Pickwick to B. Dalton to Barnes & Noble to Gone Forever.<\/p><\/div>\n

Nobody wants to look under the hood of the B & N engine, where you would find that the 8 cylinder engine is down to 4. For instance, in Southern California, they have closed many of their best store locations. Gone is B & N from Pasadena in the Old Town District, gone is B & N from the Encino area of Ventura Blvd. And don’t forget the huge loss they got when they bought B. Dalton books, which operated 798 stores in malls across America. Their mis-management closed all of them,<\/strong><\/em> including the big Hollywood Boulevard Store that was called Pickwick Bookshop that B. Dalton had bought. How soon you all forget the decades of bad management, probably over 1,000 stores closed, the thousands of employees laid off, the financial losses to shareholders, the mess with the European media giants in BarnesandNoble.com. The question is really: Was B & N a stock fraud for the last 20 years, or just the worst management ever seen?<\/p>\n

Barnes and Noble does a lot of things right. They have great selection. They have a nice clean website. They have a lot going for them with Nook, self-publishing, and many other strategies. They have nice Starbucks cafes, wi-fi, and good locations. So how can they improve and survive? Various articles point out the disaster from bad upper level management. Add to the list the recent dumb idea of in-store beer and wine restaurants.<\/p>\n

They can turn some things around by having more in-store celebrity author events, use video marketing on social media, live stream the events from their stores with easy ordering from home couch potatoes, and everything to get folks into the stores where impulse buys will help the bottom line. For the stay at home crowd, they should compete with amazon by selling used, rare and out of print books. They did this at one time, with thousands of great vendors who dropped shipped. The program could be re-started to compete with amazon. It went away due only to bad management at the top level. Amazon has a lot of flaws and weakness in the way they treat their vendors. By being fair, B & N could lure many thousands of them away from amazon and add a huge income stream. Forget the beer, go with the books.<\/p>\n

Amazon, which has a monopoly on used book sales in the U.S. and a stranglehold on new book sales, continues to erode sales at Barnes and Noble. Even President Trump has recently commented on amazon’s more than cozy deal with the U.S. Postal Service.\u00a0 What he failed to mention was not only does amazon get special postage rate deals, but it also has the post office delivering mail on Sundays in selected cities.\u00a0 This has got to be a loser for the Post Office, it totally obliterates the economy of scale needed for sustainability.\u00a0 What is interesting is to go way back in the history timeline to the 1950s.\u00a0 The Post Office delivered mail twice a day during the week in Los Angeles, and I assume, most other cities.\u00a0 What happened to that?\u00a0 We always think our civilisation as getting better every year, when the truth is far different.\u00a0 Not only has the Post Office deteriorated, closed thousands of offices, etc., but now they seem to be tied into a losing deal with the amazon monopoly.<\/p>\n

Let’s hope tha 2018 will bring some sanity back to the world. It’s just my opinion, but: Amazon is a monopoly and should be broken up.\u00a0 Google should be seized by the U.S. Government and the search engine made a national public utility.<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0 Barnes and Noble needs to get its act together, it has opportunities and possibilities, but the prognosis for them is somewhat grim.\u00a0 Happy New Year everyone!<\/p>\n

What do you think?\u00a0 Bookseller and Book Lover comments welcome!<\/p>\n

Update January 4th, 2018.<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS) today reported that total holiday sales for the nine-week holiday period ending December 30, 2017 as declining 6.4%.\u00a0 Comparable prior year store sales also declined 6.4% and online sales dropped 4.5%.\u00a0 The stock price tanked to $6.50 per share.\u00a0 A grim picture indeed.\u00a0 The question now becomes can Barnes & Noble survive at all?\u00a0 Is there even any time left for a new management turn-around plan?<\/p>\n

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