“I’d like to see them survive, but they’re really being squeezed.
“Barnes & Noble is pretty boxed in right now,” notes George Day, Wharton professor emeritus of marketing. Overall, net loss amounted to $125.5 million ($1.73 per share) last year, including a goodwill impairment charge of $133.6 million, compared with a loss of $47.3 million ($1.12 per share) in 2014. Comparable-store sales, a key retail metric, had fallen yearly over that period. In fiscal 2018, total sales came to $3.66 billion, down by nearly $1 billion from 2014, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. As Amazon was surging, sales at Barnes & Noble went the opposite direction. Today, Amazon commands around 72% of adult new book sales online and 49% of all new book sales by units, reported The Wall Street Journal. “Now they’re on the side of Barnes & Noble, the last bastion of bricks and mortar.” This turning of the tables, it said, is a “close lesson in the ironies of capitalism.” “The industry that looked on Barnes & Noble as a virus now treats Amazon like a pandemic,” wrote New York magazine back in 2013. So publishers and bookshops have anointed a new Public Enemy No. And unlike Barnes & Noble, Amazon’s growing publishing business also seriously threatens the business of publishers. Since the 1990s, Amazon has been taking away sales from bookstores, including Barnes & Noble. In an ironic plot twist worthy of a Jackie Collins novel, the disruptor has been disrupted. But the expansion of his superstores led to many independent bookstore closings, and he became a sort of “publishing Antichrist,” according to Wired. To make his big stores cozier, he installed sofas and coffee bars. Riggio believed that independent bookstores were too small to be efficient and customers had to wait weeks for special orders, so he went big in order to stock thousands more books. In the Barnes & Noble story, the protagonist is modern-day founder Len Riggio, whom Wired magazine described in a 1999 article as “tempestuous, 5’7, wears an anachronism of a mustache, and spits out quick jagged sentences” in a New York outer-borough accent. The success of Barnes & Noble even served as the backdrop for the Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan 1998 romantic comedy You’ve Got Mail, where a superstore chain offering book discounts kills the business of a beloved local bookshop.
The ups and downs of bookstore chain Barnes & Noble paint a tale as gripping as the plot of a bestselling potboiler: A Horatio Alger-type entrepreneur whose dad was a boxer and part-time taxicab driver drops out of college to build the biggest bookstore chain in the country.