“Forgotten Hollywood” Barnes & Noble on the Ropes…
Manny P. here…
If anyone gives you a Barnes & Noble gift card, be sure to cash it in by the end of the year. The bookstore chain may disappear by 2015.
It’s bad news for people who love books. It’s worse news for the next generation of readers, who may never experience buying a book in person. B&N has been closing about 20 stores per year since 2012, and has said it will continue to do so for the next several years. But its financial position is bleak.
So, why is B&N on the ropes if it has virtually no competition today from chains or privately owned bookstores? Five reasons…
1. Amazon makes it so easy to buy books.
2. Publishers thrashed B&N by selling best-sellers at deep discounts in non-traditional outlets such as supermarkets, Wal-Mart, and Costco, thus removing a key source of revenue for the chain.
3. The woefully underfunded Nook is competing with Amazon’s Kindle, which is like bringing a knife to a gunfight.
4. The antiquated model of printing books on spec, putting them on trucks, and crossing your fingers that they’ll sell doesn’t work in the internet print-on-demand era.
5. Book buyers want decent customer service. At B&N, the only way to find a sales clerk is to attempt to shoplift.
In many B&N stores, it’s actually hard to find books. You have got to wade through toys, umbrellas, Nook displays, chocolate bars, notebooks, birthday cards, and other stuff that has stolen shelf space from books.
Barnes & Noble killed privately owned bookstores, and Amazon and technology are killing B&N. The publishers have to be running scared. If B&N suddenly shutters its doors, then billions of dollars of books, which the bookstores take on consignment, go into the limbo of bankruptcy court.
Can B&N hang on through the holidays? Most likely. But, sad to say, once Black Friday gives way to Christmas, a once-proud book chain may well have reached its final chapter. And that would be chapter 11, of the Bankruptcy Code.
Until next time> “never forget”
This entry was posted on Friday, May 2nd, 2014 at 10:01 pm and is filed under Blog by Manny Pacheco. You can follow any comments to this post through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.
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