(Too boring?) Barnes and Nobel commits retail suicide....

[Strelnikov]

....by firing all the full-time staff on Monday the 12th.

From this forum thread:

- Summer of last year, Barnes & Noble started testing a "ship-from-store" initiative, which means when a digital order comes in, instead of routing it to a warehouse, it gets routed to the nearest brick-and-mortar store, where one of the staff has to take the book off the shelves/out of the back, step off the selling floor, pack it up and send it out. This reduces the availability of stock and staff for customers in the name of "filling orders faster," and these sales are not credited to the brick-and-mortar store, the outlets upon which Barnes & Noble is based. No, those orders are still counted as digital orders, filled by the company in general. Naturally, store sales fall and layoffs are justified.

- Also last year, Head Office decided to start terminating positions, particularly head cashiers, receiving managers, and leads, but without layoffs. All current employees would be grandfathered in to the new organisational structure. Remember that.

- Holiday season of last year, Barnes & Noble reduced payroll so as to have cash in hand to look good to stockholders. "During December, staffing at most locations was no different than it would be on your average day in June." Receiving in particular had its payroll hours slashed, so sellable product instead sat unopened in boxes, buried under dozens or hundreds of other boxes, during the busiest season of the year. Naturally, sales suffered.

- Fast forward to Monday of this week, February 12th, when Barnes & Noble laid off nearly all of its full-time workers. Head cashiers, receiving managers, leads. Recognise those job titles? Yeah. The current head-count is about 1,800 layoffs, about 15% of the company. As a final twist of the knife, the company has not specified what many of these employees' severance packages will be, so until they do, those people can't file for unemployment.

Make no mistake, this is a point of no return. There is no recovering from this. New hires cannot do the job of a decade-plus veteran, especially not these jobs. They take experience and training which Barnes & Noble no longer has.

So, what idiot decided to do this? Whose bright idea was it to commit financial suicide? Well, it might have something to do with their revolving door of CEO's, usually with fat payouts to see them off, like Ronald Boire, who got about four and a half million dollars out of it after working there less than a year. For reference, that's more than a tenth of what the company saved through its layoffs - and half what was paid to the previous CEO when he left, also after less than a year.

You see, this isn't suicide. This isn't mismanagement. The executive of Barnes & Noble know exactly what they're doing. It's simply that "what they're doing" is no longer "trying to help the company."

This isn't mismanagement. This is stripping the corpse for organ sales - for make no mistake, Barnes & Nobles is now a corpse. It might stagger along for a bit longer, but the company is dead. It just hasn't been buried yet.

So, where does that leave book lovers in America? Well, if you're lucky you've got an independent retailer in your area that you can (and should) support. If you're lucky. Otherwise, you're basically just left with Amazon, who undercut bookstores by selling books at a loss and recouping the money with add-ons and other items.

Who wants to bet that practice'll stick around once they've established a near-monopoly on the US publishing industry?

[The End]

One of my hopes since I couldn't get an "in" in libraries was to find a job in a bookstore. Unfortunately, Amazon pretty much killed the bookstore. All that's left in my area is a used bookstore. Even the Christian bookstores are long gone. They didn't have a prayer.

I tried to apply to B&N years ago. I'm rather glad I never got a call back now, especially now that they've made it clear that there's no way to move up in their dying company. The nearest one is nearly 45 minutes away if you consider traffic. Then again, I'm working for a retail company that likes to publicly give us benefits, but then privately cuts hours and positions to make up for the profit loss. There's no winning.

[sashi]

I remember when we thought Barnes & Noble was the threat in the 90s, back when Ingram was growing into a monolith. I remember the owner of the independent bookstore, where I was lucky enough to have landed a job peddling the Sunday NYT and sending unsold books back to publishers, didn't much like the minimum wage hikes during that period. ^^ Still, I was happy to learn the place is still around more than twenty years later!

[Strelnikov]

I remember when we thought Barnes & Noble was the threat in the 90s, back when Ingram was growing into a monolith. I remember the owner of the independent bookstore, where I was lucky enough to have landed a job peddling the Sunday NYT and sending unsold books back to publishers, didn't much like the minimum wage hikes during that period. ^^ Still, I was happy to learn the place is still around more than twenty years later!

I remember reading columns in magazines like In These Times during the '90s about how Borders, Barnes & Nobel, and the other big-box bookstores were smashing up the independent bookstores. Like with the battle between steam and gasoline/diesel in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Amazon and eBay smashed the brick-and-mortar stores, though really it has been the victory of the catalogue business model (but the catalogue is a website and not a book) over the storefront retail model. For the good of American society, Amazon will have to be nationalized before it squeezes out all other competition in fifteen years.

[The End]

At least in my area, Barnes and Noble isn't even hiring "booksellers" (the ones who actually find and sell you the books) and they are focusing on part-time baristas. It's like it's more of a glorified Starbucks which happens to sell books. Most openings I'm seeing overall are for part-time baristas and part-time booksellers with only a handful of full-time assistant manager positions. That seems to me that there's no room to move up in the organization and not many people are going to stay long. That will kill a company in the long-run.

[Kumioko]

All they would have had to do was give the local store the credit for the sale, and that would have been fine. Now, they are basically cutting their own throats.

Is Jimbo on the board for B&N?

[sashi]

Amazon will have to be nationalized...

Do you think Amazonia will be on the Security Council as soon as it is gets itself all nationalized? (amazon.de, amazon.fr, amazon.co.uk, amazon.es)

[Strelnikov]

Amazon will have to be nationalized...

Do you think Amazonia will be on the Security Council as soon as it is gets itself all nationalized? (amazon.de, amazon.fr, amazon.co.uk, amazon.es)

The company is American, all the country codes are the outlets in foreign countries it works in. Either you nationalize it when it gets too huge or you do the dumb thing America did with Ma Bell and break AT&T (Amazon) up, which just meant that the machine re-assembled itself over the long run. Amazon is a gigantic beast now, "market forces" will not tame it.

Your choice.

[ericbarbour]

After Another Disappointing Quarter, B&N Unveils Turnaround Plan

Yeah, riiiight. (I'd link to the Financial Times article "Death by a thousand paper cuts" but it's buried behind their paywall. The future of the Web: give us access to your credit card or you get no useful content.)