TL;DR: Slash costs (i.e. fire tons of people, discontinue unprofitable stock) and target stores better for their demographics.
I've spent a lot of time in both B&N and Waterstones. B&N has a lot of problems Waterstones never had even ahead of bankruptcy:
- The stores are too big. 1/2 of a B&N store is tat, reference books, niche stock, a Nook display area, and other nonsense. You could cut almost all B&N stores in half and not notice as a customer.
- They place them poorly. B&N is perfect for foot traffic. But B&Ns are typically located as drive-up "out of town" shopping. Somewhere you need to go to intentionally. They need to be in malls.
- No good Nook tie-in for the stores. My SO often goes into B&N and looks at books, and then says "I'll buy it on my Nook later." They should have made an agreement with the publishers YEARS ago: When you buy a physical book, you get the Nook book included.
- The children's area is really nice, but poorly leveraged. No classes, no reading groups, no reason to come in. Stay at home parents WANT a reason to get out of the house, you offer a free reading group for small kids, the parents will buy the books after the group.
- Atmosphere in the coffee shop is bad. Waterstones feels like a nice little swanky coffee shop, somewhere you'd go and work on your novel, B&N's coffee shop feels like a generic coffee shop at the airport.
- B&Ns has no brand, and keeps making it worse. 3D printers, toys, Nooks, what is it that B&Ns is? They're all over the place, and now when you go into a B&N store you'll never know what they'll be pushing this week.
I think B&N will go under. I just don't think the management is very good, and every attempt they make to right the ship makes it worse. The whole business needs to be restructured.
> The children's area is really nice, but poorly leveraged. No classes, no reading groups, no reason to come in. Stay at home parents WANT a reason to get out of the house, you offer a free reading group for small kids, the parents will buy the books after the group.
I think this is really important. Stay-at-home parents want to get out, and free things are always welcome. Have daily reads + arts and crafts (simple coloring sheets is probably enough) with a small discount on the book-of-the-day is probably enough. I don't think it would even cost the store that much to run.
Michael's and Home Depot do weekly parent-child activities, and those you have to pay for, and I love taking my kids to them. Much easier than trying to figure out something to do at home.
A local theater had a "cheap kids movies" thing during the summer, where they showed older kids' movies for a dollar or two. My wife took our kids to those, and it's a lot of fun, even if those movies we could have seen on Netflix at home. The theater is just different, and it's refreshing to leave the house.
Parents like these things, and (IMO) it probably brings your utilization of the store up, since during the middle of the weekday you're not going to get a lot of traffic.
Plus, as far as children's books go, physical books are way, way better than ebooks. I might even go as far to say that ebooks will never replace children's books.
> Plus, as far as children's books go, physical books are way, way better than ebooks. I might even go as far to say that ebooks will never replace children's books.
For me there is a log of nostalgia around going to Borders with my parents as a child. Regarding the eBook thing you may be correct, but for me they already have replaced real books. For 5 dollars a month through an app on iPad my kid gets access to thousands of children's books on-demand ranging from a direct page-for-page port to something more interactive with sound, interactions, and video. I, for one, welcome our e-book overlords.
I suppose regarding children's books I should have tempered that with "all children's books". There's a category of children's book that provides a tactile experience that ebooks/apps cannot match (e.g., "The Very Hungry Caterpillar")
(FWIW, you can get a "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" app, but it's a different experience, being an interactive toy. Not worse, not better, just different. It appears to nicely complement, not replace, the book.)
Also I think the UK has more foot traffic. There are certainly places in the US that generate enough foot traffic to support a bookstore, but the European market for foot traffic is much bigger.
B&N needs to quit adding "new stuff" to failing stores, as it's just not enough to make people want to go vs shopping on Amazon, and shutter them instead. Maintain a smaller but better brand.
This is my local Waterstones: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.2351971,-0.5749889,3a,15y,... (next to the Nero). You can see the amount of foot traffic that it could conceivably get, and after killing off Ottakars it’s the only book store in town (ignoring WH Smith’s top 20 section). It’s 3 stories tall and contains a Costa coffee shop with no music playing.
>But B&Ns are typically located as drive-up "out of town" shopping. Somewhere you need to go to intentionally. They need to be in malls.
Malls are dying in the US, though. The only malls that remain successful these days feature more upscale products in affluent areas that people want to see in person before purchasing. For everything else, shoppers seem to prefer your outlet style strip malls where there's less crowding and inconvenience. Or if they can wait a day or two, just order it online.
Are they? Anecdotally, I'm in St. Louis and Houston regularly and every mall I know of in both cities has always been busy every time I've been to it in the past five years. The more upscale malls in Houston are actually so busy that I can't bear to go more than once or twice a year, and I'll usually take Uber when I do because parking is so congested and difficult. Granted, these are both relatively large cities, so perhaps that's a factor here.
No, but that's a point that a certain type of person likes to push. As this article [1] starts, "maybe it's that reporters don't like malls". You could add "and Hacker News commenters" after "reporters" there.
Yes, but for every Galleria or Woodlands Mall there's a number of malls like Greenspoint or Northwest, losing anchor stores and becoming very low quality. Even malls like Deerbrook, which while still containing mainstream stores and staying pretty busy, are very obviously becoming run down.
Well, to be fair, Greenspoint (also affectionately called "Gunspoint") is not exactly a thriving area. I don't think it's surprising that a mall in a run-down area might be run-down.
It wasn't always that way - it was originally intended to be a thriving area (see the office buildings in the area), but during development, the economy went sideways.
As the linked article says, it does vary with higher-end malls tending to be in better shape. This matches my personal experience. One local mall that counts a Penney's and a Sears among its primary anchors doesn't seem to be in great shape. But if I go into Boston, something like Copley Place seems to do just fine. The shopping malls across the border in NH also seem to be regularly packed but that's something of a special situation because of sales tax.
From this article http://www.wsj.com/articles/shrinking-u-s-shopping-malls-get... it seems that the industry consensus is that malls are "overbuilt", not necessarily dying as in long-term trend. So we're seeing a correction, not necessarily a long-term slump.
> outlet style strip malls where there's less crowding and inconvenience
"Dying" problem and "crowding" problem seem to be mutually exclusive in a Yogi Berra kind of way.
A couple of B&N shops around here are in malls. I have no idea if that's better for sales or not, but they seem overall just as dreadful as the non-mall B&N locations.
I greatly enjoy books, and bookstores, and have shelves of books in my home. I guess I'm not the kind of customer B&N wants.
> The only malls that remain successful these days feature more upscale products in affluent areas that people want to see in person before purchasing.
If physical bookstores are to have any hope of surviving then books need to be exactly that kind of product.
> If physical bookstores are to have any hope of surviving then books need to be exactly that kind of product.
Physical books are exactly that kind of product, but there are precious few malls that meet that description, and the rents are very high. And the communities where they exist also tend to be communities where B&N has stores (though not always in the malls, though sometimes on the same lot and sharing foot traffic). I'd be very surprised if there's any real evidence that there is a profit opportunity for B&N being missed by tieing itself more to malls, there or anywhere else.
Agreed, but that becomes even more difficult with shifting trends in how people spend their free time. I'm disgusted by the number of people I know who actually boast about how few books they've read.
In the UK, malls are one of the places that Waterstones has done so well in. They're also the type of place that WH Smith seems to be (somewhat) surviving in, despite an incredibly poor reputation.
Maybe Barnes and Noble could do well over here. I mean, they can't really be any worse than Smith's in terms of quality, can they? I think they could do decently well in say, Lakeside or Bluewater.
The management is horrible. They're out of touch with the individual stores, push questionable initiatives, constantly reshuffle areas, have poor inventory management, and their IT is roughly 1995. They have plans to cut the number of stores, but they're not being aggressive enough. If they had strong leadership, they'd focus on customer experience; create a nice place for people to spend time enjoying books, not chasing the latest and greatest tech fad.
B&N will linger on, since they have no real competition anymore with the demise of Borders. People still buy physical books, and book readers still like to visit bookstores. But the long term outlook is probably a 50% reduction in stores.
Oh, and they pay their employees like shit, though all retail does to some extent.
B&N's coffee shop is a generic coffee shop. At my (now closed) local B&N, it was a Starbucks. With very little seating. And too loud pop music. It was not a place somebody would ever go to sit and read a chapter of the latest novel.
It's interesting , do you think B&N is well aware of all these shortcomings yet they don't do anything(for whatever reason) or the management is not or doesn't care?
Isn't knowing exactly who customers are and what they want the priority of any business? (one might argue sometimes customers don't know what the want)
They have to know, right? If not, they're incompetent.
Of course, the current CEO presided over Toys R Us as they fell into oblivion and ended up purchased by Bain Capital. And Sears Canada, another example of failed "big box" retail shopping.
>At my (now closed) local B&N, it was a Starbucks.
It was probably a Branded Solutions Food Service store (http://www.starbucks.com/business the Food Service option, not a Licensed Store or Starbuck Office Coffee delivery service) that served Starbucks brands from the "We Proudly Serve Starbucks Coffee" portfolio.
Or it may have been a real store (licensed); I can't say for certain.
The B&N I live near also has a "Starbucks" inside it, except it is actually one of the food service branded stores on closer inspection. It doesn't take the Starbucks app or giftcards, small signs with the prominent mermaid logo have the smaller "We Proudly Serve" print instead of "Starbucks", etc.
I think the Starbucks that are inside Target stores are also these sorts of arrangements.
My B&N had this "Branded Solutions Food Service" coffee. It was not a good experience. They didn't have the usual Starbucks coffees and it wasn't even hot.
Starbucks never operated coffee shops in B&N. B&N runs the shops entirely, and just uses Starbucks coffee and recipes. Try using a SB gift card at a B&N coffee shop and you'll see.
Regardless, my comments about the atmosphere hold. The coffee product was overpriced and mediocre. The seating was next to non-existent. And the music selection and volume were annoying. It was not a comfy place to sit and read.
Not all Starbucks coffee shops are generic. Some of them have really nice layouts with cozy corners and comfortable couches and they play jazz or classical music at reasonable volumes. But those tend to be in high-end areas, and B&N is definitely not high-end.
> Not all Starbucks coffee shops are generic. Some of them
> have really nice layouts
It may just be one of the generics that you like - they have I think four different styles (not exact layouts, but upholstery themes).
Quite a good idea IMO - allows them to better fit the area as you say, also make two nearby shops a bit different, while also keeping all the benefits of a common theme(s): bulk buying, easy and fast replacement, maintaining brand, etc.
Coffee business is about margins though - as long as people kept buying $3.50 cups that cost 25c to make (excluding labor), it might have been a good business.
> B&N's coffee shop is a generic coffee shop. At my (now closed) local B&N, it was a Starbucks.
It's not really a Starbucks in the same sense as the standalone coffee shops of that name (nor is it specific to a particular local store); they've licensed the branding and beverage product line from Starbucks on a chain-wide basis (their food products are not Starbucks lines, but from other sources.)
They used to. From 1987 to 2010, B&N owned a mall bookstore chain called B. Dalton. There were in every mall, but then B&N decided they didn't need that market anymore, so they liquidated the stores and killed the Dalton brand.
There actually are a few full-size B&N stores in some malls, but only a few malls have them, and they're typically positioned as anchors.
To be fair, those B. Dalton stores were tiny. No way they could compete in the general-sales arena with so few shelves, when Amazon arrived with orders of magnitude more titles at lower prices and quick delivery, and drive-to or anchor bookstores were so nearby. They worked when bookstores were few and far between, and malls were the new place everyone went, but not when vast & cheaper alternatives arrived nearby and mall foot traffic turned to a less academic clientele.
I bought my first Goosebumps books at my local B. Dalton. I have no idea why they closed it...I felt like it was the perfect size. Or maybe that's just nostalgia talking.
> They used to. From 1987 to 2010, B&N owned a mall bookstore chain called B. Dalton. There were in every mall, but then B&N decided they didn't need that market anymore, so they liquidated the stores and killed the Dalton brand.
B Dalton was (as were other mall located bookstores at the same time) in decline when B&N bought them; the format was visibly on the way out even before online competition.
> - They place them poorly. B&N is perfect for foot traffic. But B&Ns are typically located as drive-up "out of town" shopping. Somewhere you need to go to intentionally. They need to be in malls.
There's slight confirmation bias as before 2011 it was Borders who would follow the Starbucks strategy for real estate - sign a lease on the place with the most foot traffic (in US it was typical to see Borders shops close to train stations, major urban shopping centers, malls, etc.)
Borders went bankrupt, and B&N is not that flush with cash to overtake their leases (which makes me wonder if expensive leases combined with relatively fixed margins on books are sustainable), but that was likely the reason B&N would not compete for prime real estate.
> The stores are too big. 1/2 of a B&N store is tat, reference books, niche stock, a Nook display area, and other nonsense. You could cut almost all B&N stores in half and not notice as a customer.
> They place them poorly. B&N is perfect for foot traffic. But B&Ns are typically located as drive-up "out of town" shopping. Somewhere you need to go to intentionally. They need to be in malls.
The smaller, mall-located brick and mortar bookstores were unsupportable even when B&N was doing well -- B&N even bought several of them and continued to operate them under their old names for a while, attempting to leverage connections to B&N's loyalty programs, online presence, and other relevant strengths to make them viable.
I think the theory here has been fairly well tested and proven false.
> The children's area is really nice, but poorly leveraged. No classes, no reading groups, no reason to come in. Stay at home parents WANT a reason to get out of the house, you offer a free reading group for small kids, the parents will buy the books after the group.
Most B&N's I've seen have events in the children's section; I just checked one of my local stores, and they have children's storytime weekly.
> Atmosphere in the coffee shop is bad. Waterstones feels like a nice little swanky coffee shop, somewhere you'd go and work on your novel, B&N's coffee shop feels like a generic coffee shop at the airport.
IME, "coffee shop atmosphere" varies considerably among B&Ns (for those that even have coffee shops).
> B&Ns has no brand, and keeps making it worse. 3D printers, toys, Nooks, what is it that B&Ns is? They're all over the place, and now when you go into a B&N store you'll never know what they'll be pushing this week.
I think B&N, like many stores, has decided that focusing on a narrow product range is less viable than targeting interests of a particular demographic. This is not a completely insane idea, but do I think Waterstones' strategy of keeping the book focus and letting each store target locally is better.
> I think the theory here has been fairly well tested and proven false.
Only if we assume that store size and location at the ONLY metrics used to determine success. Not atmosphere, product selection, store layout, consumer demand, competition, and price.
You cannot say for sure why that specific attempt failed. Nor can I.
Our local B&N is the size of Toys R Us (same plot), and while Toys R Us makes good use of their floor space, it feels like half of the B&N is populated (e.g. fiction section) while the other half is a desert wasteland (reference, Nook showcase, etc).
And considering how much rent costs around here, I can only imagine how much B&N could save by re-designing the stores into a smaller plot. Or heck move it into a plot with more foot traffic, and the same popular selection.
Back in the days when Borders was still around, I constantly found myself wishing there was some way to scan my member card or use an app to send books to my Kindle. There were so many times I'd find an interesting book while browsing, but avoid purchasing because I didn't want another book taking up space. Sometimes I'd make a note and buy it on Amazon later, but other times I would just forget.
> - The stores are too big. 1/2 of a B&N store is tat, reference books, niche stock, a Nook display area, and other nonsense.
That was the same with Waterstones. They just decided to kill all that stuff. None of the stores stocks any references or similar things.
I think Waterstones just generally benefits from having really good locations and tailoring them to the audience. But that requires good stores in the first place. Not every company has that luxury.
> They should have made an agreement with the publishers YEARS ago: When you buy a physical book, you get the Nook book included.
It's not for lack of trying, but publishers have to play ball. They've had a few programs where you could buy a physical book and pay $x extra for the ebook, but the process has been cumbersome and the publisher-set additional cost too high.
I've spent a lot of time in both B&N and Waterstones. B&N has a lot of problems Waterstones never had even ahead of bankruptcy:
- The stores are too big. 1/2 of a B&N store is tat, reference books, niche stock, a Nook display area, and other nonsense. You could cut almost all B&N stores in half and not notice as a customer.
- They place them poorly. B&N is perfect for foot traffic. But B&Ns are typically located as drive-up "out of town" shopping. Somewhere you need to go to intentionally. They need to be in malls.
- No good Nook tie-in for the stores. My SO often goes into B&N and looks at books, and then says "I'll buy it on my Nook later." They should have made an agreement with the publishers YEARS ago: When you buy a physical book, you get the Nook book included.
- The children's area is really nice, but poorly leveraged. No classes, no reading groups, no reason to come in. Stay at home parents WANT a reason to get out of the house, you offer a free reading group for small kids, the parents will buy the books after the group.
- Atmosphere in the coffee shop is bad. Waterstones feels like a nice little swanky coffee shop, somewhere you'd go and work on your novel, B&N's coffee shop feels like a generic coffee shop at the airport.
- B&Ns has no brand, and keeps making it worse. 3D printers, toys, Nooks, what is it that B&Ns is? They're all over the place, and now when you go into a B&N store you'll never know what they'll be pushing this week.
I think B&N will go under. I just don't think the management is very good, and every attempt they make to right the ship makes it worse. The whole business needs to be restructured.