I frequently shopped at Barnes & Noble ~20 years ago. But they slowly carried less and less that I was interested in, seemingly shifting from a "store for people who like books" to a "store for people to buy gifts for people who like books".

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.

Chapters/indigo in Canada is like that. Half the stores are gift shops for socks and blankets etc. They removed all the tables and chairs they had 20 years ago for you to read at. At least they still exist though, all 4 used bookstores (plus one chapters) near where I live have closed down

> Half the stores are gift shops for socks and blankets etc.

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.

That's the GE-ification of retail.

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.

I buy books by the bushel from thrift stores. Can't beat those prices!

Tsutaya bookstore in Japan is the best example of such a place. They also expanded to a few neighboring countries as well. I think it's one of the best big network bookstores I had been.

My first interaction with Amazon was as the storefront for Borders Books online (since out of business). Interesting case of EEE.

The pattern is that efficiency increases and hyperscale fell the previous incumbent. If the pace of innovation doesn't slow, Amazon may fall to the same forces.

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.

That sounds scary - a company even more powerful and competitive that could beat Amazon. Imagine what their abuses would be!

> Then they were one of Amazon’s first casualties!

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 :-)

I want to quickly emphasize that they are data driven enough to understand that lots of people buy those books because about 51-54% of the country doesn’t and never did like him.

The last barnes and noble I went to had a liberal shelf and a conservative shelf (not labeled as such, but clearly separated). I live in a county that biden won by <1%. It's clearly a data-driven decision and both sides of the aisle love buying books from their tribe.

But who are those books for? I don’t buy books about politicians I don’t like.

A non-trivial number of people do across the political spectrum. Political memoirs for instance are usually ghostwritten (outside of the first Obama book and maybe the Pete book given he was a nobody) and are only purchased in order to show support for the candidate. It's a team spirit thing.

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.

No, not books meant to paint politicians in a good light. I’m talking about these “orange man bad” books. Why would I want to spend hours of my life reading more details about a man I don’t want occupying my mind?

I do. "Don't like" is not the same as "not interesting".

I read a couple months ago that publishers were being pressured not to publish books by Trump insiders.

Yeah, and that probably didn't stem much of the flow because the rest were published by journalists. If anything some of the insiders' accounts were just as scathing as the explicitly anti-Trump books, which is saying something.

Same here - went into the shop for the first time in a few years about 3 years ago, and was shocked to see two rows of "self-help"-type books. Amazing. It seems many people have outsourced our friends and familial support structures to random writers.