First Visit to a B&N Bookstore Since Early March Was Depressing

 I've been very cautious about going places I really don't need to go during this whole COVID-19 disaster, but I decided to poke my head inside the door of a couple of local bookstores last week for the first time since early March. I figured I could judge by their parking lots whether or not very many people were inside before I ventured through the door myself. In both cases, the stores had maybe 10% of the number of browsers and shoppers I consistently found there in the pre-pandemic days.

Interestingly, one of the stores, Half-Price Books, looked exactly the way I remembered it looking last March. But the other one, a large one-floor Barnes & Noble, looked like someone had walked away with about 25-30 percent of the books they used to stock. Shelves had been moved around, there were empty wide-open spaces all over the place, and customers seemed to be doing nothing but browsing. I didn't see a single book actually being sold for the entire 30 minutes I was there.

This is what I mean. Look at the astounding amount of floor space being wasted. Back in March, space like this was utilized by rows and rows of shelving used to display books. The shelving, at least as I recall it, ran perpendicular to this pathetic little island sitting out there all alone. 

This is what's left of what was a substantial Fiction section in the store. It appears that more than half the old shelves are gone from this area. I did find a few remnants of the old shelves in other spots, but the number of books being carried by this B&N location is now pretty embarrassing. If you are looking for anything not brand new or on the bestseller list, forget it. That is unless it's the back catalog of such literary masters as Stephen King, James Patterson, Danielle Steele, or the like. 

This is a spot in one of the back corners of the store. This area used to house the store's nonfiction books, but it has suffered a fate similar to that of the fiction section I mentioned earlier. The one lone table, featuring a single book, highlights the emptiness and deterioration of the section. The history section is still pretty good, but not all of the nonfiction sections appear to have been so lucky. Lots of missing shelves, translates to lots of missing books from which to choose.

I put this photo here only to show that the store has decided to remove the benches that were on the green rugs before the pandemic changes. I do sort of understand that removing the seating in the store is probably a smart move until Texas gets its infection rate under control. The few remaining chairs in another corner of the store have also all been removed.

This just made me sad. Barnes & Noble has been struggling for years to survive the Amazon onslaught. B&N managed to help drive all the other bookstore chains out of business years ago, and then Amazon decided to do the same to them. But up until now at least, my local store still served as a place I could go into and come out of with some book I didn't even know existed until I spotted it on a shelf. And then, if I wanted to read something else by that surprise author, there was a chance that the store had at least another book or two by them.

Those days are gone now. Chances of finding something new and interesting at this B&N location are only slightly better than trying to wade through the Amazon dreck-haystack looking for something worth reading. In the Amazon case, it's a haystack so filled with utter garbage that good books get buried by the trash. In the B&N case, the haystack is now so small that the interesting stuff gets buried by the dreck written by the Kings, Pattersons, Steeles, and ghost writers of political books. 

These changes give me the impression that Barnes and Noble is hanging on by the skin of its teeth now. I certainly didn't enjoy my visit to this location, and I walked away empty-handed. Can't remember the last time that's happened. I entered all prepared to spend a lot of money on my first visit to a bookstore in over six months. I left without spending a dime - and that's B&N's fault, not mine.

I asked the store manager what was behind all the changes, and her explanation was that they were told to get rid of everything that "doesn't sell." For that reason, bestsellers and hack-authors now dominate the shelves. I even asked her if the "island spacing" had something to do with keeping customers more spread out during the pandemic. She looked at me as if I had just given her an idea of how to answer the question next time she was asked about all the missing books. But, no, she said this was the store's permanent new look.

And that depresses the hell out of me.

As did this book I found on display. How could Anne Perry, of all the people in the world, write a book with this particular title? This is the same woman who helped beat her mother's best friend to death with half a brick stuffed in a sock - the young mother who took the author into her home and included her on the very outing during which Perry helped murder her. The lack of personal awareness on exhibit here is astounding.