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Comment by so33 | Hacker News Reader

In Canada, Indigo is a chain of bookstores just like B&N. To counter the threat of Amazon, they have dedicated a large amount of their stores’ square footage to a lifestyle concept that sells aesthetically pleasing stationery, home goods, and gifts. AFAICT this has allowed them to keep afloat and they do still sell quite a bit of books.

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As far as I've seen, every chain bookstore has tried this, and most have subsequently gone belly up. It's a little like RadioShack going into cellphones. Maybe you can keep your head above water for a minute, but there's an existential risk in pivoting away from your raison d'etre.

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

Is that ironic? Amazon has also become the electronics retailer as well. I don't recall the last time I've bought anything at Newegg or Monoprice, or BestBuy. It's basically Amazon or bust, at this point - if I desperately need something right now, I'll gamble on Walmart maybe having it in stock, but chances tend not to be good, and the selection awful.

Waterstone's - another similar chain in the UK - returned to profit from near death with a strategy of treating each branch like a local independent. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/03/balancing-the-...

> To counter the threat of Amazon, they have dedicated a large amount of their stores’ square footage to a lifestyle concept that sells aesthetically pleasing stationery, home goods, and gifts.

B&N does that, too.

Plus the in-store café.

A quarter of B&N now devoted to toys. They also earn more in their cafe than they probably do selling books.

Is this a fact or something you just assume?

The floor space is anecdote, but I have yet to see a B&N that didn’t conform to that in the last few years. As for the cafe profits see articles like http://www.nrn.com/onsite/barnes-noble-expand-food-and-bever..., downscaled cafes already bring in 10% of all sales for the store, the profit margins on those must be much higher than books.

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