“Well, give ‘em one more Christmas.”
As you say, it’s unthinkable they didn’t see Christmas coming. And it’s equally unthinkable layoffs of this size weren’t planned out twelve weeks ago.
As for not adequately staffing it, you simply can't. You cannot get a decent workforce via part time seasonal work. the way it worked before was part timers just took extra hours in peak periods, but Obamacare killed this by forcing any part timer over so many hours to be eligible for benefits, making it impossible to do.
And yet, virtually every retailer for the last 3+ decades has, in fact, done so as a matter of normal operations.
It has nothing to do with Obamacare. The employment norm was not to only schedule full-time hours for part-time employees (which, even before Obamacare, violated a lot of employment law). Aside from laying off full-time employees after the cycle (which they justified by the crap sales during Christmas), B&N refused to staff-up as normal for virtually every other retailer in North America, to accommodate the most predictable sales cycle in the world... basically in order to justify the firing the full-timers.
This was a hit job by insiders looking to profit off the corpse.
30 years ago I was a part-time employee at a big box store from October to January. Large retailers long ago figured out how to ramp up their workforce temporarily to adequately handle the sales season that accounts for the largest portion of their sales every year.
For any retailer to blow the Christmas sales season by not adequately staffing it, which has been basic retail management for at least three decades, actually does argue for malpractice on the part of executives. It's a criminal level of incompetence, and I'm not sure whether "criminal" means "criminally negligent" or "fraudulent".