Totally Frustrated and Saddened by What I Find at Barnes & Noble (And What I Don't Find) Nowadays

I very clearly remember the feeling of stepping into a Barnes & Noble bookstore with a feeling that I was certain to leave the store with at least four or five books in my arms. I remember just how much fun that was. The problem is I can't remember the last time it happened.

However, a quick look at Wikipedia tells me it was probably not too long after Elliott Management Corporation acquired the company for $683 million back in August 2019. B&N remains a wholly owned subsidiary of Elliott's to this day. Elliott also owns and runs the huge Waterstones Booksellers chain in the UK, and the problem is that the new owners decided to use the British bookselling model on Barnes & Noble rather than using the American model on Waterstones. 

That means effectively that everything sold in either chain is priced at the recommended list price that the publisher chooses or it is put on sale in one of those "buy one at full price, get another at 50% off, schemes that I seldom use (in effect, that means paying 75% of list for each book). I lived for several years in London and frequented Waterstones because it seemed to be everywhere I went, but I probably didn't make that decision more than a half-dozen times in all those years because the "second book" part of the deal was limited to just a handful of books similar to the one I really wanted at the moment.

That used to be not such a big problem at B&N (even in London), though, because of the always-arbitrary selection of bestsellers that they chose to discount in both hardcover and softcover versions. Look at this picture:

This is today's bestseller grouping from my local store. If there's a similar grouping for softcover books, I never ran across it. Now admittedly, there are a couple of books here that may actually be worth reading, but B&N has so obviously tailored the list to highlight the lowest common denominator of reading tastes that I hardly ever find anything on that shelf that I want to take home with me. If you're not into thrillers by the usual suspects, you're pretty much out of luck. (If there's a similar selection of nonfiction, YA, and children's books, I missed those, too, because I don't really shop those departments.)

Remember those fun displays of what I call "remainders" from major publishers that B&N used to place so prominently in their stores? Well, don't hold your breath until you pluck some current fiction or nonfiction from the chain's new, horrible Book Annex groupings. Clue: you're going to die first. Those displays are only made up now of stale, cheap reprint editions in the nonfiction area, and of classics in the fiction area. (That could very well be because publishers don't do the huge print runs like they used to - meaning that the remainders stock is limited from the source.)

I used to count on going into a B&N and walking out with five or six one-or-two-year-old previous bestsellers for about $40 and another two current books that I paid near full price for - along with a couple of magazines. All for about $80 or $90. And I did that every 60 days or so. 

Now look at these photos from the store this morning near noon and ask yourself what is missing from each of them:

If you guessed "people," you win the prize. There were actually fewer people in this large store today than there were workers (I think I counted four other people plus about 4 small children).

Don't get me wrong; I want to see Barnes & Noble do well. They are, after having effectively run all of the other bookstore chains either completely out of business or out of my area, now the only major bookseller available to me. I hope that the B&N braintrust figures out that their new marketing strategy is not going to work...especially during a period of hyperinflation like the one we are experiencing right now. If they don't, they are doomed just the way they helped make sure that all the competition was doomed.