or internet personality would gain you a huge pile of cash. Right now that starts to get watered down. You can get reasonable known YouTuber show on your sons or daughters birthday party for reasonable amount just because there is so much content that fan fragmentation starts to show up.

What I believe we're seeing is world transitioning from "live to work" to "live to work or entertain those who work" with sad turn to "entertainment through hate" happening lately...

> Maybe we need to acknowledge that we're moving towards having a society where "everyone has a job that earns them their living" is untenable

No, we need a society that guarantees everyone a job, a job that will generate the income necessary for survival. We shouldn't give up agency and become simple wards of the state, waiting hand stretched ahead for the UBI to fall from the crumblings at the tech billionaires table. UBI without jobs is humiliating and lacks vertical mobility. Self reliance is good.

The slogan should be "Give us jobs or give us the means of production!"

In the future it will be easier to be self reliant by using solar energy, agro-bots, 3d-printing and various biotech and materials research technologies. We can be self reliant, we don't need no stinking BHI. We don't like to be passive and hand our dignity out for a penny.

As a final argument, think about this: what is cheaper? what is more tenable - to hand out free money to everyone, or to create jobs that pay for themselves? The jobs could be - cultivate your own food, raise your own house, educate the children of your community, repair cars and electronics for local people, etc. Most of the jobs emerge from the needs of the community, so the community can hand them to itself. Then only a small amount of external aid could go as far as a huge amount of UBI.

The name of this philosophy is Local Self Reliance and it is related to Distributism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism).

A list of related concepts: community ISPs, credit coops, anti-trust, buying from local businesses.

This is a promo video from the Institute of Local Self Reliance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDw4dZLSDXg

I think the proportion of private sector to public sector jobs might shift, but as long as our cities have subways that haven't been built, our roads and highways have potholes, our bridges aren't rated to survive the next earthquake, our power generation isn't 100% carbon-neutral, and so forth, there is more than enough work for the humans we have.

“Even sweeter, those vendors don't sit on my order for a week for funsies like Amazon does if you resist their PRIME offering.”

What’s the deal with this? I turned off prime a couple of years ago and it certainly feels like they’re intentionally slow processing orders.

For books, I only buy used and try to pick nearby sellers. Often the media mail shipment will show up in 2-3 days. Pretty great.

Maybe the books you buy are way more esoteric than ones I do, but I’ve been very happy with Alibris for used books.

Yeah. Sharp edges are all the more better for cutting, it seems.

You are making the completely unwarranted (and demonstrated false by modern history) assumption that decisions coming from capitalism are made objectively and rationally.

This has an assumption built in: The more money you control, the more your your opinions ought to shape what work someone else does. Some people think the assumption is very true, some think it is very false.

"Capitalism is very efficient at exposing useless labor"

No its really not a lot of work out there adds limited value to anyone's life.

Further the measure of the worth of the labor is determined by how much resources the decision making party controls.

Something which flatters a rich person and ads negligable value is worth more than something that keeps 3 poor people alive.

What is it wasteful of? What if someone working such a job feels better about being alive, because they have a role to fill in a community? Why is having people doing forms of “make work” worse than letting people waste away into despair? Would you feel good about having your aunt thrown to the curb, because she has no marketable skills?

The ideas of “efficiency” as they are used in economic theory are very narrow, and reflect a technical understanding of a vastly over simplified model of reality. Such models do provide insight into real life, but they are analytical tools, nothing more.

Economics, as field of study, has a big problem with the concept of “value.” The price of things tends to stand in for the value of things, as it is easily measured.

You don’t have to look hard to see the absurdity of taking this compromise too far. Look at military spending. Since dollars are spent buying a weapon, and workers get paid, profits are made, the “value” of the sale gets added into GDP. Then we take that missile, and blow it up. If we kill our enemies, then maybe one could say we got our money’s worth. If we kill only innocents, then I see it as more of an “anti-value.” What if it just blows up in the desert, and makes a multi-million dollar hole in the sand? Sort of a modern, high tech version of paying one group of workers to dig holes, and another to fill them in, is it not?

The tragedy, for me, is that while I agree with most of what you've said and my transition to ebooks has been similar to yours, I've also begun realizing what we're losing by moving away from brick-and-mortar retail.

I look back on my childhood in the 80s and 90s and remember retail as not only fulfilling the need of acquiring stuff but also as a central meeting place. Going downtown to buy stuff was an activity as much as it was an errand. There were movie theaters, restaurants and all sorts of other business that existed in an symbiotic ecosystem with all the retail outlets. Over time, each of these business has been or is being replaced by a more-efficient, internet version of itself. We now order more and more food delivery rather than eating out. We now stream more of our entertainment in our homes and many people haven't been to a theater more than a couple of times per year. And while none of these shifts is bad in and of itself, the common theme is that we've replaced the social version of each of them with a version that we use alone, interacting only with a computer and not another human being.

I don't think it's a coincidence that we're having an epidemic of drug addiction and overdose considering how often drug addiction is a side effect of lack of human connection. We've taken all of these services and removed the human interaction and I think we're seeing that that human interaction was more than just fulfilling a transactional need. It was also keeping us sane in minuscule increments that, overall, added up to something tangible.

It's a tough duality for me to accept. I love my Kindle and I find the reading experience to be so much nicer than a physical book. On a recent year-long trip abroad, I was able to bring enough books for the entire trip and it weighed less than a single physical book. In one sense, it was great. Every book I read was something I wanted to read and I probably enjoyed them more because of it. On my first prolonged trip abroad back in the late 90s, I could only bring a couple of books with me. After I'd finished them, I had to find people to trade with to get new books. I probably didn't enjoy those books as much as ones I would've selected for myself, but I also ended up reading things I'd never have even considered reading before because I just didn't have any other options. There's a distinct part of me--the person that's able to look beyond the immediate fulfillment of my needs--that thinks that things were much better back in the days where stuff cost a bit more, it took more time to buy and I had to actually talk to a person to buy it.

I can't say how much of an effect customers like us -- people who owned a ton of books but have switched to the Kindle -- have had on the bottom line of Barnes and Noble, but my experience completely echoes yours. I even find myself purchasing books on the Kindle that I already own in physical form just for the improved experience.

The main thing I miss is browsing for books; the experience on the Kindle or on the web is terrible compared to walking down an aisle and flipping through books that draw my interest. I have young children now, so I purchase a fair number of physical books for them, mostly through Amazon, but occasionally browsing in our local Barnes and Noble. Whenever I'm there, I find myself rooting through the shelves, finding all sorts of interesting books that I want to buy, and then I guiltily take a picture of them to buy on Amazon later for my kindle.

EDIT: One thing I have noticed, though, is the increase in price gouging in ebook sales. I think a result of the Hachette deal; lots of things that would have been $6 mass-market paperbacks are instead $10. Unfortunately, this is not local to Amazon, so leaving the ecosystem is no help at all.

In Canada we have Chpaters-Indigo instead of Barnes and Noble. They stock very expensive, but very attractive, home design crap (think pottery barn minus the furniture). They also sell scarves, mitts, slippers, fragrances, purses, chocolates, and children's toys. Basically a convenience store for these items, and they have a regular turn-around so they always sell new versions of all this stuff. It's working very well, and I don't know if Barnes and Noble does this too but Chapters-Indigo is actually expanding where I live. People still like going to the store for physical books-- it's something about the atmosphere-- but they definitely need a little push to stay, and another reason to be there.

That's a wonderful story, but may be premature. I don't know the UK market, but I'm not sure I'd invest in 2018.

A reasonable litmus test for monopoly is whether they would fail if they started exploiting their customers.

Time Warner and Comcast pass this test. They refuse to compete and then aggressively raise prices, seemingly to no end, knowing full well their customers have no choice. Microsoft's Windows 10 also passes this test with extreme anti-customer behavior that relies exclusively on consumers tolerating only due to a lack of choice.

Now back to Amazon. If they started ramping up their prices they would fail, fail hard, and fail practically overnight. There's a difference between a company being incredibly efficient and passing, with great success, that efficiency onto consumers and monopolies. Another general trend in monopolies is that they generally rely on tertiary forces to prevent competition. For the telecoms, this is the lack of access to wiring or even simply poles. For Windows, it's native execution of decades of third party software as well as the vast majority of all consumer software written today. There's no barrier to competing with Amazon, you're just not going to do it as well as them. It's the same reason WalMarts destroy small local businesses.

I sometimes think our views might be to 'current-centric' when considering a post automation era.

In my mind one of the most distinguishing features of the labor world today is the growth of complete independence. You have solitary people start software companies and independently design, develop, and publish products that go on to earn billions. I think a big part of this is the efficiency created by current systems. The economic systems to handle payments are almost entirely automated. The system of publication processes payments and delivers product in an entirely automated fashion. And consumers can learn about and purchase your product also using fully automated systems. Compare that to times when software was sold exclusively in retail outlets. For that matter you don't even have to go that far back to times when computers themselves were outside the reach of all except the most elite of society rendering such economic possibilities moot.

And I think this trend of independence is something that will likely continue going forward. Imagine in a post automation world where things like industrial level machining and eventually even things like semiconductor fabrications become as accessible as PCs were let's say 30 years ago. This is a game changer that I think is going to be extremely difficult to predict the implications of. For that matter imagine automated construction bots capable of executing building designs all the way from ground clearance on up.

Let's get more agrarian. Consider things like automated micro-farms. People could use these for their own nourishment, but then there's also the possibility of automated delivery systems enabling user-to-user distribution systems where people could even make a living off of their land in an autonomous fashion. Right there are vast amounts of great arable land in the US that's for sale for next to nothing. In some cases you can get land literally for free. But without automation it's not so straight forward to monetize this. What would be the implications, if it did become possible? 4 acres and a bot?

The whole point here is that I think by focusing on training as a means of contributing to a large company as a means of earning a living is not necessarily something that will be a given in the future. These large companies are the ones that have the means and motivation to eliminate these jobs. The present already rewards independence vastly more than dependent labor and this is a trend I think we'll see grow exponentially in the era of automation. And that has very difficult to even imagine implications.

Nothing about the comment gave the impression that the author isn't familiar with those concepts.

Believe it or not, I didn't just "come upon" this realization and I've taken multiple econ classes (though I'd like to take more). Also, our unemployment benefits are a pretty sorry excuse for a social safety net, which is why I wasn't specifically talking about them here.

This post is condescending without any real substance. "Read some economic books" is not meaningful in the context of one particular government safety net.

> Haha, you literally just came upon

This breaks the HN guidelines in two ways. First, it's uncivil. Second, it falls far short of this:

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."

Could you please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow those rules when commenting here? It does take an effort, but it's an effort everyone needs to make if we're to succeed in having a bit higher quality here than internet median.

A long history of good things adds up in one's mind. If your employer has benefited you, it's hard to maintain a mentality of pure rational self-interest.

Not just any 3rd party seller, only the ones willing to systematically spend ad dollars to promote products.

But even non-spending sellers send a lot of transaction revenue Amazon’s direction. You don’t get good treatment however because you're a disposable commodity. Treating you well doesn’t increase revenue.

For the books you already know you want, I agree that Amazon is hard to beat. However, it’s hard to replicate the “discoverability” of a brick and mortar bookshop. Even without having a specific title in mind, I can always find something that looks interesting, just by walking around. Sometimes a blurb on the cover draws me in, sometimes it’s a recommendation by the staff, and sometimes seeing a title or author jogs my memory.

Meanwhile, logging into my Amazon account recommends several books (out of order) in a series, some updated versions of textbooks I once bought, and a few titles I recognize from the NYT best seller list but have no interest in. Since I recently bought one, there are also a good dozen screwdrivers for what Amazon assumes is my burgeoning collection of flatheads.

Also, books don’t cost very much, but they are a big investment in terms of time. Thumbing through the actual book is a great way to make sure you like your prospective purchase. This isn’t quite the same online—Look Inside is carefully metered out so you can maybe get a sense of the books style and level, but it’s often not enough to draw me in.

there's a big bookstore nearby that does a few things right: (1)the staff know a lot. It's not just about 'I liked this book give me something like it', it's about where you don't even know where to start. I've walked in there a dozen times looking for gifts for people aged 4 through ~60, with mostly a vague description of what they're like and what interests them and they know a bunch of choices that fit. Amazon, Google, etc can build profiles on you and figure you out, but they cant figure your friends and gifts out (or even more out of the box recs, or have a more thorough look at what does or doesn't interest. (2) they have coffee. Yay. (3) they have two sections of interesting sales: books that are soon to be out of store (but still on the website) that are on clearance, prices going from €80 to ~€10 or whatever. Great sales. Or just old secondhand things, with books in there that are unique, rare etc, and you would be hard pressed to find online, or if you could you're mostly back at the discoverability issue IMO.

So they know their strengths for meatspace stores, and supplement that with a good online presence (e.g. same day delivery in this city).

This is Scheltema in Amsterdam btw

Yup, I have. It’s usually hard, stressful, customers are assholes, work is part time and unpredictable hours, and pay is horrible.

Have you?

Honestly I’m surprised they are still around.

Don’t get me wrong I love the stores, and it’s sad to lose nice things. I’m not happy about it.

But don’t blame the new CEO, blame the old CEO for doing nothing for a decade as the market transformed around them.

I couldn't agree more with this. I think it's the OP that hasn't taken a close enough look at the B&N employee's "situation" and just spouted off an opinion.

Is this a fact or something you just assume?

Ironically, Amazon Books stores have big floor area for electronics.

If you have a decent ad blocker, it blocks those. I only get them if I turn off uBlock Origin.

I was wondering about Best Buy too. Does anyone know what's going on with them?

Last I heard (2017), they were trying hard to be more "on-demand" in response to Amazon. They were quite fully aware of people "demoing" items in store and buying them online, so they dropped prices and updated their e-commerce. If it worked is a separate question entirely...

That fits in just fine with the above, at least as far as my understanding of businesses and what their goals are is...

I've worked in the publishing industry in the UK - it is experiencing long term decline. To illustrate this, see the multitude of publishers merging, cutting staff and closing imprints. Very few publishers are making money any more. The story is the same for bookstores - there is one significant UK-wide chain now (Waterstones).

The article you cite doesn't even show healthy figures - it shows a bump in 2015, then fall to almost zero growth in 2016 for the UK, and a dramatic decline in growth for the US from 2015 to 2016. Hardly signs of a healthy industry. This is just the kind of cherry-picked data the industry has been deluding itself with for years. The figures produced by the industry are unreliable, and the interpretation of those is equally suspect, as evidenced by the article you've found. They've tried to manipulate stats by doing things like pricing ebooks higher or just below physical books for example.

Barnes and Noble will close soon (as this article predicts), as will all the other big brick and mortar booksellers, and soon after that mass-market paper books are doomed as Amazon has little incentive to promote them over ebooks, and no interest in sustaining publishers.

Around 2000-2002, you could walk into most B&N stores and find nice comfortable chairs to sit in. These chairs encouraged book lovers to grab a book, sit down, read a few pages, and actually enjoy the book buying experience. So what did B&N do over the next couple of years? Get rid of the comfortable chairs, and replace them on a 1:2 basis with hard, uncomfortable wooden chairs. Then slowly phase these chairs out completely.

This did a couple of things; discourage people from reading books on the book floor, while encouraging them to read in the Cafe, where the books and magazines get damaged easily. But the core idea of having an inviting bookstore died that year.

Another issue was the Cafe relationship with Starbucks. The Cafe's use Starbucks components, and often follow their recipes. They have tons of "Starbucks" branding as part of this relationship. BUT you can't use a Starbuck giftcard at a B&N Cafe. Try explaining this to someone who received a giftcard over the holidays. They order a coffee after waiting in line, and get hassled about the form of payment. It wouldn't have been hard for B&N management to work out a deal with Starbucks for handling these cards, but B&N never did.

Also, bookstores have the ability to send a majority of their inventory back to the publisher (yeah, crazy legacy stuff). Inventory levels are largely decided by Corp HQ yet despite modern inventory mgmt software being a thing, they continually botched it. So you would get huge shipments. Then when cash flow for the company would get tight, they'd have you pull the books off the shelves and send them back to the publishers. This would be a continual process that consumes tons of time, time that would be better spent on customer service.

Corp HQ would also decide to change the store layout frequently. The staff would pack up all the Sci-Fi/Fantasy books, move them to a completely different part of the store. Customers would come in, head to their favorite section, and be flummoxed. Since so many labor hours were spent doing this type of thing, (and the aforementioned book pulls), there weren't as many employees on the book floor to help. I called it the Titanic chair shuffling...

Staffing levels were always a problem. On busy holiday weeknights, you might have 4-5 people working. One manager, one head cashier, two in the cafe, and one on the book floor. Employees need breaks, so often you would end up with one cashier, and one person on the book floor. If you get a rush of people, that line at the register can get awfully long. B&N only pays lip service to the customer experience.

A lot of these types of decisions add up overtime to create a crappy customer experience. B&N never could compete with Amazon on pricing, and never should have. They should have embraced the book buying experience, and made customers love coming in. But that's a long long game to play, and their management made continually bad choices (like Nook) that distracted them, took capital they didn't have, and confused customers.

Calibre is fantastic, and open source too! It's primary a library management system with all the features you could ask for, but there are also open source plugins to remove DRM that make it a go-to for creating libre libraries.

Good catch, thanks.

Well, that’s the point of the article, isn’t it? The long-time employees that were laid off were almost certainly there out of love of their wares, and the parent business could have put the work into making value out of that distinguishing fact. But beyond that, they had institutional knowledge, both of how the business works and what their customers want. I know it’s hard to imagine that retail work could involve any amount of skill or knowledge, but this is no doubt a loss of value.

From what I understand, this wasn't considered a mass layoff because each site only lost a handful of workers. The definition of a mass layoff according to the law is that the "mass" applies to each site that experiences layoffs.

I could not care less about downvotes, but I enjoy discussion. And I certainly think people would like to disagree with me, but it seems none are really able or willing to form coherent counter points - which I think puts a very sad frame on the disagreement. So I thank you for changing that, though I think there's something you may not have considered in your logic.

At the most basic level we can view a company's profitability as a price vs demand curve. If your price is too low then you're leaving money on the table. If it's too high then you're also losing money since you could earn more by charging less to more people. And I'm sure you'd agree that all companies are really trying to maximize that curve.

But the thing here is that competition is not some tertiary element not considered in our basic price vs demand curve. It's in most cases the single biggest driving factor of the demand function. When there's no real competition, you can increase your prices quite recklessly - see Time Warner or Comcast. But the amount that Amazon can increase their prices is strictly limited due to competition. If you're going to buy an electronic component do you buy it at e.g. New Egg or Amazon? It doesn't really matter if its the same thing - you're just going to go with wherever is cheaper in net (e.g. factoring in rewards/shipping/etc), even if that price difference is really quite small. The point here is that while you may think that Amazon could raise their prices let's say 5% and see a 1-2% growth in profit, but this is a question that they are undoubtedly constantly researching - and they disagree.

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And in any case this is literally the case for most all small margin businesses. For instance WalMart has 2.3 million employees and $13.6 billion net. Our $1k/year raise costs them $2.3 billion, or 1/6th of their entire available income. The only companies that are truly lush with money are companies that sell their product at extremely high markups, or companies whose product enables the minimize labor, such as software. For instance Apple, as an example of the former, nets $48.4 billion with 123,000 employees. A $1000/year raise there would work out to 1/400th of their available revenue. Google/Alphabet, as an example of the latter, had a bad year last year, but generally net around $20 billion on 72,000 employees. Their $1k raise works out to about 1/278th of their available revenue. It creates an ironic result that few people would complain about the wages Google or Apple offer, yet they actually offer their employees a far less 'fair' share of revenues than do the companies that people consider greedy.

Not to mention that B&N went in big on ebooks. B&N's Nook platform was the only competitor comparable to Amazon's Kindle ecosystem.

It didn't work out, of course, but that's something very different than missing the coming tide of ebooks altogether.

> Imagine if B&N could compete on price with Amazon

One of the points of the article is that they can't*, because Amazon has other lines of business and B&N does not. So Amazon can use the revenue from those other businesses to swallow losses on book sales in order to drive out competition.

Yeah, it like how Kodak "never saw digital coming." Actually they had PhotoCD long before digital cameras were a widespread thing. You can recognize a shift to electrons and still not figure out a way to make a large chain B&M business work.

Smaller scale, but one of the first larger bookstores around me to discount books on a consistent basis effectively helped drive a lot of the smaller bookstores that had been around forever out of business. Ten or twenty years later, they were complaining online when they were effectively driven out of business by Amazon.

Because treating people to lots of free kindness, ra ra spirit, free cheap food, team building is a great way to retain people so long as the wages you pay them are enough to get by. If you persue this strategy successfully your business will be chock full of people who love you and think you all are family even though you don't pay them much..

People that need more monetarily will of course notice that raises are minimal and long term growth meh but many people have modest needs or spouses that make more money and they have no particular reason not to collect the same money adjusted for inflation and stay comfortable.