At first I placed online orders with them, but once moving to online shopping at all, it was clear that Amazon had even better selection, prices, shipping, etc.
But I still enjoy a good physical bookstore. I might still shop there in person today if their stock was more interesting, even if the prices were a little higher.
Yeah this annoyed me to no end, however after a few shops I realized the only reason these are even open right now is because of the high margin gift section. Check the prices on their plushies when you are there. $35 for a small rabbit! and people buy them.
Yes, you should allocate a larger share of scarce resources (in this case, floor space) to high-margin product...
... but not at the expense of the central thesis of why customers actually come to your store.
B&N was able to sell high margin gift shop items because traffic was already there as a bookstore... and there as a bookstore because they had reading areas and a coffee shop.
Imagine a virtualized army of engineers that the AI or brain upload future may bring. Maybe that won't happen in our lifetimes, but it will happen at some point if we don't manage to nuke ourselves.
There are probably a handful of other trends that will cause instability and salients to develop in the fitness gradient.
They're still in business. I browsed one last month. I was amused that one entire rack, 6 shelves, was filled with "Trump is Evil" books. Somebody at that store doesn't like Trump :-)
Plus, I'm sure some have their own niches (satire, exposés like "Frankly we won this election" that have new reporting, etc) and many have their own historical value. I saw an ant-Tom DeLay book in the wild a few years ago well after his fall from grace and considered buying it just as a keepsake of the era.
What's sad is that there probably is some interesting IT story behind Walmart scaling, but not using supercomputers and using PCs or somethign instead.
My first job out of college in 1989 was to go to work in the basement of The Pentagon for the Defense Communications Agency, as an Analyst/Terminal Operator for those old pre-Multics Honeywell WWMCCS mainframes. One of my first jobs there was to help modernized the classified Airfields database from COBOL 66 to COBOL 77.
At the beginning, we used glass tty terminals that were wrapped in faraday cages, and all local printing was done via a screen print function to local thermal paper printers. We could use the line printers, but those were not directly accessible to us, and we had to go up to the Operator window to ask for our output.
They later upgraded the terminals to EMF-hardened IBM PC XT computers with removable 5GB hard drives, known as WIS-CUC terminals. That was like 1991. Note that this was PC XT technology from like 1984, not PC AT.
The unclassified PC AT type computers we used outside of the classified environments probably had more RAM, larger hard drives, and more I/O capacity than those ancient Honeywell mainframes.
So, no, there weren’t any supercomputers at the Pentagon in 1985.
Now, if you want to talk about NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, then that’s a different story.
/s
Actually, I believe that was Walmart as well: >TIMMER: I used to ask my class, I’m talking 1985, “Where is the world’s largest supercomputer?” And the correct answer was, “It’s at the Pentagon.” Okay. “Where is the world’s second largest supercomputer?” Bentonville, Ark. Home of Walmart. They used that computer to track every single item on every single Walmart shelf. That information technology is what revolutionized food marketing. And it was pretty much invented by Walmart.
Source: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/farms-race/#:%7E:text=where...