Photo: Canva
It’s no surprise that Barnes & Noble has once again been feeling the heat of competition from Amazon. After all, Amazon started out as a bookseller and pushed Borders out of business in 2011.
Even with victory appearing all but in its grasp, Amazon tried to double down on its increasing dominance but eventually decided to shut down all 68 of its brick-and-mortar bookstores.
That leaves Barnes & Noble as the lone major brick-and-mortar retailer of books in the U.S.
According to NPR, “The book chain is planning to open some 30 new stores this year. Many are returning the retailer to areas it previously abandoned. In a few, Barnes & Noble is even taking over former Amazon bookshops.” They also note, “Barnes & Noble sales have been rising, and last year grew more than 4%, according to Shannon DeVito, director of books.”
But that doesn’t mean staying profitable and relevant is easy.
In December 2020, the Wall Street Journal reported that “Barnes & Noble has suffered seven years of declining revenue in the face of Amazon.com Inc.’s dominance in online retail. The pandemic crushed sales in big cities, with revenue down 50% at major metropolitan stores, as well as the in-store cafe business.” The then-newly appointed CEO, James Daunt, stated that “the very survival of bookstores is on the line.”
As a result, Daunt decided to do something that no retail expert could have predicted: grant more creative free rein to each Barnes & Noble location so that they can all cater to their local customers. In turn, this will allow each bookstore to independently function as more of an indie community bookstore than a corporate chain, according to the WSJ.
“By shifting control of the process to individual store managers across the country, Daunt is giving local booksellers permission to do things they were never able to do before,” the WSJ noted. “They have discretion over purchasing, placement and even pricing. He wants Barnes & Noble locations to feel welcoming but not overwhelming—a chain store should be more inviting and less intimidating than a truly independent shop—and that means he needs the people who run them to make sensible decisions for their markets.”
The CEO also hopes that this will encourage customers to spend more time enjoying their local Barnes & Noble, browsing and discovering other books and items they would not have found otherwise.
This reinvention of sorts began on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where the retailer’s most iconic store “has been the site of a grand experiment for much of the past year. The chain invested millions of dollars to rebuild this Barnes & Noble into a model for its other stores to emulate as the company transforms into a bookseller for the modern age.”
The idea that corporate chains need to be cookie-cutter clones is being challenged. “Barnes & Noble used scale and uniformity to its benefit in the 1990s and 2000s, but those advantages have since become liabilities. Bookstores don’t have to be the same from one to another. They shouldn’t be, either. The best managers know the books they sell and the customers who buy them—and what works on the Upper West Side might not work in West Des Moines.”
On the other side of the coin, others are wary of this new strategic shift. The WSJ’s report points out how publishers fear this change “will translate into the nation’s largest chain purchasing fewer books. The managers of individual stores having more control over what they stock and how they price it means the publishers have less. Others in publishing are skeptical that local tastes matter as much in a business increasingly driven by national bestsellers.”
In New York specifically, there are plenty of successful indie bookshops brimming with personality and charm. One such owner, Dane Neller, the CEO of Shakespeare & Co., remarked how “an indie bookstore is always going to have that idiosyncratic, owner-operated feeling that you’re not going to get in a chain store.”
Daunt agreed but said there is a place for both types of bookstores. “A large store like this will always be much more and much less,” he stated. Even though they aren’t the same, indie bookstores and chains can still have some overlap. “Within a chain,” Daunt said, “you can create an awful lot of the ethos of an independent bookstore.”
BrainTrust
Brian Cluster
Director of Industry Strategy – CPG & Retail, Stibo Systems
Cathy Hotka
Principal, Cathy Hotka & Associates
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