At first I placed online orders with them, but once moving to online shopping at all, it was clear that Amazon had even better selection, prices, shipping, etc.
But I still enjoy a good physical bookstore. I might still shop there in person today if their stock was more interesting, even if the prices were a little higher.
Yeah this annoyed me to no end, however after a few shops I realized the only reason these are even open right now is because of the high margin gift section. Check the prices on their plushies when you are there. $35 for a small rabbit! and people buy them.
Yes, you should allocate a larger share of scarce resources (in this case, floor space) to high-margin product...
... but not at the expense of the central thesis of why customers actually come to your store.
B&N was able to sell high margin gift shop items because traffic was already there as a bookstore... and there as a bookstore because they had reading areas and a coffee shop.
Imagine a virtualized army of engineers that the AI or brain upload future may bring. Maybe that won't happen in our lifetimes, but it will happen at some point if we don't manage to nuke ourselves.
There are probably a handful of other trends that will cause instability and salients to develop in the fitness gradient.
They're still in business. I browsed one last month. I was amused that one entire rack, 6 shelves, was filled with "Trump is Evil" books. Somebody at that store doesn't like Trump :-)
Plus, I'm sure some have their own niches (satire, exposés like "Frankly we won this election" that have new reporting, etc) and many have their own historical value. I saw an ant-Tom DeLay book in the wild a few years ago well after his fall from grace and considered buying it just as a keepsake of the era.