From The Motley Fool:
Barnes & Noble . . . has been a slowly sinking ship for many years. You can blame some of that on Amazon and some on the chain’s own incompetence.
The bookseller botched its digital strategy by waiting too long to have one. Now, the company’s NOOK line of digital readers barely exists, and there’s no chance of winning back that market.
What’s more troubling is that there’s a clear blueprint for struggling retailers to follow since the rise of Amazon and the internet. Barnes & Noble added a piece of that when it built out its cafes, but it basically stopped there.
. . . .
Barnes & Noble is not the only retailer threatened by Amazon. Best Buy found itself in a similar position roughly six years ago when Hubert Joly became CEO. The electronics retailer had essentially become a showroom for Amazon — a place consumers went to look at items before buying them at a cheaper price from the online retailer.
Joly instituted price-matching, but that was only one small piece of his efforts. He also transformed Best Buy to give consumers a reason to come to its stores.
That included building out store-within-a-store concepts from a variety of technology leaders. The Best Buy turnaround also involved adding omnichannel capabilities, and more services through Geek Squad.
Consumers have a reason to go to Best Buy now. They know they’re getting a fair deal, and they can see dedicated areas for Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, and others (in many cases, their cable, internet, or phone providers). Basically, instead of just being a warehouse for electronics, Best Buy became a destination with lots of things to do and reasons for consumers to come out.
. . . .
Books no longer make Barnes & Noble a destination. Consumers can browse books on their Kindles, tablets, and phones. They can also browse the shelves of a bookstore and then order the book from Amazon at a lower price.
To make its stores relevant, the chain needs more than merchandise. It put a toe into that water by adding toys, but it failed to use the category to become a destination.
. . . .
The company has been operating cautiously — as if somehow Amazon had not taken its market, or as if the right display of books might bring people back. That’s not going to happen.
Link to the rest at The Motley Fool
Books no longer make Barnes & Noble a destination.
To make its stores relevant, the chain needs more than merchandise.
Well, Barnes & Noble is a store – a place that sells merchandise, and the merchandise they sell is books. Saying that books are no longer “good enough” and that they “need more than merchandise” is the easy thing to do. Figuring out what that really means is the hard thing to do.
Well, if merchandise isn’t enough, the only other thing a store can offer is a service.
And B&N’s services are hardly much of a draw, are they?
BestBuy is hardly an example of a smart company. Here in canada they bought out the Future Shop chain and, rather than coordinate the two brands, they would open one of each store in the same new mall again and again. I was building a no frills in Grande Prairie at the same time they built a Best Buy and a Future Shop less than two hundred meters apart in the same strip mall.
‘Cannibalizing business units… it’s the latest new management craze’
Top execs are criminally overpaid, if you ask me.
I heard that.
Not very good at picking locations.
In Puerto Rico they opened 5 stores in the San Juan metro area, population 1M within a 20minute radius.
They opened none in the rest of the island, population 3M. Not even a city with a half a million within 20 minutes.
A year later, they shut down three of the stores for lack of traffic. Duh.
And, of course, BestBuy.com won’t ship to the island.
Costco, Sam’s, and even Sears make hay, meanwhile.
There may be a way to salvage the balance sheet, but there is no way to salvage the bookstore.
The Motley Fool is still being foolish …
“Consumers have a reason to go to Best Buy now. They know they’re getting a fair deal, …”
And they’ll still suddenly be ‘out-of-stock’ if it sounds like you aren’t going to want the extended store warranty and they’ll push the monster HDMI cables.
I’ll admit I’m not sure where any of them are as they’re still on my ‘don’t bother with’ list.