The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble - <AUTHOR> http://audreyii-fic.tumblr.com/post/170886347853/the-entirely-unnecessary-demise-of-barnes-noble <comment><USER4> I was out shopping 3-4 days before Christmas this year, and happened to be near a Barnes and Noble so figured I'd grab a copy of a magazine I've been wanting to read for a while.

Grabbed the magazine, wandered the aisles a bit and picked up another book then went to check out. Basically I was their marketing department's dream - walk-in traffic coming to buy something cheap and specific who made an impulse retail buy of a much higher margin item.

The checkout line was at least 50 people long and probably estimated at over an hour. Two cashiers working out of 8 or so possible registers, and as far as I could tell a singular employee on the floor itself.

I put my selections back and walked out the door. Granted it was near peak shopping season - but that was inexcusable. There were quite a lot of really pissed off looking people in that line.

So that is to say my experience lines up with the article. They entirely botched their Christmas season and it wasn't the employee's or consumer demand's fault. Just that one store bled hundreds of dollars in lost sales just from the 5 minutes I watched people walk in and immediately out after seeing the line.

<comment><USER5> >>Two cashiers working out of 8 or so possible registers

And the worst part about this is that each cashier seems determined to relentlessly pester me with annoying questions at the register! Did I want to join this loyalty program? Did I realize that I could save $5 by signing up for so and so. Do I want to get on the B&N mailing list? Really aggressive questioning.

Oh my God. I realize that the cashiers have been ordered to do this (I assume) but knock it off already! This is so consumer unfriendly. I just want to pay and go. I'm sure that this also delays checkout times significantly over the course of a day.

This is one of the main reasons I use Amazon when possible. Retail checkout in the US has become a one-way grilling. You end up leaving the store feeling like a murder suspect.

<comment><USER6> Not only are they ordered to do it but corporate puts requirements on the store as to how many joins they are expected to get each day, and cashiers have their own individual quotas and they get chewed out if they don't meet them by managers who get chewed out for not meeting them. The fact that this behavior reduces sales throughput, employee productivity, and customer satisfaction are not worked into the analysis that comes up with these programs or their growth targets. Upper management comes up with a target and they push their stores to meet it, because their CMO went to a conference where he was wined and dined by the company that sells the software to run the loyalty card system and believes their stats about how it saved company X and now that they've spent the money the ROI has to meet internal targets or risk embarrassing the CMO.

<comment><USER7> Sounds like a company that would keep such an executive on board deserves to fail.

<comment><USER8> Blaming the executive here makes sense. But saying the "company deserves to fail" ignores the livelihoods of everyone below that person in the hierarchy, who gets fired because mgmt has different incentives than the workers.

<comment><USER7> Perhaps if those lower in the hierarchy and society as a whole are constantly burned by businesses failing due to incompetent leadership, they might start to expect or demand something different. Socialism? Anarchy? Some kind of socially conscious capitalism? I don't know what form it will take, but it might be something different than what we have now.

<comment><USER9> Isn't "conscious capitalism" what's being sold to us since the 70's, through the "new spirit of capitalism" ?

Anyways props to ur comment hah

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Barnes and Noble did some dumb things as this article points out, but they are NOWHERE near what the CEO of Sears is doing. That is corporate malpractice, gross negligence, and perhaps high treason all rolled into one. Literally look up anything online for "Sears CEO is terrible" and you will get links from NY Times, WaPo, etc.

Also with BN, I mean they were going up against one of the biggest most powerful companies in human history. Their survival so far is impressive at least, and they did try with the Nook, but Amazon was always a software company so BN has a difficult and late challenge.

If anything, the best strategy for now with BN is to increase cash-flow, cut expenses, etc and wait for the legal and cultural environment to turn against some of the tech companies. Personally I don't think Amazon has done that much wrong, but I imagine they will suffer some collateral damage from the move against first, Facebook, followed by second Google. Although Google is smart and already broke themselves up years ago to avoid just this fate, Facebook is still in denial......

<comment><USER11> The Sears situation is just sad. I'm not sure why shareholders are putting up with it, except... most probably have just accepted the narrative that sears is dead, and are OK with the sell off and ... yeah, treason isn't a bad word. But... selling off assets you control to another company you also control would seem like... oh.. what's the term? Conflict of interest? I don't understand in the slightest why this has been allowed to go on. I can't imagine if, say, Target's CEO started cutting store budgets, then closing and selling the bad performing stores and real estate to another company the CEO owned, and then made a profit repurposing those stores to other companies. It's truly bizarre.

<comment><USER12> Sears was/is a total mess. Went there to buy something (before they closed the local store) and it took 10 minutes to checkout, with the clerk fumbling between the iPad, a CRT register, and credit card scanner. What a cluster F.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > The people who lost their jobs had been actively assured this would NOT > happen for the past several months.

My last employer did this. Not so much the _exact_ scenario, but they constantly assured us they were fully committed for the long-term to our satellite office that they opened. They went out of their way to reiterate this quite regularly and put a good of effort into it. Until one day they showed up and shut down the entire office.

I just don't understand _why_. Who treats people like that? It's not like these decisions just suddenly pop up out of the blue one morning and a decision to fire people has to be made immediately. Clearly companies have to mull over this type of stuff for quite some time. I don't understand why you reassure people like that only to completely up-end their lives. Knowing that B&N pulled this crap, I'll definitely be avoiding them moving forward.

So moral of the story is, when I company has to start assuring you that you _most definitely_ won't be let go any time soon, it's a pretty good indicator that it'll be happening very soon.

<comment><USER14> they do it so employees don't quit beforehand, so that they can keep using them to make money until the last second, while not giving them any opportunity to find a new job so they don't miss rent the week after they're fired

if it's not illegal it should be, and I'm sure there is some ground for a civil lawsuit in the fact they they assured them they would not lose their jobs, thereby costing them thousands in lost income when they're laid off and having nothing else lined up, in this case it could be a class action.

We have no compassion as a society anymore (if we ever had any), its been supplanted by greed.

<comment><USER15> There is such a law:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraining_Notification_Act_of_1988)

I'm not sure what the terms of these employee's termination actually is. The article leaves the impression that they were essentially tossed onto the street, but it could be that they were all given the required 60-day notice.

<comment><USER16> Or they can just say "try and sue us, we'll be in bankruptcy before you get the papers filed anyway".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I remember back when Circuit City fired all of its floor staff and replaced them with entry level (and bottom run wage) workers. Oddly, they went out of business not long after that.

You can't race to the bottom in retail, the bottom is already taken by walmart and online stores (like amazon). You can't be cheaper or more convenient, you need to offer something they don't. For bookstores that means you have to have good selection, a good environment, author signing/speaking events, and so forth.

The retail apocalypse is not being driven primarily by lack of revenue, there's plenty of meat on those bones for companies to survive on in perpetuity, and many continue to thrive. Rather it's being driven by poor business decisions. Hedge fund driven leveraged buyouts that load down retail chains with enormous levels of debt. Complicated expansion schemes designed to enrich some particular set of owners or executives at the cost of business health. And so on. B&N is just another example of how retail chains have becomes playthings for the business elite. Business fundamentals are irrelevant. The fate of the business itself or the workers are irrelevant. All that matters is how many golden eggs they can cut out of the goose's body before it dies.

<comment><USER18> I think your point about offering what your competitors are not is spot on: a hub that facilitates community and study, events with widely known authors and public figures, and so forth. Portland's Powells book store in the Pearl District nails this, with multiple stories of books that seemingly never end and centered right in the middle of the hustle and bustle of the city. I hope B&N replicates this because I would hate to see them go and it's why any book I buy is only from one of these chains.

<comment><USER19> I hate to rain on your parade but Powell's isn't exactly thriving. There were layoffs about 5 years ago and they've scrapped big renovation projects and even plans to move the main store because of revenue problems.

<comment><USER20> I think this is a very important point; independent bookstores in general aren't "thriving" in the normal Wall St sense of the word. I wonder: is their whole resilience is due to more of a downshift in expectations? I.e., earn enough to make a living but not to expand? To give your employees a liveable wage but no healthcare?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Yes this is creative destruction, but Amazon is able to sell at a loss because Wall St. sees the infinite dollar signs at the end of this road when they've literally killed off all competition. Selling at a loss is anti-competitive and should get them hammered by anti-trust, but somehow the US government has decided that, in this generation at least, monopolies are fine as long as they don't raise prices.

As a customer I like Amazon, but as a citizen they deeply worry me.

<comment><USER22> Does Amazon sell at a loss? I'm pretty sure they've been profitable for a couple years now. And how could Amazon be a monopoly? They have larger competitors.

<comment><USER23> Amazon has a certain side business that makes most of their profits.

<comment><USER22> That may be true, but their retail business still is profitable. Last year they made around $1 billion of profit from selling a lot of stuff ($120 billion in sales).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is the flip-side of creative destruction. Amazon and ecommerce in general have given us a world where brick and mortar retail often just can't compete. 99% of these layoffs and restructurings, etc. are just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. The writer of this article seems to think that the executives are just trying to milk the company all the way down, but it's not even clear to me there's a better option. You can't lose money indefinitely, you can't compete in the sector you grew huge in (because it's rapidly dying), and so what's the end game here? Yes, they could handle this better, and maybe they overpay their executives (although what experienced executive would even want this job unless the pay was awesome?), but this is just quibbling. Whether it happened now or happened in six months or two years, this is inevitable.

Now, it's definitely sad when people lose their jobs, but that's kind of the devil's bargain we've made with capitalism.

Some of the startups that grow out of HN will be in new sectors that only add to the economy, but many will replace, supplant, cannibalize, and dominate companies and industries that aren't strategically or operationally capable of adapting. That means a LOT of people are going to lose their jobs in the process.

It sucks, but I'm not sure there's a better option. Maybe the best we can do is try and structure a society where getting laid off from a decent job isn't so damaging and scary on a personal level.

<comment><USER25> > Now, it's definitely sad when people lose their jobs, but that's kind of the > devil's bargain we've made with capitalism.

It's not so much a "bargain" as it is how we discover which jobs are useful. Capitalism is very efficient at exposing useless labor, and this is a good thing. Having a bunch of humans laboring at jobs no one needs or wants is wasteful.

<comment><USER26> What is it wasteful of? What if someone working such a job feels better about being alive, because they have a role to fill in a community? Why is having people doing forms of "make work" worse than letting people waste away into despair? Would you feel good about having your aunt thrown to the curb, because she has no marketable skills?

The ideas of "efficiency" as they are used in economic theory are very narrow, and reflect a technical understanding of a vastly over simplified model of reality. Such models do provide insight into real life, but they are analytical tools, nothing more.

Economics, as field of study, has a big problem with the concept of "value." The price of things tends to stand in for the value of things, as it is easily measured.

You don't have to look hard to see the absurdity of taking this compromise too far. Look at military spending. Since dollars are spent buying a weapon, and workers get paid, profits are made, the "value" of the sale gets added into GDP. Then we take that missile, and blow it up. If we kill our enemies, then maybe one could say we got our money's worth. If we kill only innocents, then I see it as more of an "anti-value." What if it just blows up in the desert, and makes a multi-million dollar hole in the sand? Sort of a modern, high tech version of paying one group of workers to dig holes, and another to fill them in, is it not?

<comment><USER25> > Why is having people doing forms of "make work" worse than letting people > waste away into despair?

How would you suggest choosing who gets to do the "make work" versus who must toil away at the necessary? How would you suggest compensating those whose work is more vanity than value if no one pays them for their output?

<comment><USER26> If someone is lacking marketable skills, and is forced to take a "make work" job, I would hardly call that a "vanity" project.

This was done in the Great Depression, to try and keep the economy going.

There are ways to create work that is valuable, but the market value is below what anyone can afford to live on. So the government could subsidize salaries, in addition to hiring people.

Getting back to my comment about military spending: I see it as a destructive waste. How does that get decided? It's decided by people operating in a complex political-financial-industrial-military complex.

If we, as a society, can decide to waste lives and wealth on idiotic military action, we can decide to spend wealth on helping our own citizens.

That's all government spending.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> If management is assuring you repeatedly that there will be no layoffs, it's a good sign that layoffs are coming.

If management is assuring you repeatedly that specific people will not be laid off, it's a good sign that those people will be laid off.

At least this is what always seems to happen, IME.

<comment><USER28> I will never understand why people become loyal to their employers. You can be proud of your work, career, without being married to your employer.

This is the inevitable conclusion to a bookstore competing against Amazon, but they still act surprised...

<comment><USER29> A long history of good things adds up in one's mind. If your employer has benefited you, it's hard to maintain a mentality of pure rational self- interest.

<comment><USER30> Yep. Some employers are really good to their employees, even if they do layoffs and downsizing. One place I worked had an employee with terminal cancer, in the later stage he told them he'd never be able to come back to work but they kept him on the payroll anyway so he didn't lose his health insurance, right up until the day he died. Doesn't mean they didn't also close unprofitable locations and lay employees off sometimes too.

Businesses are cold-hearted machines, but they are staffed by humans. And sometimes those humans make good decisions.

<comment><USER31> And until this is not the exception but the rule, we continue to be amazed by stories like this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Taking a thought from another thread...

What if B&N merged with wework?

Wework just bought meetup.com - now you have more locations for meetups. B&N often has pretty good locations, and covers areas of the country wework doesn't akready have prescence. There's already a coffee shop built into B&N

If you implemented a cashierless checkout process, and had ship from location, you now can compete with Amazon, and the retail prescence is an attractor for weworkers and meetups.

I'm not sure of the B&N commercial real estate holdings, but wework seems to be all into that.

Of all the possible fates of B&N - If I saw that happen, I'd be be pretty pleased with it.

<comment><USER30> Remote working spaces have amazing untapped potential IMO. Right now they're mostly concentrated in downtowns of major metro areas which might be nice for the heavily concentrated populations living there, but sucks for anyone in residential neighborhoods outside of the downtown core. Take Chicago for example: there are six WeWork locations within 200 miles of the city, and the furthest distance from one to the other is less than 2 miles. If you live in Schaumburg or Skokie or Aurora or Joliet, to get to your closest "office" you have to commute downtown just like everyone else, every morning and back home every evening. And in my metro area of 1.5m, there are no WeWork locations at all, the closest is over three hours away. There are some other co-working locations in my city's downtown, but I don't want to commute downtown every day.

I think there's potential for co-working spaces in residential or suburban areas, but it's a smaller market so it'd be pricey... unless you already own space in the suburbs. Like Barnes and Noble does. And they already have Starbucks available at most of them, and many of them are in areas with plenty of food choices around for lunch. Many of them are near plazas with nice places to walk and get some fresh air.

We're just getting started with co-working spaces, there's a lot of untapped potential in smaller markets yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Amazon's primary customer has shifted to the 3rd-party seller, i.e., it's not profit off water coolers that allows low prices.

Looking at Amazon's financials, they make more profit off of selling advertising (lightning deals, search ads & "related" sponsored listings) than margin off sales.

It really shows when you look at the lightning deals and find product after product with artificially inflated reviews. Amazon has zero interest in fixing this because customers are its product not its customers.

Hard to see how a traditional retailer can begin to compete with this.

<comment><USER19> > Amazon has zero interest in fixing this because customers are its product > not its customers.

If you think 3rd party sellers are Amazons customers and get much better treatment than end buyers, boy are you barking up the wrong tree.

<comment><USER33> Not just any 3rd party seller, only the ones willing to systematically spend ad dollars to promote products.

But even non-spending sellers send a lot of transaction revenue Amazon's direction. You don't get good treatment however because you're a disposable commodity. Treating you well doesn't increase revenue.

<comment><USER34> Yeah, they have no trouble finding the next person in line or cutting their own deal to replace the supply they have kicked off for anything remotely high volume.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I likes this article. This point, though, seemed off:

 _I would double-down on what we can offer that Amazon can't: enthusiastic staff that can find and upsell books..._

But it's already been proven, sort of, that this isn't what people want, at least in sufficiently large numbers. That kind of underscores the difficulty of recovering this franchise.

<comment><USER36> "... find and upsell books"

What can be easier than using the Amazon search bar? And as far as upwelling goes, Amazon's ML-driven 'suggestions' algorithm results often seem to interest me.

<comment><USER37> For the books you already know you want, I agree that Amazon is hard to beat. However, it's hard to replicate the "discoverability" of a brick and mortar bookshop. Even without having a specific title in mind, I can always find something that looks interesting, just by walking around. Sometimes a blurb on the cover draws me in, sometimes it's a recommendation by the staff, and sometimes seeing a title or author jogs my memory.

Meanwhile, logging into my Amazon account recommends several books (out of order) in a series, some updated versions of textbooks I once bought, and a few titles I recognize from the NYT best seller list but have no interest in. Since I recently bought one, there are also a good dozen screwdrivers for what Amazon assumes is my burgeoning collection of flatheads.

Also, books don't cost very much, but they are a big investment in terms of time. Thumbing through the actual book is a great way to make sure you like your prospective purchase. This isn't quite the same online—Look Inside is carefully metered out so you can maybe get a sense of the books style and level, but it's often not enough to draw me in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Reading that Storytime guy's tweet, I really wondered:

Has this guy never taken a look at his situation and noticed something off?

He works in a relaxing huge retail store reading books to kids for free, and makes above min wage and keeps his job for the next 20 years and supports 5 kids???

That's insane, and completely abnormal. No one else with that same type of job has that kind of life.

It reminds me of someone I know who lived in an in-law with no rent control and no law against eviction, for 15 years, paying 60% of market rate. And then was completely stunned and devastated when the landlord gave 60 day notice. Really???

<comment><USER39> Your comment is so uniformed. Relaxing? The guy is a receiving manager. That's a physically tough job, requires a high level of organization, and he still takes time to help on the book floor by doing storytime.

A receiving manager at B&N makes around $15-17/hour. If his partner works, that's a reasonable enough amount of money to live, but not in a high COL location. How is this abnormal?

What's abnormal is thinking that this is abnormal. $35k/year isn't a high salary.

<comment><USER20> I couldn't agree more with this. I think it's the OP that hasn't taken a close enough look at the B&N employee's "situation" and just spouted off an opinion.

<comment><USER38> I just said that guy had an abnormally great situation compared to most retail jobs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> 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.

<comment><USER41> 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.

<comment><USER42> Ironically, Amazon Books stores have big floor area for electronics.

<comment><USER41> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> The thing that frustrates me most about the slow, drawn out demise of first Borders and now Barnes & Noble is that there has never been a bold vision for the future. The mega-bookstore was a great model in the 1990s, but post- Internet, they really needed to leverage their space to do something magical.

One idea I would have loved: Browse your books in store, but buy them for Nook or Kindle -- at the same prices you pay on Amazon. Maybe that's even a loss leader and you upsell $5 lattes.

Or perhaps they double-down on really awesome kids sections, where you want to try out a book on you kid before buying. Or maybe they aim to make the store more like a "community center" and build in meeting rooms, or make certain stores specialized in a particular topic (e.g. the "tech" store downtown).

But running the same, tired playbook year after year ultimately is, just as the author suggests, a way for current executives to milk the cow until it falls over. I hope when my son is old enough to enjoy sitting down to read on his own, I'll still have a nice book store to enjoy with him.

<comment><USER44> Great idea. Don't carry physical books at all; maybe just a postcard-size flyer to advertise a particular text. Buy the postcard--which could be signed by the author--and get a code to download the book. Turn the spaces into, a la FNAC, exhibition spaces, deliberately permitting 'cataloging' of similar products.

Keep in mind that the publishers don't really have skin in the game. Theirs, at least in the U.S., is wholly a consignment business.

Put in an Espresso Book Machine for those who want paper copies.

Make the stores membership only: blend bookstores and libraries. Offer an experience not obtainable elsewhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I feel for the grown man who dresses up in costumes to read stories for children. I respect him. And yet if there were some subjective corporate performance metrics he had to game to keep his job, I think other employees may know how to work the system better than him. A lot of the best employees are bad at office politics, because they simply love what they do. If there's something to be said about mass-layoffs, it's that they're maybe better than targeted and subjective firings.

I think B&N was a wonderful place and concept while the underlying forces were working: it seems like a lot more people want to work with books than there are/were jobs at Independents or Libraries, and B&N got them into a business with the cashflow to support dozens of people on the floor. Are there enough jobs in the brick and mortar book business for everyone without B&N? Probably not right now, but there might be a new franchise concept at some point? Time for one of these people to start it.

</comment><comment><USER46> It would probably help some if their website didn't GIVE YOU LINKS to places you can buy the book you are looking at for less.

I was looking up a book I'm thinking of buying, and right below the customer reviews section on the page they have a Google ads block, and the first ad was for the book at thriftbooks.com. The ad touted it for cheap used there, but clicking it also shows they have it new, too, for $25 (B&N online price is $30).

Below that is another block of Google ads with pictures of the book and links to other sellers. Those ads show the new price right in the ad. Two are $25 (the aforementioned thriftbooks.com and biblio.com) and two are more than B&N's price.

WTF? Why would they do this?

PS: Here's a picture showing this: [https://imgur.com/a/Pg5eL](https://imgur.com/a/Pg5eL)

<comment><USER39> I can't reproduce this on any browser...

<comment><USER46> If you have a decent ad blocker, it blocks those. I only get them if I turn off uBlock Origin.

<comment><USER39> Wow, you're correct. Yet another example of the stellar leadership from Riggio...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> >As a side note: people often want to know why Amazon's prices are so much lower than B&N's, and why B&N doesn't price match. There's a lot of different reasons, but the biggest is that Amazon loss-leads their books: that is, sells them at a loss, then makes up the money with expensive add-ons, like Echos or Kindles or other non-book stuff.

Well no, Kindles are breakeven and Amazon makes it up by selling more books (digital ones with good margins though)

</comment><comment><USER48> Barnes and Noble had a huge high-margin section, just like Best Buy did... their ridiculous physical video and music section. I think the availability of streaming services did as much to hurt those "book" stores as reasonable competition from Amazon.

<comment><USER49> Is best buy going out of business too? I had a surreal experience while trying to buy a camera lens at Best Buy. The employee in the camera section first directed me to phone camera addons (cool, but not what I wanted) then once explained that I wanted camera accessories (I gestured like I was taking a picture) I was eventually lead to the camera section. I was able to find the Nikon lenses eventually, and the employee returned... I was hoping he'd explain to me what lens would be good for zooming in, but instead he fiddled with the floor model until he managed to take a picture with it, showed me the picture and said, triumphantly, "camera." I gave up and left.

<comment><USER20> I was wondering about Best Buy too. Does anyone know what's going on with them?

Last I heard (2017), they were trying hard to be more "on-demand" in response to Amazon. They were quite fully aware of people "demoing" items in store and buying them online, so they dropped prices and updated their e-commerce. If it worked is a separate question entirely...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I can see how the author views this as company mismanagement, but I'd offer a possible counter:

Online is killing retail, full stop. High touch sales models everywhere have lost profitablity due to "showrooming" \-- curation and upselling aren't profitable for B&N, and they won't ever be again. To adapt, management needs to move to a lower touch model based on thin margins, web sales, and simpler stores. To do this, they need cash and they need to make staff cuts.

Everything in the article fits perfectly with this course of action.

<comment><USER51> Except, you know, lying about the upcoming layoffs.

<comment><USER52> That fits in just fine with the above, at least as far as my understanding of businesses and what their goals are is...

</comment></comment></comment><comment> grey-area The industry is experiencing a secular decline.

There is no way back to profit for booksellers and publishers, because fewer people are buying paper books, nowhere near enough to sustain the existing industry, and authors can simply publish direct via schemes like Amazon. They've tried overpricing ebooks, taking things off Amazon, setting up their own online readers/stores (nook). Every publisher is now having real trouble making money, every bookseller also, and significantly cutting jobs - <USER2> industry is being turned upside down at every level and no-one except some big brand name authors has a viable business model. Those that are not affected because they live in a profitable niche like academic publishing will meet the same challenges soon, because they are driven by the introduction of computers and the internet, which has radically changed how people write, and how they read.

Of course the management handled this incredibly badly, and have extracted huge fees for passively overseeing the death of the company, and the story is correct in saying it is not bleeding out, but the demise of Barnes and Noble and other booksellers like it is not, it is the inevitable consequence of the shift of content online, and the huge and ongoing disruption across a range of industries that the internet and free copying of information has brought.

Ironically this may lead in the short term to the resurgence of small bookstores who sell second hand copies of books, at least until a generation grows up which has never bought a paper book, just as they have never bought a paper newspaper or magazine. But in the long term I think new mediums will arise more suited to the medium of production and transmission - now everyone in the world can access the store of the world's knowledge in their hand, mostly for free and share their thoughts with others, again for free - <USER3> will radically change our perception of culture, and our consumption and production of stories, so the disruption is just beginning.

<comment><USER53> Book sales are increasing in the UK and US

[https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/books/dat...](https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/books/datablog/2017/mar/18/the- fall-and-rise-of-physical-book-sales-worldwide-in-data)

<comment> grey-area I've worked in the publishing industry in the UK - it is experiencing long term decline. To illustrate this, see the multitude of publishers merging, cutting staff and closing imprints. Very few publishers are making money any more. The story is the same for bookstores - there is one significant UK-wide chain now (Waterstones).

The article you cite doesn't even show healthy figures - it shows a bump in 2015, then fall to almost zero growth in 2016 for the UK, and a dramatic decline in growth for the US from 2015 to 2016. Hardly signs of a healthy industry. This is just the kind of cherry-picked data the industry has been deluding itself with for years. The figures produced by the industry are unreliable, and the interpretation of those is equally suspect, as evidenced by the article you've found. They've tried to manipulate stats by doing things like pricing ebooks higher or just below physical books for example.

Barnes and Noble will close soon (as this article predicts), as will all the other big brick and mortar booksellers, and soon after that mass-market paper books are doomed as Amazon has little incentive to promote them over ebooks, and no interest in sustaining publishers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Why all the fuzzy love for Barnes and Noble? They intentionally destroyed independent bookstores in many places with their superstores. Good riddance!

<comment><USER55> I think it's because the implicit value is:

Independent booksellers > B&N > Amazon

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> My wife has worked for B&N for 21 years. I met her there, and worked there for a bit over a year. I've followed this company since then, and the amount of sheer stupidity exhibited by upper management is astounding. Decisions from the regional and main corporate offices that were just amateurish. Money wasted, time wasted, people wasted. I'm amazed they've lasted this long.

<comment><USER56> Any examples?

<comment><USER39> Around 2000-2002, you could walk into most B&N stores and find nice comfortable chairs to sit in. These chairs encouraged book lovers to grab a book, sit down, read a few pages, and actually enjoy the book buying experience. So what did B&N do over the next couple of years? Get rid of the comfortable chairs, and replace them on a 1:2 basis with hard, uncomfortable wooden chairs. Then slowly phase these chairs out completely.

This did a couple of things; discourage people from reading books on the book floor, while encouraging them to read in the Cafe, where the books and magazines get damaged easily. But the core idea of having an inviting bookstore died that year.

Another issue was the Cafe relationship with Starbucks. The Cafe's use Starbucks components, and often follow their recipes. They have tons of "Starbucks" branding as part of this relationship. BUT you can't use a Starbuck giftcard at a B&N Cafe. Try explaining this to someone who received a giftcard over the holidays. They order a coffee after waiting in line, and get hassled about the form of payment. It wouldn't have been hard for B&N management to work out a deal with Starbucks for handling these cards, but B&N never did.

Also, bookstores have the ability to send a majority of their inventory back to the publisher (yeah, crazy legacy stuff). Inventory levels are largely decided by Corp HQ yet despite modern inventory mgmt software being a thing, they continually botched it. So you would get huge shipments. Then when cash flow for the company would get tight, they'd have you pull the books off the shelves and send them back to the publishers. This would be a continual process that consumes tons of time, time that would be better spent on customer service.

Corp HQ would also decide to change the store layout frequently. The staff would pack up all the Sci-Fi/Fantasy books, move them to a completely different part of the store. Customers would come in, head to their favorite section, and be flummoxed. Since so many labor hours were spent doing this type of thing, (and the aforementioned book pulls), there weren't as many employees on the book floor to help. I called it the Titanic chair shuffling...

Staffing levels were always a problem. On busy holiday weeknights, you might have 4-5 people working. One manager, one head cashier, two in the cafe, and one on the book floor. Employees need breaks, so often you would end up with one cashier, and one person on the book floor. If you get a rush of people, that line at the register can get awfully long. B&N only pays lip service to the customer experience.

A lot of these types of decisions add up overtime to create a crappy customer experience. B&N never could compete with Amazon on pricing, and never should have. They should have embraced the book buying experience, and made customers love coming in. But that's a long long game to play, and their management made continually bad choices (like Nook) that distracted them, took capital they didn't have, and confused customers.

<comment><USER56> Thank you for such a detailed response!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> a-nikolaev Just wanted to say that in NYC, the quality of book selection at Barnes and Noble is just amazing. In my opinion, it's way better then the hyped Strand, for example. So, maybe, go to your local B&N some time and just buy a book? Support brick-and-mortar bookstores, while we haven't succumbed to Amazon just yet.

<comment><USER46> It would help with this if B&N would fix their website to make it less annoying to try to find out what is at your local store.

Suppose there are several books you are thinking of buying. You want to know which of those are at your local B&N. You go to their website and search for the first book. On the book's page you click the "Check Store Availability" link.

That pops up a form to enter your zip code. You do, and it brings up a pop up that shows the availability of the book in the nearest few stores.

So far so good.

Now you want to check the second book. You find its page, click the store check link. And you get the zip code pop up again...and it isn't even smart enough to pre-fill the zip code. You have to enter it again!

This is just irritating.

At the very minimum it should pre-fill the zip.

Better would be to skip that pop up completely if it already knows the zip and go straight to the results. This would not inconvenience people who want to change the zip to check a different area's stores, because the results pop up has a zip entry field for doing that.

Better than that would be to, once it has the zip, automatically show on the book pages whether or not they are available in nearby stores.

Even better than that would be to also put that on the search results pages and on the browsing results pages, like Best Buy does. At Best Buy it tells me right there if it is available for pick up today at my local store. If not, it tells when it can be if I order online for local pick up.

Once they do all that, they should add a way to filter results to only show locally available items. Best Buy again is a good example. On search and browsing pages, there is a tab that limits it to only items you can pick up today in your local store.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Barnes and Noble and Borders effectively destroyed the independent book stores of the nation, because at the time they had a better business model. I don't have a lot of sympathy for their business model getting the same treatment from the internet sales model.

</comment><comment><USER58> So the bigger question, if this trend continues and B&N goes the way of Borders ... what happens to all your Nook purchases?

I only have 2 or 3, but I feel like I need to figure out how to rip the DRM off and export all my highlights/notes sooner rather than later.

<comment><USER59> I've heard from friends that [https://calibre-ebook.com](https://calibre- ebook.com) is the "go to" solution for this kind of thing

<comment><USER60> Calibre is fantastic, and open source too! It's primary a library management system with all the features you could ask for, but there are also open source plugins to remove DRM that make it a go-to for creating libre libraries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> That was seriously well written.

I don't normally read Tumblr posts but the pacing and the way they peppered the images throughout; very well-made piece.

</comment><comment><USER62> 'The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act of 1988 (the "WARN Act") is a US labor law which protects employees, their families, and communities by requiring most employers with 100 or more employees to provide 60 calendar-day advance notification of plant closings and mass layoffs of employees, as defined in the Act.'

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraining_Notification_Act_of_1988)

It's sad that old-school books are dying. I love books, especially older hard cover books; but, if you know your business and industry are dying, then you owe it to your team who got you there to engineer a soft landing. That's simply the ethical thing to do.

<comment><USER63> "The WARN Act also is not activated when the following coverage thresholds are unmet:

If a plant closing or a mass layoff results in fewer than 50 workers losing their jobs at a single employment site;"

<comment><USER62> Good catch, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> A sidenote in the article, but I'd like to know why people think that Amazon treats books as a loss-leader... Last I checked in tech news, it was the common assumption that Amazon retail in general has razor-thin margins or might even be losing money, but AWS was making money hand over fist.

</comment><comment><USER65> Bezos cheerleaders and their ilk never seem to be willing to acknowledge that creating wealth is much harder than extracting it, and either out of bad faith or naivety will misidentify ventures that specialize in the latter as being exemplars of the former. In this case, we have the incalculable loss of so many person-years of experience in a deep topic, literature, that's being shrugged away as a case of the market moving on in a post facto justification of the actions of some corporate raiders that never even considered alternatives beyond stripping a company of its assets for their own sake. I just wish we could be honest about what actual competition, what actual wealth creation, looks like, because this isn't it.

<comment><USER66> What experience in literature are you referring to? Do many people ask Barnes and Noble employees for book recommendations?

<comment><USER65> Well, that's the point of the article, isn't it? The long-time employees that were laid off were almost certainly there out of love of their wares, and the parent business could have put the work into making value out of that distinguishing fact. But beyond that, they had institutional knowledge, both of how the business works and what their customers want. I know it's hard to imagine that retail work could involve any amount of skill or knowledge, but this is no doubt a loss of value.

<comment><USER52> > and the parent business could have put the work into making value out of > that distinguishing fact

The fact that you can easily make vague pontifications about what else they might have done doesn't mean that any of those things are actually viable for the business.

> I know it's hard to imagine that retail work could involve any amount of > skill or knowledge, but this is no doubt a loss of value.

But probably not enough value to be worth keeping them on staff, unless they did the layoffs on whim, like you seem to think. It is possible that they examined a lot of scenarios and are privy to a fair amount of relevant details to which the public isn't.

<comment><USER67> It seems to have worked to Waterstone's in the UK, which was similarly on the point of death, and recently managed to return to profit with that sort of strategy. [https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/03/balancing- the-...](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/03/balancing-the-books- how-waterstones-returned-to-profit)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> When B&N decided not only not to compete with Amazon on books ("No, we will not price match these books". "Pay money to join our club to get a discount") but become a wacky showroom of wacky products ( sushi making kit, anyone? Would you like a reading lamp? Oh, wait, no, it is not a reading lamp, it is just a lamp that you could use for reading. How about our Nook thing? Not that we can run anything electronic ) it signed its own death sentence.

B&N stores were overstaffed.

</comment><comment><USER69> (Taking the article at face value for the sake of argument.)

I have to imagine there's going to be a smarter way to finance and manage companies that don't have huge growth prospects. Sure, creative destruction and all that, but isn't there some size at which a bookstore works profitably?

So figure out that size, which is maybe smaller but still a chain, and get organized around that concept. Is that unrealistic somehow? Does it really need to be financed in public markets?

</comment><comment><USER70> I'll be sad to see my local B&N disappear, but it's not unexpected: the writing has been on the wall for years. I generally hang out in the cafe, drink coffee, read magazines. If I see a book I like, I'll probably buy it on Amazon.

</comment><comment><USER71> Did retail ever deserve to live anyway? What kind of life and satisfaction does one get by selling someone else's work? It's easy, low skill and is just plain 'busy work'. Perhaps we are entering the golden age where one's worth is more closely related to the value they add to other peoples lives through their real work as human beings - not as middle men (middle people?) The trades for example are thriving. The food industry is burgeoning. Tourism is growing.Good riddance to mind numbing dehumanizing work - the assembly line, the stock clerk, the delivery person.

</comment><comment><USER72> The real tragedy here is that US has laws which allow employers to fire someone on the spot. What a travesty - 20 years at work and they can get rid of you in a day? Just wow.

<comment><USER12> Legally, there is a difference between layoff and fire. Depends on the state, but employers of a certain size have to give warning that a layoff is coming. The article says they were given notice their positions were going away; that is probably legally enough. Even firing requires documented poor behavior.

<comment><USER73> From what I understand, this wasn't considered a mass layoff because each site only lost a handful of workers. The definition of a mass layoff according to the law is that the "mass" applies to each site that experiences layoffs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> Our local B&N lost me when they eliminated the "New Releases" section of science fiction & fantasy novels.

</comment><comment><USER75> It's time for BN to suck it up and put signs around the store saying 'Found a book you love here but are choosing to buy it from a competitor? Please use our referral code: xyz".

</comment><comment><USER76> The writing is on the wall for Barnes and Noble, and I can't help but see what they've done here as mirroring what Circuit City did just before they shut everything down. IIRC, they ditched their most experienced sales-people, who were also the highest paid, and not soon there-after, they were done.

That said, I don't entirely agree with the assessment of the author. She _sounds_ like one of the employees that was let go and her view of things might be colored by that. She seems to be over-valuing the contribution these employees made to the bottom line of the business. She may or may not be right; I can't, personally, speak to that -- where I live, there hasn't been a Barnes & Noble nearby in a long time. In fact, the place I work is _located on the second floor of what once was a Barnes & Noble_. When there _was_ one a couple of miles from my home, I rarely purchased anything from them other than coffee.

This is anecdotal, of course, but I don't know that pulling employees from the floor and putting them to work boxing and shipping orders from the store was such a bad idea. If it did, indeed, decrease shipping time and costs, it would have been a _fine_ use for that staff assuming they could find enough people to buy books online when those people could often save money at Amazon. In the _decades_ that I did spend time at Barnes & Noble, my interactions were limited to the "kinda-Starbucks" folks and the (rare) store teenage cashier. Maybe I am a very specific customer[0]; I went there because of the selection of obscure programming books. I'd often need something not available at my library. They'd have a few options and I wanted to review them before having the library order it.

I buy the argument that it's not necessarily Amazon that was B&N's downfall -- it hurt, a lot, I'm sure and I know former B&N customers who now exclusively purchase via Kindle -- but there are a lot of people like me, who didn't buy books from _either_ place. In a twist of irony, I own a second-generation Nook with the e-paper/color screen. I have never owned a Kindle.

Here's my take on where B&N fell over:

(1) Failure to recognize who the competition actually was. Amazon needn't be mentioned; it's obvious. But the big one for me was my local home-town library. They are just as close, a little bigger, just as nice (sans Fivebucks coffee), but I don't have to spend _anything_ there and being a speed reader (skim/scan style, not the gimmicky nonsense), I get through my book during the borrowing window. They also have an automated self-checkout and self-dropoff, so I wait in far fewer lines. So I'm already inconvenienced by having to _gasp_ drive somewhere, but my library handles the experience _entirely better_.

(2) Very expensive real-estate: I mentioned that my employer is in a former Barnes & Noble location. Our office is in an incredibly desirable area. I have no idea what the cost is, but I know that homes with fewer bedrooms than I have and half the square footage go for twice the price of my home (and homes just a few miles up the road) in _less_ desirable parts of this suburb. The stores are very pleasant to be in, with expensive furnishings in expensive, convenient areas. These things don't come cheap. There's a reason the mom-and- pop book-sellers are located on the dumpier side of town, often have "use other door" signs posted on 8.5x11 paper with ink-jet Comic Sans all caps print and the books are jammed together on shelves stacked floor to ceiling separated by aisles that are barely large enough to meet ADA requirements... books are low-margin items. Every time I visited a Barnes and Noble for Fivebucks coffee I wondered how, on earth, they stayed in business.

(3) Staffing costs had to be high. Ignoring the whole thing about the CEO and executives making stupid amounts of money[1], the staff requirements to provide the level of customer service required of those customers who _do_ need help, especially those who purchased a Nook and mistakenly thought that driving over to B&N would be helpful in solving their problems, is impossible to do profitably. And I don't think that the quality of their staff would have been the same as the mom-pop bookstores described in point #2. The few mom/pops that I've been to are staffed by book-obsessed individuals; those individuals are often also the owners of the place, and the owners of the place are often the only employees. Thinking back about a decade, when I last went to a B&N, I'm not _entirely_ sure that I _never_ needed help, but I am sure that I _never_ received any. I don't ever recall seeing an employee anywhere _other_ than at the coffee shop or behind the counter ringing people up. Where they _had_ employees, they had to _few_ of them. It always took _forever_ to get out of there with a (rare) purchase; even a (less rare) coffee purchase. I think they are the record holder for me of saving me money through waiting . . . how bad did I want that coffee? 15 minutes, bad? Or that 2600 magazine that had the cool payphone photo that I wanted to keep; do I really want to wait in line behind those 9 other people for the one cashier who's ringing everyone up in their (pointless) common-feeder line?

(4) Inventory costs had to be high. I went to B&N _only because I knew they had a huge selection_ , yet I rarely purchased anything from that selection[2]. I would have never walked _into_ the store if they didn't have that selection, though. It's a _lot_ easier for Amazon to handle that problem. My local library, as well, is _massive_ and actually larger than the B&N was (though they had a more limited programming book selection). Back to point #1, their competition has far fewer difficulties doing what they do.

Of the problems I can see, fixing any of the bottom three would be customer- hostile in (probably) equal ways -- different impacts, but would take enough away that they'd lose a lot of business. Staffing -- the third -- is the only one that can be done quickly and have an immediate impact on the bottom line. The problem, though, is that it's like borrowing money at a higher interest rate to pay off debt[3]. They'll lose high- and probably medium-maintenance customers, and they'll lose customers sympathetic to the employees' circumstances which will drive them into cutting more. It's a downward spiral and they're so close to the bottom, I don't see them having a chance at this point.

[0] Generally, I ended up there in search of books related to programming, networks and other computing topics. They had the largest selection and I could crack the books open and see if they were worth burning the time on, which I would often then do in their coffee shop over a few weekend days. I'd occasionally look over the fiction titles under topics I like, but I don't read fiction, I listen to it and I generally did that by grabbing the CDs or ( _gasp_ ) tapes from the library.

[1] I'm not disagreeing; it's absurd given that they're failing at their actual job, it's just obvious enough, IMO, that it doesn't require more detail.

[2] PSA- I feel that way about Microcenter, somehow they have almost everything that I can find on Newegg, and they manage to be nearly competitive, price-wise, with them. I don't want them to vanish, though, so I make it a point to do as much of my geek spending there, in-store, even if they are a little pricier; plus ... instant gratification is nice.

[3] Or, as is said all too often by people who aren't thinking about what it is they're actually saying, the equivalent to "digging yourself out of a hole".

</comment><comment><USER31> Anyone know the source of that awesome breakdown of comp for the execs? That is, I know it's from the filings, but it's a pain to manually assemble, so that's a powerful image...

</comment><comment><USER77> Building a cash reserve in the business is important, if you're hoping to sell the business in a leveraged buy-out.

Basically, someone buys B&N by using the B&N cash-at-hand as collateral.

</comment><comment><USER78> The one in Bethesda, Maryland, is closing. Whenever I have looked in--usually because I'm in Bethesda to see a movie or to take my car to the dealership--it has been busy.

</comment><comment><USER79> I think many people tend to grossly overestimate the profit levels of large companies. Let's take Amazon since they're arguably the reason for the failure here and a company I think many perceive to be lush with money largely because of 'greed.' It also hits on notions from this paper like companies just not hiring enough employees, even if only at certain times.

Amazon currently grosses $178 billion. However, their net income is what matters. That's what's left over after paying cost of goods, salaries, rent, taxes, and so on. Basically what's left over after the mandatory expenses to keep your company running. And that's only $3 billion. 'Only' sounds funny preceding $3,000,000,000 and is undoubtedly what leads to complaints against Amazon (and here as well) that they're just being greedy, not paying employees enough, and so on.

But that's not really accurate. Amazon has 566,000 employees. If they gave each employee a $1000 raise. For those working your average 2000+ hour year that's a whopping $0.50/hour raise. Yet that marginal raise amounts to $0.56billion, or 1/6th of their entire remaining revenue. Interestingly enough 1 executive earning $1million in compensation is, by contrast, only 1/3000th of their remaining revenue. This critical calculation on the number of workers to fill any given role is why compensation and things can seem so lopsided. The sheer magnitude of the number of workers at many of these companies is very counter intuitive.

And this is the case for most large small margin companies. Back to Barnes and Noble, in 2016 they had a net income of -$24.5 million with 26,000 employees. Try to keep those figures in mind when considering this. I think the post that described any real solution for them as akin to 'shuffling chairs on the Titanic' is very apt.

\---

 _If anybody has a counter point here, I 'd love to hear it. From my perspective it seems people are replacing reality with ideology, whether intentionally or not. We want to blame companies for being greedy, even when in reality the numbers don't really support such views. All jobs are disappearing, when we have 4.1% unemployment (even the U6 is down to 8.2%!), etc. I used to feel very similarly, but the numbers simply don't support these incredibly cynical views._

<comment><USER80> You are being downvoted because Amazon is a bad example. They are intentionally not profitable so that they can lower prices to drive others out of the market and reinvest all revenue into R&D and horizontal expansion. They could net way more than $3B if they wanted to.

<comment><USER79> I could not care less about downvotes, but I enjoy discussion. And I certainly think people would like to disagree with me, but it seems none are really able or willing to form coherent counter points - which I think puts a very sad frame on the disagreement. So I thank you for changing that, though I think there's something you may not have considered in your logic.

At the most basic level we can view a company's profitability as a price vs demand curve. If your price is too low then you're leaving money on the table. If it's too high then you're also losing money since you could earn more by charging less to more people. And I'm sure you'd agree that all companies are really trying to maximize that curve.

But the thing here is that competition is not some tertiary element not considered in our basic price vs demand curve. It's in most cases the single biggest driving factor of the demand function. When there's no real competition, you can increase your prices quite recklessly - see Time Warner or Comcast. But the amount that Amazon can increase their prices is strictly limited due to competition. If you're going to buy an electronic component do you buy it at e.g. New Egg or Amazon? It doesn't really matter if its the same thing - you're just going to go with wherever is cheaper in net (e.g. factoring in rewards/shipping/etc), even if that price difference is really quite small. The point here is that while you may think that Amazon could raise their prices let's say 5% and see a 1-2% growth in profit, but this is a question that they are undoubtedly constantly researching - and they disagree.

\----

And in any case this is literally the case for most all small margin businesses. For instance WalMart has 2.3 million employees and $13.6 billion net. Our $1k/year raise costs them $2.3 billion, or 1/6th of their entire available income. The only companies that are truly lush with money are companies that sell their product at extremely high markups, or companies whose product enables the minimize labor, such as software. For instance Apple, as an example of the former, nets $48.4 billion with 123,000 employees. A $1000/year raise there would work out to 1/400th of their available revenue. Google/Alphabet, as an example of the latter, had a bad year last year, but generally net around $20 billion on 72,000 employees. Their $1k raise works out to about 1/278th of their available revenue. It creates an ironic result that few people would complain about the wages Google or Apple offer, yet they actually offer their employees a far less 'fair' share of revenues than do the companies that people consider greedy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> What's sad about Barnes and Noble is that the book industry never saw the ebook and online buying coming. So they kept the price of books high, pressured by big name authors who were use to the big royalty checks, and they can't move away. Imagine if B&N could compete on price with Amazon, and the booksellers had to take what the market is willing to pay.

<comment><USER82> Never saw ebook book buying coming? What? In the '90s we were selling books for the Palm Pilot. I remember when a sample of the Rocket showed up at the office. We thought, hey, now maybe people will start buying ebooks!

I also remember when Amazon first started selling books online, and they were getting their data from Books in Print. Despite the name, BIP lists a lot of books that are not in print. Some effort was required to get them to clean up their data.

In those days, B&N was rapidly expanding their superstore system, and trying to drive out the independents by, you know, discounting. And we said, hey, once they've gotten rid of the competition, those discounts will go away. And they did.

<comment><USER83> Yeah, it like how Kodak "never saw digital coming." Actually they had PhotoCD long before digital cameras were a widespread thing. You can recognize a shift to electrons and still not figure out a way to make a large chain B&M business work.

Smaller scale, but one of the first larger bookstores around me to discount books on a consistent basis effectively helped drive a lot of the smaller bookstores that had been around forever out of business. Ten or twenty years later, they were complaining online when they were effectively driven out of business by Amazon.

<comment><USER82> But, rather infamously, a Kodak engineer cobbled together a rudimentary digital camera out of parts lying about in the lab, c. 1975, showed it to management, and they were like, who would want that.

<comment><USER83> Oh, Kodak did plenty of things wrong. But the technology wasn't really there for a mass market digital camera for almost 25 years after that. And replacing a consumables business that was so big Kodak owned their own chemical company at one point was going to be difficult in any case. Fujifilm transitioned much better but they were much smaller and also had their own struggles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> Are any of these executives ex Walmart executives? I'm thinking a Elop -> Nokia sort of operation...

<comment><USER85> hmmm, maybe they are going to sell the brick and mortar stores to Amazon?

</comment></comment><comment><USER86> Now go prove you "deserve" unemployment.

American labor laws are pathetic, yet we collectively keep voting for this shit over and over to appease the wealthy ownership class.

Wonder if we'll ever wake out of this stupor that everyone can lift themselves by the bootstraps. Seems unlikely in my lifetime.

</comment><comment><USER12> Don't ever count on "loyal and faithful service" on keeping your job. I've seen engineers with 25 years of service laid off with 5 minutes notice. The only relationship you should have with an employer is extracting as much pay and benefits in exchange for work.

</comment><comment><USER85> that's a real freaky Santa gif

</comment><comment><USER87> I don't agree with the basic premise of the article wrt job security. B&N does not owe you a job. Nobody does.

You got to work at the same company for 20 years? You should be happy and gracious. All things come to an end.

I'm 37 and the longest I've worked at a company was 3.5 years, and that was my own startup. I average about 2-3 years/company. I'd kill to find a company/job where I can stay for 5 years without becoming a dinosaur. But I can't, because it's the startup/tech sector, things move fast, even here in Europe. On the flip-side, you could chose to be more static, risking increased irrelevance, in which case you'll be more upset upon losing your job. But that's the risk/tradeoff.

<comment><USER52> Plus these sound like mostly entry level, no-qualification jobs. I can't imagine why anyone would feel like they had any real measure of job security at jobs like those.

<comment><USER88> Because treating people to lots of free kindness, ra ra spirit, free cheap food, team building is a great way to retain people so long as the wages you pay them are enough to get by. If you persue this strategy successfully your business will be chock full of people who love you and think you all are family even though you don't pay them much..

People that need more monetarily will of course notice that raises are minimal and long term growth meh but many people have modest needs or spouses that make more money and they have no particular reason not to collect the same money adjusted for inflation and stay comfortable.</comment></comment></comment>


Studio Ghibli API - <AUTHOR> https://ghibliapi.herokuapp.com/ <comment><USER2> I just took a look. It's 48kB uncompressed JSON. You can easily load this into a browser tab. Why is it an API?

To save anybody from copy-and-pasting it, here's ten seconds of playing around:

> ghibli

Object {films: Array(20), people: Array(16), locations: Array(25), species: Array(5), vehicles: Array(3)}

> ghibli.films[0]

Object {id: "2baf70d1-42bb-4437-b551-e5fed5a87abe", title: "Castle in the Sky", description: "The orphan Sheeta inherited a mysterious crystal t…uta's science to make himself ruler of the world.", director: "Hayao Miyazaki", producer: "Isao Takahata"…}

> ghibli.locations[0]

Object {id: "11014596-71b0-4b3e-b8c0-1c4b15f28b9a", name: "Irontown", climate: "Continental", terrain: "Mountain", surface_water: "40"…}

> ghibli.people[0]

Object {id: "ba924631-068e-4436-b6de-f3283fa848f0", name: "Ashitaka", gender: "male", age: "late teens", eye_color: "brown"…}

<comment><USER3> > Why is it an API?

It's not an official Studio Ghibli API. But it's exactly what you'd build if you were learning to build APIs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A more minimal data api. :)

        requests.get('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/janaipakos/ghibliapi/master/data.json').json()

Now it can be loaded into Pandas for analysis. Even if I was building an app I'd want to own the data 1) so my users aren't being logged by the API service 2) control over the uptime 3) lower latency 4) flexibility of serving the data, such as generating static pages.

</comment><comment><USER5> What's with attaching the id to the url when scrolling with the next section, its a bad user experience. Jacked my back button.

<comment><USER6> They should be using replaceState instead of pushState

<comment><USER7> Looks like the site was generated by this [0]. They'd probably appreciate someone raising an issue.

[0] [https://github.com/Rebilly/ReDoc](https://github.com/Rebilly/ReDoc)

<comment><USER8> ReDoc author here. Thanks folks, for submitting a bug. I've implemented this feature recently and I usually do not use back button during testing :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The more I look at this the more it feels like an unofficial random project endpoint relying on trademark infringement to look important and get extra publicity than a case of "who the hell at Ghibli thought this was needed and decided to build this?".

<comment> rena-anju Couldn't agree more. I see exactly _no_ potential use cases for this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I had to swipe back 6 times to return to HN so I could write a comment to complain…

More usefully, this isn't an API, it's a data source for in-universe facts! It _has_ an API (but is not one).

<comment><USER11> It's like the extremely popular Pokeapi ([https://pokeapi.co](https://pokeapi.co)) or SWAPI ([https://swapi.co](https://swapi.co)): a service providing data over a REST interface. In other words, an API.

It's honestly the first time I see anyone claiming "an API is not an API unless it changes something".

<comment><USER12> API stands for "Application Programming Interface". A website that serves up data is not an API. The best way to explain the difference is that you can write an API on a piece of paper and it is still an API (i.e., you don't have to implement it). It documents how different parts of an application interface with each other. Normally it consists of things like the definitions of functions that you can call to achieve various results.

An API is specifically not a service. You can have many services that all use the same API. REST itself is an API. You can build another API on top of REST. So if someone says they have a REST API for querying movie information, that's sensible. If you have a service that serves up movie information, that's not an API. That's a service. It _uses_ an API.

It might seem pedantic, but I have talked with otherwise talented programmers who didn't actually know what an API was. They mentioned using "the API" in their front end code and when I asked the only reasonable question, "Which API?" they didn't know how to respond. They've got about a billion libraries in their front end code (like everyone else ;-) ) and each one of them has an API -- otherwise they couldn't use it. However "API" _only_ meant talking to the server to them.

I realise common usage is trumping the original definition of the term, but I think that's to the detriment of everyone involved.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> My guess is that this was built for practice. That said, some of the data is coming back bad. The 'url' property contains an address that is missing the 'u' and 'a'. [https://ghibliapi.herokpp.com](https://ghibliapi.herokpp.com)

<comment><USER14> It's just a typo [https://github.com/janaipakos/ghibliapi/blob/master/data.jso...](https://github.com/janaipakos/ghibliapi/blob/master/data.json#L375)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'd like someone to introduce slug fields to the programmers of this API. I'd like to search for species/cats and not /species/3.

</comment><comment><USER11> I struggle to understand the general negativity of this thread. Like zillions of other projects seen on HN, this is just someone playing around and offering a service others may or may not find interesting.

Sure, the dataset is currently small, but it can easily get bigger if anyone starts doing things like marking appearance times, quotes with translations, pictures and so on.

Sure, it might not be an official Ghibli project, in the same way IMDB or ComicDB did not start as official projects.

I personally find it fun and will look into building something with it, just for kicks. One obvious application would be a GMap mashup with locations, at least for the realistic films. Another would be a Youtube mashup with clips for each element.

Sometimes the internet seems too cynical even for a sad old fart like me.

</comment><comment><USER16> > It was created to help users discover resources

It's not the first time I see this claim in a REST API. What is it supposed to mean? Does it hint at some form of automatic (machine-driven) discovery, or is it just a pompous way to say they expose capabilities via a REST API?

<comment><USER17> a principal of REST which is often ignored or improperly implemented is hypermedia-driven discovery. You should be able to discover the entire api via a top-level entry point which will return a bunch of links.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HATEOAS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HATEOAS)

<comment><USER18> It's really weird:

\- SOAP had discovery

\- XML based REST APIs had discovery (via HATEOAS)

\- JSON based REST APIs inevitably _never_ have discovery (looks like there's no standard JSON version of the 'link rel' from HATEOAS)

\- GraphQL has discovery

<comment><USER17> if you implement swagger (now openapi) then you put the discovery in: [https://github.com/OAI/OpenAPI- Specification/blob/master/ver...](https://github.com/OAI/OpenAPI- Specification/blob/master/versions/2.0.md#pathsObject)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I like the formatting of this. Were any libraries used? Reminds me of Stripes API documentation a bit.

<comment><USER20> Scroll down, [https://github.com/Rebilly/ReDoc](https://github.com/Rebilly/ReDoc)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Cool! any chance you can add music (song, composer, album, etc.)? I think that's like one of the most wonderful things about Studio Ghibli films.

<comment><USER11> +1, although it can be challenging - Ghibli covers are extremely popular in Japan, they are now classics and even Ghibli themselves pushed different albums at different times. It's a bit like trying to get the original for "The Girl from Ipanema".

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> If you ever find yourself assigning a unique URL to a thing which has a name and a type, and assigning a unique URL to the type which has a name and a supertype, consider dusting off rdf:type and rdf:subClassOf and maybe JSON-LD rather than reinventing something very similar.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm confused by the thinking behind things like these. Seems like they should be static data dumps rather then network APIs. (Or why not both?)

<comment><USER24> Pretty sure it's just for funsies.

<comment><USER25> An interesting thing to talk about in an interview, for sure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Cool idea; bad overuse of history on website.

</comment><comment><USER27> What is possible use case for this?

</comment><comment><USER28> Looking at the example, they show catbus as male. Isn't it female?

<comment><USER29> Catbus has balls:

* [http://i.imgur.com/gySIZ.png](http://i.imgur.com/gySIZ.png)

<comment><USER28> I thought that was a labia, as I don't see any other male organ...

<comment><USER29> Heh heh This is a clearer picture:

* [http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1258/1355972123_12a28bd3b6.jp...](http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1258/1355972123_12a28bd3b6.jpg?v=0)

Seeing that the peehole is forward would make it male no? This little toy also seems male:

* [https://img0.etsystatic.com/110/0/11763563/il_570xN.88580129...](https://img0.etsystatic.com/110/0/11763563/il_570xN.885801298_dk7r.jpg)

I'll be sure to ask the opinion of my friends next time I play with their cats! Btw I am not trying to argue. I'm just curious.

<comment><USER28> i thought that "peehole" is a bellybutton, but yeah, maybe it's okay to be interpreted by the viewer :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This webpage does some funky history writing on firefox and chrome on scroll, so just scrolling through the page you get dozens of fragments in your visit history. You need to click back a dozen times before you get out of the page depending on how far you scroll!

<comment><USER31> Perfect use case for history.replace instead of history.push.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> This page hijacked my back history in some weird way. Avoid.

<comment><USER33> Nah, it's just that scrolling updates the URL the same way the sidebar links do, so it gets added to your browser history. Seems like an honest mistake.

<comment><USER8> I'm the author of the tool used to generate the doc. And yes this is just my mistake (I don't use back button so much during testing so never noticed this). Will fix it asap.</comment></comment></comment>


The working dead: IT jobs bound for extinction (2017) - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoworld.com/article/3196022/it-careers/the-working-dead-it-jobs-bound-for-extinction.html <comment><USER2> The content is behind a login-wall: can't read the article if you're not logged in.</comment>


How Do You Solve a Problem Like Oscar Hammerstein? - <AUTHOR> https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/solve-problem-like-oscar-hammerstein/ <comment><USER2> Had not realized that in many circles Rodgers is considered a near-genius and Hammerstein a bit too preachy and sentimental. The article argues otherwise.

<comment><USER3> The only argument I would make with your statement is the word "too". Hammerstein is almost an entire definition of "twee" himself. That doesn't preclude him from being one of the most loved lyricists of all time.

It's also rather strange to compare composition and lyricism. Rodgers certainly had nowhere near the talent Hammerstein did at actually putting words to music.

<comment><USER4> > It's also rather strange to compare composition and lyricism.

It's probably also a lot harder to make music sound preachy and sentimental independent of the lyrics

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> " I am a modern major general... "</comment>


Another look under the hood of search - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/08/another-look-under-hood-of-search.html <comment><USER2> Am I the only one who really likes behind-the-scenes videos? Sometimes I enjoy them more than the actual products/movies.

Anyhow, it's great that Google is making constant improvements to its search but lately, I feel like the results aren't as good as they used to be because of SEO spam and people gaming the algorithm solely for profit.

</comment><comment><USER3> What surprised me was the human element, I'd expected it to be more data- driven with less human debate.

<comment><USER4> I agree. Why are do so many people need to weigh in on what the "numbers" must be telling them. The process seems way more subjective than analytical.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What's the spin here? Google is trying to project:

        - Search is a hard, interesting problem - and we have really smart
          people working on it (come work with us).
        - Search is a competitive business (don't regulate us).
        - We use a scientific process (don't investigate our practices
          as a potential conflict of interest).

The video is interesting. But one thing NOT addressed is how much is the search experience improving? Yes, they've made "500 changes" to the algorithm last year. By what measure is search quality going up (or down)?

I sense an improvement over the last 6 months (seeing less low quality or spam links) - but I'd like to see this quantified.

</comment><comment><USER5> I was expecting Sanjay Gupta to pop in!

</comment><comment><USER6> Surprised to see that what appears to be the "feature launch committee" has about 30 people in the room... and another 15 or so patched in by video. (Perhaps most are just 'flies on the wall' to learn?)

<comment><USER4> This was pretty typical at Microsoft too. Many groups (Windows, Office, Exchange, etc) had a leadership group hold a regular "war room" type meeting at which major decisions were made. From 10 to 30 participants was common at these (usually weekly) meetings.

It's a sign of bureaucracy, not trusting important decisions to individual contributors, and an ass-covering vehicle to remove blame when mistakes are made.

Some of it reflects a needed amount of "care" - but it can easily lead to bad organizational dynamics.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you have an aversion to time tracking/screen capture software? - <AUTHOR> With freelance/contract work, do you have any issues with using time tracking, screen capture software? <comment><USER2> Yep. I would never use such a thing.

In fact, I feel so strongly against it, that I wrote a blog post on how to find work outside of those marketplace freelance sites that force you to use tracking tools.

You might be interested in reading it at [https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/how- to-start-a-successful-fre...](https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/how-to-start-a- successful-freelance-business-as-a-software-developer)

</comment><comment><USER3> I use time tracking and activity tracking for my own edification, but that information is only shared with clients in the form of an invoice.

</comment><comment><USER4> My main issue is that I don't want to install this kind of software on a computer that is not dedicated for that specific job. If they don't trust me enough to report my work correctly, then why should I trust them when installing proprietary software on my computer? Who knows what else this software is doing, once I install it?

If I had to use this type of software to get a contract, I'd be willing to do it (on a dedicated machine), but the payback would have to be substantial. However, it seems like the gigs that require installing this type of software don't actually pay as well as those that don't.

</comment><comment><USER5> Yeah, in general it is not acceptable. The clients who will require this are not the clients you want.

Basically, it is impossible to ensure you're not leaking information while you have such software installed. There are too many vectors. Unless you literally setup a VM per client and ensure you do not check email on that VM, which I suppose is possible ...

</comment><comment><USER6> I agree with everything said in the previous comments. If a potential client requires you to use such software walk away as fast as you can. The same applies to freelance marketplaces or other middlemen who try to pull off the same thing.

</comment><comment><USER7> No, I was working with it for over 2 years on Upwork and I know dozens of people who work for years like that.

I also hired there and I wasn't looking at my freelancers' screenshots. It's just a platform's rule.

</comment><comment> UK-Al05 Lack of trust. There not treating you as a professional.</comment>