I haven't bought a book at a retail outlet in probably 10 years. There's just nothing about the retail experience at B&N that's even worth the effort to drive there and park. It's not salvageable.
B&N's 'competitive advantage' today is not experienced staff. I can't ever recall an employee up-selling significant amounts of merchandise, or having a customer relationship that might move a needle.
Like Sears, it has real estate and a terrible retail position. If you treat the stores like mini-warehouses, with Amazon-warehouse-worker-hours, it might work. My guess is that failing to staff-up for the holidays was, seen charitably, a way to get the full-timers through the holidays.
I don't think so. Outside of the airport that's not useful to anyone. At that rate you can just go to the section where they have bestsellers at Costco or Walmart. A bookstore with no selection is practically pointless.
Target has more merchandise than B&N, but there's no career employee on the floor to suggest that you might like Mossimo if you bought Merona.
There are also various regional retailers.
The last book I bought at B&N wasn't so long ago. They pulled it off the shelf and had it waiting for me when I arrived. I appreciated being able to preview it to decide it was worth buying.
I don't have a local B&N anymore, but a local independent book shop is pretty good. They've ordered new books for me to preview too.
Yeah, they could have managed the holiday season better. They could have a better strategy for ecommerce. So what? It doesn't fundamentally change anything. It maybe delays the inevitable for a year or two? But in the end, B&N is almost certainly going out of business.
EDIT: I guess there are two other possibilities:
1. B&N finds another B&M strategy that works beyond just selling books. But it's not clear what, given their financial situation, existing stores, employee base, etc. Either way, lots of layoffs between here and there.
2. They pivot to selling books online solely. This actually seems likely, at least for awhile, because it's a decent brand, and they're already doing this, so this would just mean shutting down all their stores. But all these employees are still losing their jobs in that scenario.
You don’t have to think that hard to realize the callous absurdity of this viewpoint.
Many healthy retailers use omnichannel, ship-from-store, buy-online-fulfill-in-store, etc. These methods can improve fulfillment, increase inventory utilization, and reduce stale inventory.
If a retailer wants to draw down inventory, then just cut replenishment. I believe Target Canada was accused of doing so. Implementing "faux omnichannel" and the associated IT, store processes, etc. would be much harder.
The fact of the matter is logistic operations in the Midwest are favorable for the medium range retailer. In the post-warehouse age, when the book your NYC customer wants is in Seattle, you’re paying Zone 8 rates to USPS instead of Zone 3 from Indiana to NYC (or Seattle).
The article states i) distraction from in-store sales for employees, ii) removing inventory from store shelves, and iii) no credit for stores.
The "stores don't get credit" argument is weak. The article implies that corporate is siphoning credit from stores to online. Sales are down 6% across the board. Samestore sales down 6.5%, online sales down 4.5%. Omnichannel does not create those numbers.
Anyway, the logistics argument depends on more than rates. Fulfilling from a midwest warehouse can be cheap; a warehouse full of product sliding down a markdown curve can be expensive.
I've been surprised by the merchant pushback to omnichannel. I've been hearing "there are no cash registers in the warehouse", etc. for years. Now we expose more inventory to customers and stores complain about selling to the wrong (usually ecommerce) customer.