I was out shopping 3-4 days before Christmas this year, and happened to be near a Barnes and Noble so figured I'd grab a copy of a magazine I've been wanting to read for a while.
Grabbed the magazine, wandered the aisles a bit and picked up another book then went to check out. Basically I was their marketing department's dream - walk-in traffic coming to buy something cheap and specific who made an impulse retail buy of a much higher margin item.
The checkout line was at least 50 people long and probably estimated at over an hour. Two cashiers working out of 8 or so possible registers, and as far as I could tell a singular employee on the floor itself.
I put my selections back and walked out the door. Granted it was near peak shopping season - but that was inexcusable. There were quite a lot of really pissed off looking people in that line.
So that is to say my experience lines up with the article. They entirely botched their Christmas season and it wasn't the employee's or consumer demand's fault. Just that one store bled hundreds of dollars in lost sales just from the 5 minutes I watched people walk in and immediately out after seeing the line.
>>Two cashiers working out of 8 or so possible registers
And the worst part about this is that each cashier seems determined to relentlessly pester me with annoying questions at the register! Did I want to join this loyalty program? Did I realize that I could save $5 by signing up for so and so. Do I want to get on the B&N mailing list? Really aggressive questioning.
Oh my God. I realize that the cashiers have been ordered to do this (I assume) but knock it off already! This is so consumer unfriendly. I just want to pay and go. I'm sure that this also delays checkout times significantly over the course of a day.
This is one of the main reasons I use Amazon when possible. Retail checkout in the US has become a one-way grilling. You end up leaving the store feeling like a murder suspect.
Not only are they ordered to do it but corporate puts requirements on the store as to how many joins they are expected to get each day, and cashiers have their own individual quotas and they get chewed out if they don’t meet them by managers who get chewed out for not meeting them. The fact that this behavior reduces sales throughput, employee productivity, and customer satisfaction are not worked into the analysis that comes up with these programs or their growth targets. Upper management comes up with a target and they push their stores to meet it, because their CMO went to a conference where he was wined and dined by the company that sells the software to run the loyalty card system and believes their stats about how it saved company X and now that they’ve spent the money the ROI has to meet internal targets or risk embarrassing the CMO.
If you're lucky you just get chewed out. My wife used to work retail and in one store, you had to push credit cards, often to people who really should not have another one. If you failed to meet your quota you get a warning the first time and then fired the second time.
This sounds heartbreakingly true, especially the part about the CMO being sold a fantasy at a conference. I really like the way you've chained it together from the C-suite all the way down to the lowly cashier.
Unlike the Internet, when a break-and-mortar fails it's not easy for a competitor to break into the space and scoop up their market share. In theory in an efficient market, players that deserve to fail will be replaced and the market as a whole will remain and become stronger. In meatspace, where many things have friction, players that deserve to fail will bring the market down. I also wish it weren't the case, but it's not a market many players are actively trying to enter right now.
> Unlike the Internet, when a break-and-mortar fails it's not easy for a competitor to break into the space and scoop up their market share.
Also, in this space, there's a competitor that's on it's way to a monopoly. if B&N goes belly-up, I'm not even sure where I could buy books besides Amazon.
My situation might be different because I live in a major US city, but I can think of a handful of independent bookstores near where I live. If they didn't have what I was looking for they could probably order it for me.
So many good memories as a kid of going to the local B&N with my parents. Unlike our library, it had coffee and social energy and tables set up for browsing and was open past 5pm.
It shared a cursed strip mall with a Blockbuster, a LAN gaming center, and a music shop that was finally torn down last year.
Blaming the executive here makes sense. But saying the "company deserves to fail" ignores the livelihoods of everyone below that person in the hierarchy, who gets fired because mgmt has different incentives than the workers.
Perhaps if those lower in the hierarchy and society as a whole are constantly burned by businesses failing due to incompetent leadership, they might start to expect or demand something different. Socialism? Anarchy? Some kind of socially conscious capitalism? I don't know what form it will take, but it might be something different than what we have now.
Not to mention the fact that so many companies right now have new leadership that didn't build the company and are stuck, like B&N's here, not in a mode to improve the company but a mode to make sure there's as much meat for picking as possible when it eventually goes down in flames.
It seems like the "Old Business" world is just a nest of snakes eating each other until there's just one left to die of starvation.
That's assuming that someone recognizes which strategy was responsible for failure. Blaming the competitors, or the employees, is probably much more comforting and easier for upper management.
A couple of days ago I attempted to pay for snacks at a convenience store with cash. The clerk sheepishly directed me to answer a series of questions about discount cards via the pinpad! When I asked if this seemed like a good idea, she could only sigh and glance skyward.
Apparently the corporate morons have figured out how to pester the customer even against the better judgment of clerks. Fortunately I have a choice in which convenience store enjoys my custom.
B&N isn't the only one to do this but they are one of the most persistant. I visit the store once or twice a month and have been since Borders tanked. Every time I buy something, I get this spiel. Dozens of times now. Usually, I cut them off with a curt "no" when I sense they're ready to start the question. I sort of feel bad because it isn't the clerks fault but I'm really annoyed at just being asked over and over. I'm tempted to have a badge made up I can pin to my shirt that says "Thank you. No.".
>Oh my God. I realize that the cashiers have been ordered to do this (I assume) but knock it off already!
Why should they? If they don't they will get fired. Business goes up or down that cashier doesn't get paid more or less...they have no incentive to risk their job for a customer. These companies are so obsessed with squeezing a nickle out of 5% of their customers because they can _measure_ that. Its 'impossible' to measure losses like you with any granularity, so it doesn't matter. They 'can't' incentivize it.
If I'm incented to sell memberships, I'm going to sell the sh out of memberships. The pearl clutching in this thread is apparent, but remember, they have the data, we don't.
A bunch of corporate people who never had to ask someone face to face about buying stupid shit after they've already decided what they want, and a bunch of corporate people who never actually shop at their own stores.
JCrew is relentless with this lately. They ask you if you’d like an “email receipt”, which is code for re-subscribing you to their daily barrage of emails. Then they hand you a paper receipt as you walk out.
I aggressively avoid buying books on Amazon, mostly for the reasons listed in the article, but between BAM and B&N, I will always go to a local bookstore instead. They don't grill me for PII at the register, for one.
Overall the whole experience is way better. Finding a book is a tiny bit harder (emphasis on tiny), but honestly, I'm not in a hurry when I'm in a bookstore, so I don't care.
They don't grill me for PII, and that is at least a part of why they have an easier time getting it. The local bookstore put out a sign up sheet collecting email addresses, with a little blurb at the top saying what it was for. Nobody ever mentioned it, but after a couple trips of looking at and reading it, I just threw it down on a whim. By contrast, the sense of being actively pressured for my contact info at major retailers just makes me dig my heels in on the subject.
I actually don't think finding a book is harder, either. If I know what I want, I just walk up to the counter and ask. If it's in stock, I go grab it. If it's not, they order it, tell me it'll arrive within a month, and I swing back buy to pick it up it about 2 days later. If I don't know what I want, the staff recommendation slips most independent bookstores put out are great, especially now that I've gone enough times to know which staff members share my reading tastes. And have led me to many, many more delightful books and authors I wouldn't have tried otherwise than Amazon's sad attempts at getting something useful out of collaborative filtering. ("You liked Pride and Prejudice? Well, how about... Sense and Sensibility!! Ta-daaaa, isn't AI amazing!?")
I have this same experience with B&N as well, getting grilled on a milion questions is annoying.
Another thing is I like knowing what kind of readers have read similar books to me, and their opinions of said book. I prefer to just buy everything on my kindle, its easy and convenient. Not a big fan of hard copy textbooks much anymore
TBH, the problem is they put this stuff in the checkout dialogue. They could put it on posters etc, but they put it in the way of the purchasing utility (checkout) so you can't avoid it. and it gets in the way, slows you down.
Just another case of business being penny smart and dollar dumb.
"Traditional" media did the exact same thing when faced with competition from the internet. They reduced the quality of their service & product when they saw a reduction in customers which only fueled a further reduction in customers, rinse and repeat til death.
"The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself." -- JK Galbraith
In certain failing businesses, the activities of senior management aren't directed towards trying to save the sinking ship, but to free up as much cashflow as possible and direct it to themselves. Rather than the creditors who would get it in bankruptcy.
A good CEO, of which there are a few are worth the money. There are a few cases (Steve Jobs comes to mind) where a new CEO has come in and turned a failing company around, or a new CEO has come in and tanked a great company. If a company finds such a great CEO who leads the company into making billions, then they are worth a lot of money as reward for their efforts.
Business schools have studied this. One of the strongest indications of a great CEO is how long they worked at the company before becoming CEO. The best CEOs started 20+ years ago and worked their way up the ladder (ie first job out of school). The worst CEOs were hired externally for the CEO role. There are exceptions that you can think of, but when a company brings in an outside CEO that should be a red flag: they don't have the internal development in place to make someone who knows the business the leader. Sadly investors have for the most part not caught onto this. (Warren Buffet knew is in the 1950s which is why he buys companies for their great leaders and keeps the leaders in place)
Even if you can find a great CEO with a great plan with your company, I don't think paying him 10M$ instead of 500k will make him more efficient or be necessary to retain him.
Also I don't think the CEOs salaries are a results of competition for the best (like tech workers), but CEO being generous with themselves (and their peers as they're all in each others' board).
You are correct, but that doesn't invalidate anything I said. If someone is a great CEO for you, and they tell you they will retire to a less stressful job unless you pay them $10m it is worth it, even though you know next year (and $10m richer) they will retire. Their success over that one year should more than make up the money you spend.
Of course this assumes that one more year of development is required for the next CEO to be ready. Great CEOs try to have a replacement (or several) in training at all times.
Note that I'm assuming a great CEO - most are not great.
This is what you get when your business culture rewards quick profit-taking by a small sub-class of actors over long-term business building that benefits customers and employees.
It's more profitable - personally - to asset strip a struggling company, even if it still has prospects, good will, and loyal employees, than to put in the creativity and hard work needed to make it prosper.
Well a good CEO would ideally be someone who understands the intricacies and drawbacks of cost-cutting measures. Unfortunately, the intersection between CEOs with large personal networks, and actual chops is vanishingly small. Most experienced employees working at B&N could probably do a better job than the current CEO. But they don't play golf and know the CEOs of other large companies.
A mentor of mine once said something that really stuck with me: "Any company that chooses to fight a new type of competitor by slashing prices has already admitted defeat"
Or executive are smart about the dollar in their pocket, they don't care if they kill one company because they'll just find another nice executive job in another one.
This is the case of the least denominator in management"thinking". If managers were legally liable to shareholders for obviously bad decisions that benefit to the managers, it might occur less. Only Sweden makes regular management liable in this way, even on criminal penalty. I see all manner of arguments why this could be used to excuse sclerosis in innovation, but frankly I don't see it that way.
This happens in a lot of places. The shopping experience may be nice but the actual payment experience is atrocious. Honestly if I have to wait more than 10 minutes to pay for something, I just don't buy anything, or purchase online instead. Even if there are long queues, there are many ways you could improve the experience - for example get an automatic ticket to get "in line" in the system, and get called when it's your turn - at the same time you can continue looking at more items instead of wasting your time in line.
Many train stations in the Netherlands have book and magazine shops with "self checkout". Basically a scanner & screen like you see at Ikea. Works great in rush hour when these places are packed with people buying morning newspapers and such.
Things like this are why I love Apple's self-checkout system at its stores. No need to even go to a checkout; just scan the item with your phone, and it's paid for.
I sometimes feel like a shoplifter on my way out, but nobody's ever looked at me sideways.
More than once I've decided to pick up an adapter or headphones or a hard drive at the Apple Store instead of Fry's or Best Buy or Target because of the iPhone checkout.
When I've gone to Barnes and Noble recently, I've found editions of books in prominent places that were poorly printed. For instance, one hardcover with a fancy binding had very thin/transparent pages to the extent that the text was less legible. Don't get me started about the trade paperbacks that I suspect will have the binding break immediately.
I wonder if Barnes and Noble sells reduced quality books the same way that Wal*Mart gets brands to make cheaper but reduced quality versions of their products for their stores.
Either way it turns me off. They are pretty good at getting me into the store to use my laptop at the Starbucks or for when my son is doing a group project and the other students are meeting there -- only to immediately turn me off with inferior products.
As in the story above, bad experiences don't just cost a sale immediately, but they might cost all future sales from that customer.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed that. I had the same experience and it made the store seem a bit scammy lately. A lot of the cheaply made books also seemed geared toward older people: they were either about the 1940s-1960s, or were the kinds of public domain classics a grandparent would buy a grandchild (Robinson Crusoe, The Arabian Knights) in outwardly fancy but actually poor quality editions.
It's especially a shame because Barnes & Noble classics editions from 10 or 15 years ago are actually very nice.
Super interesting. For the bibliophiles out there, I wonder how bad this is getting industry-wide? Does it happen at indie book sellers, Wal Mart, and Amazon too?
Certainly I have put down books that were made way too cheaply, and I have impulse-purchased books that are exceptionally well-designed.
But the rest of the year, the stores are empty. Which validated the company's decision: why have a bunch of full time employees, when what it really needs is part time and flexible employees to handle holiday surges (probably caused by waiting for Amazon shipping to not be an option).
Not the one near me (in Phoenix, near Arizona State University). It's a major anchor in a shopping center, and is busy every time I'm ever in there.
The employees are also really helpful. This Christmas, I was trying to find some books as a christmas gift, and the staff made a bunch of suggestions based on books that they had actually personally read.
Sidenote: finding appropriate books for 8-14 year old girls is really freaking hard.
Try Frances Hardinge. The Lie Tree [0] won loads of awards. I'm not in the target age range obviously, but my favourite is Cuckoo Song. Her earlier books are definitely for a younger audience. All Hardinge's books have young female protags.
Philip Pullman's, His Dark Materials trilogy [1]. The protag, Lyra, is one of the most interesting young female protags in literature. (This is one of those trilogies that you can reread at different stages of your life and get new things from each time.)
Patrick Ness's, Chaos Walking trilogy [2]. (Read the dead tree versions, because the use of typography adds a lot.)
Also, checkout Malorie Blackman.
You might also want to take a look at the Carnegie Medal longlist [3] (released yesterday) for ideas.
Note that the His Dark Materials books are a fictionalized advertisement for atheism in the way that C. S. Lewis's Narnia books are for Christianity. If that matters to you, you may want to pick something else.
My knee-jerk reaction to this unsupported assertion was to counter it as a myth; however, I was reading Alan Garner's, The Voice That Thunders [0], this afternoon – specifically the essay, The Voice in the Shadow – and my understanding of myth has deepened; so, instead, I will suggest this assertion is a canard – and not in the sense of the lumps of sugar the French dip into their coffee.
His Dark Materials (HDM) is a retelling of Paradise Lost [1] – Milton's epic poem of the story of Adam and Eve. Its foundational myth is the keystone of much religion. Pullman is a scholar of Blake, and his grandfather was an Anglican vicar whom he was close to as a result of his father dying when he was young. Pullman knows precisely what he's doing.
Where some Christian groups – I will refrain from labelling them as fundamentalists – seem to have backed into their breeches is with Pullman's portrayal of The Magisterium (which some Catholics believe represents themselves), and that in the telling, Pullman kills God.
The Catholic church has – to say the least – had a colourful history. Much of it sanguine – in colour, that is. That's undeniable. And if a parent should want to censor their 8-14 year old reader from the harm that HDM might thrust upon them with the behaviour of The Magisterium, then they are going to have a whale of a time "protecting" them from history of the Catholic church. Good luck denying Martin Luther's place in history; let alone the Inquisition.
Before I tackle the alleged murder of God, can I point out that the Archbishop of Canterbury loves HDM [2]. This is someone who holds a role first filled by Augustine in 597. (Augustine was quite something. Do read his tale.) If anyone on the planet was going to callout Pullman on atheism, the ArchBofC was the man. Nope. Not only loved it, but recommended it.
And yet, in the US, the books were censored [3].
The most telling expurgation is this from the point of view of Father Gomez (of The Magisterium) watching Lyra (the protagonist):
"And there it was: the dark-blonde movement that was the girl's hair. He moved a little closer, and took out the rifle. There was a telescopic sight: low-powered, but beautifully made, so that looking through it was to feel your vision clarified as well as enlarged. Yes, there she was, and she paused and looked back so that he saw the expression on her face, and he could not understand how anyone so steeped in evil could look so radiant with hope and happiness."
"... he could not understand how anyone so steeped in evil could look so radiant with hope and happiness."
For me, in context, this one of the most beautiful parts in the trilogy, but in the US – the Land of the Free, the bastion of free speech – you cannot read it.
God, of course, is not murdered in HDM. First, let us see how Pullman describes the place of God in his universe:
Balthamos (an angel) said quietly, “The Authority, God, the Creator, the Lord, Yahweh, El, Adonai, the King, the Father, the Almighty — those were all names he gave himself. He was never the creator. He was an angel like ourselves — the first angel, true, the most powerful, but he was formed of Dust as we are, and Dust is only a name for what happens when matter begins to understand itself. Matter loves matter. It seeks to know more about itself, and Dust is formed. The first angels condensed out of Dust, and the Authority was the first of all. He told those who came after him that he had created them, but it was a lie. One of those who came later was wiser than he was, and she found out the truth, so he banished her. We serve her still. And the Authority still reigns in the Kingdom, and Metatron is his Regent.”
Pullman uses the idea of sentient matter – he calls Dust – as a core theme of his books. This can be linked to panpsychism, which has a broad history and many proponents both ancient and recent.
But the murder of God?
The two protagonists, Lyra and Will, simply open the crystal cell that contains the Authority and he/it dissolves with “a sigh of the most profound and exhausted relief.”
There's no "fictionalized advertisement for atheism" here, however hard you look.
Patricia C Wrede, Mercedes Lackey, Tamora Pierce, Ursula K Le Guin, Judy Blume and Anne McCaffrey are some authors who have outstanding books for girls in that age range, in case you find yourself with the same problem again.
Thank you! Any specific stories you recommend? The problem I was having with the things I was looking at were that a lot of them seemed to be basically romance novels for kids.
But I liked the Dealing with Dragons series from Patricia C. Wrede (humorous), The Hero and the Crown and The Blue Sword from Robin McKinley, and the Dragon's Blood series from Jane Yolen.
You can get the entire Enchanted Forest series (the name of the series that Dealing with Dragons is the first of; four books in total) for $20-30.
As a male I enjoyed it, and one of my best female friends also remembers it fondly.
I'd also throw in Sabriel, as a YA fantasy novel that I really liked, that had a female protagonist who kicked ass (rather than was there to support a male, or something else equally stereotypical)
I second the Sabriel series. I tend to think Garth Nix is a kind of Neil-Gaiman-starter author. Elements of gothic/horror stuff, but never really too scary for kids (or at least, not for me when I was that age, it tends to depend on the kid in question)
For the adventurous tomboy: "Alanna: The First Adventure" and "First Test" are the first books in two different series.
In general a good series: Sandry's Book (Circle of Magic Series)
Some of them do have romances/crushes (Alanna series more than the other two), but they're all focused on adventurous girls doing cool stuff, and the importance of hard work, friends, learning new things, etc. etc. I loved them as a kid (and now).
Lots of good recommendations below, I'll add Pegasus in Flight and The Ship Who Sang as my favorite McCaffery novels. Mercedes Lackey you do actually have to be careful with, because some of her books are reeaaaally smutty. I remember them fondly from when I was 12, but you probably don't want to be the uncle who gives them to her, come to think of it.
When looking for books for children I look at the CILIP Carnegie award to find winning and shortlisted books. I then noodle around the other books written by those authors.
The award covers a wide range of ages, so some books might be too young.
It’s weird, but some stores are thriving and others are dying. The one in downtown Santa Monica Ca is super crowded whenever I went there, while the one in downtown Bellevue WA is super dead. My impression of B&N changes quickly....
you mean the one in bellevue near the new amazon building in bellevue across the lake from amazon hq1? I'm not sure that's the best store to example off of.
The long time one in downtown, not sure if there is an Amazon building downtown. They closed the attached (real) Starbucks and now it lacks a cafe, even though the Starbucks was always busy the store was still kind of empty.
Yeah that's the one I'm thinking of. There are 2 starbucks one block up the hill to the transit center too, so basically 3 on that square block. It was too far down the hill for me to go to when I worked there.
Bellevue is saturated with starbucks, but very few that were open until 10PM like the one in B&N was (actually, only the Lodge and the original Bellevue store are open late). It was the place for students to hang out studying, but now...there really isn't much to replace it.
At the upper end of that age range, the Chronicles of Chaos (https://smile.amazon.com/Orphans-Chaos-Chronicles-John-Wrigh...) is an excellent trilogy. One of my favorite parts about the series is that each of the main characters has a very distinct way of looking at the world (logic, spirits, etc) that helps start conversations about understanding other peoples' point of view.
Good point, thank you. I did not realized I might be implying that.
Questions about society, future and such are very interesting at that age, older people tend to be interested in different things (at least I went that way). Asimov packs it together with kinda normal fun to read story which kids at that age like too.
Asimov is an incredibly broad writer. He has some stuff aimed at younger readers, but still managed to be uncomfortably sexist with the Norby novels. Robots of Dawn involves sex with robots. I'm not that familiar with the Foundation series but I've heard Foundation's Edge uses sex to drive the plot.
I couldn't finish Foundation, after making it nearly all the way through the book and finding the only woman in the story was someone's secretary. It just felt like very, very dated and boring writing. I don't feel like all his stuff has aged so poorly, either.
I downvoted you because of the suggestion that "most books" are appropriate for (and interesting to) 8-14 year old girls. That is so untrue as to border on absurdity.
And, I also downvoted this comment because asking why you're being downvoted is not only dull, it adds nothing to the conversation.
It does add to the conversation because we have a somewhat binary outcome for a binary recommendation. If recommending Asimov is wrong, why? Don't just downvote opinions you disagree with. Explanations are noble.
I don't think recommending Isaac Asimov is wrong. Some people really like his writing (myself included).
If you would read my reply again, you'll note that I said, "I downvoted you because of the suggestion that "most books" are appropriate for (and interesting to) 8-14 year old girls."
Frankly, I don't think that's controversial enough to have to explain.
First, it's flat out wrong to group 8-14 year old girls together. The sheer amount that girls grow between those years makes that highly questionable. The kind of book that the average 8 year old would gain from would be insulting to the average 14 year old. And the kind of book that a 14 year old girl would gain from wouldn't make much sense to the average 8 year old.
And yes, there are outliers, but if your child is an outlier, for the love of all that is holy, spend time in bookstores with her and figure out what she's actually interested in. In distributions like this, outliers tend to have very strong interests that overwhelm all the social pressure. If you're dealing with an outlier, figure out those interests and cater to them.
Second, let's look at the word "most". Do we have to talk about how most popular fiction geared towards adults may not be appropriate for the average 8 year old? And what about interest? I'm a 40 year old man who reads voraciously yet "most" books are neither appropriate, nor interesting to me. There isn't anything wrong with that. It's just that we all have interests.
It's annoying when someone edits a comment to ask why they were downvoted. But, it's flat out dull when they edit a comment and then make an entirely different reply to ask the same thing. That adds absolutely nothing to the conversation.
[...] I'm a 40 year old man who reads voraciously yet "most" books are neither appropriate, nor interesting to me.
There. Just a friendly suggestion: I think you may be a bit over-extrapolating from your personal experience and your sense of "common sense", to make overgeneralized statements about things as arguably complex and idiosyncratic as "appropriateness" or "interest" in books. (Hence, perhaps, the pushback from other readers.)
I can see how most books would not be interesting to you, but why would they be "not appropriate"? What does the word appropriate means in this context?
We're talking over two threads here and I went into this in another comment.
To answer it succinctly, I'll use the programming language example that I used.
Let's say that you have never programmed before, so you come to me for help. I start teaching you. The first lesson, I teach you how to output "hello world". The second lesson, I teach you about monads. Honestly, how do you think you'd do?
There isn't anything absolutely wrong about monads, but I'd tend to argue that they're a little too advanced for someone who only knows how to output "hello world". In this example, I'd say that teaching you about monads in the second lesson was inappropriate - you likely won't gain from it, in fact, it's more likely that learning about monads too soon will actually hurt your progress.
The other answer to that question "Maybe someone took umbrage with the idea that Asimov stops being interesting after 14?" did added something to the conversation.
Young girls are primary demographic for reading. While it is true that 8 years old are not there, 14 years old already are. Majority of what is in bookstore is appropriate, maybe boring, but I don't recall running into something super inappropriate while randomly browsing bookstore.
First of all, you not only edited your original comment to ask why you were being downvoted, but then you made an entirely different reply to ask the same thing. Repetition like that is dull and adds nothing to a conversation.
Second, I don't think that 8 year old girls and 14 year old girls should be grouped together. I have an 8 year old stepdaughter and she talks to her stuffed animals. She knows (at least, I hope she knows) that Unicorn is stuffed and I make her voice. But, she still talks to, argues with and consoles Unicorn. And, when I meet her friends, she wants her friends to meet Unicorn.
Let's flash forward six years. What do you think she will say/do if I talk like Unicorn in front of her friends? Or, what will happen if her first boyfriend comes over for dinner, I plop a faded old stuffed unicorn on the dinner table, affect a squeaky voice and ask him "do you like unicorns?" That's not appropriate! It will either embarrass her, keep her friends away from me, or otherwise hurt my relationship with her.
Finally, you talked about how you don't recall running into something super inappropriate while browsing bookstores. I'm not talking about Fifty Shades type of stuff. Rather, let me give you an example.
I love The Catcher in The Rye and genuinely believe that every person should be required to read it before being allowed to graduate from high school.
So, that's a book that I would definitely recommend to 12-16 year olds. The thing about the Catcher is that it's best when you've already started questioning the social world around you. Otherwise, it's too easy to declare Holden Caulfield a whiny little twat and not gain from the book.
So, I would argue that while that book is amazing and all kids deserve a copy, not every kid will be ready for it at the same age. So, while the sentiment is appropriate, the book isn't appropriate for every young person at the same time.
Or, in terms of code, let's say that you've never programmed before. It wouldn't be appropriate to teach you "hello world" then go right into monads. There's nothing particularly wrong with monads, it's just that they would be so far beyond you that you wouldn't gain from the lesson.
1.) I did not grouped them, parent did in the question. I picked upper range for answer.
2.) I did not objected to your downvote further. I was honestly curious when I asked those questions. (And also appreciated the answer about glib interpretation.)
For the rest, thank you for answer. I guess I have every different opinion about amount of harmful books for kids in bookstores or maybe we have different bookstores around here. At that age, I was freely selecting books from adult section in local library without any supervision or control. I assumed that other girl is the same.
30 years ago I was a part-time employee at a big box store from October to January. Large retailers long ago figured out how to ramp up their workforce temporarily to adequately handle the sales season that accounts for the largest portion of their sales every year.
For any retailer to blow the Christmas sales season by not adequately staffing it, which has been basic retail management for at least three decades, actually does argue for malpractice on the part of executives. It's a criminal level of incompetence, and I'm not sure whether "criminal" means "criminally negligent" or "fraudulent".
They are removing expensive full time employees for whom they pay benefits for. The article said they had planned on doing this anyways, they just did it after a bad season.
As for not adequately staffing it, you simply can't. You cannot get a decent workforce via part time seasonal work. the way it worked before was part timers just took extra hours in peak periods, but Obamacare killed this by forcing any part timer over so many hours to be eligible for benefits, making it impossible to do.
And yet, virtually every retailer for the last 3+ decades has, in fact, done so as a matter of normal operations.
It has nothing to do with Obamacare. The employment norm was not to only schedule full-time hours for part-time employees (which, even before Obamacare, violated a lot of employment law). Aside from laying off full-time employees after the cycle (which they justified by the crap sales during Christmas), B&N refused to staff-up as normal for virtually every other retailer in North America, to accommodate the most predictable sales cycle in the world... basically in order to justify the firing the full-timers.
This was a hit job by insiders looking to profit off the corpse.
Institutional knowledge and loyalty. Your entire staff can’t be flex workers if you expect customers to be treated properly (see: Apple retail for how it’s done well).
Even still, see how Amazon’s flex/contractors handle deliveries (ie atrociously, as there is no incentive to care) vs UPS (a union shop).
You have to align incentives. Your employees’ success is your success. Otherwise, close up shop and go home. You’ve already lost.
Comparing the level of customer care at a bookstore with that of an Apple store is pretty unfair. Apple makes hundreds or thousands of margin dollars per customer; a bookstore is probably closer to $10.
A better comparison would be Starbucks considering the margins. Not everyone needs to have Apple margins to compensate their retail employees above minimum wage (considering the $14 million dollars Barnes and Noble executives have siphoned off already).
considering the $14 million dollars Barnes and Noble executives have siphoned off already
I don't know, $14mm for the executive team of a company with tens of thousands of employees and 600+ stores doesn't seem crazy to me. Maybe you think that smart, capable, experienced executives grow on trees, but you're wrong. And what smart, capable, experienced executive would ever want to take this job when they probably have much better options with companies who aren't dying?
Would you want to go be lead developer on the Nook team right now, knowing that you probably won't have a job for long, that your equity will be declining in value, that it'll be miserable unless you can miraculously figure out a way to turn things around? Would it be unreasonable for you to only be interested in doing that if you were getting paid very well?
I doubt it. Belief and passion may be necessary, but they're not sufficient. How do you pick this person? Based on the strength of their belief? Because if it's based on their experience and track record, you're back to where you started: this person likely has better alternatives and is smart enough to want to be compensated for the opportunity cost they're incurring.
Also, it's all well and good to say this when it's not your money on the line, but the board is responsible to the shareholders, and I doubt they're interested in taking a chance on some unproven person who has "belief in the company" as their primary qualification.
Well, these fancy pants CEOs didn’t really succeed, did they.
I’m sure their individual point of view, their self interest, it’s perfectly reasonable. But from the outside it’s disgraceful. How do you justify taking a $4m payout after working less than a year? Especially when you know the axe is going to fall on the lowest paid employees.
Maybe you could, you know, skip your bonus, so the people laid off might have a little breathing room.
Frankly, this kind of stuff looks borderline close to fraud. Maybe not a legal fraud, but the fraud of management who wave their hands around to act like they know what they are doing, while they loot the company before it goes down.
Actually, I wonder if this is really true. The thing is, a company like Barnes and Noble needs to roll a hard six. Hiring an experienced, competent executive they can afford who wants to work there and ticks off all the boxes etc.. might not be in the cards for them.
B&N needs to think like a Startup again. Vision and dreams might be more important than a Harvard MBA and 10 years of experience at BigCo, Inc. Remember, Barnes and Noble is default bankrupt right now. Their situation in some ways is more like that of a startup that needs to raise capital fast or die than Amazon or Google. That means that barring drastic changes, their trajectory intersects with the ground. Why not take a big chance? Who's more likely to bet big, a young dreamer who wants $100K and a ton of stock, or the experienced executive who wants $5M a year and is going to get majorly paid no matter what happens? They're going to lose everything as it stands anyway.
I've done a lot of hiring, and have found that salary demands are weakly inversely proportional to performance.
That is to say, people whose salary demands are at the lower end of the salary range for that career have outperformed those whose demands are at the higher end.
My sample size is small but significant. Food for thought.
Meh. The older and more experienced I get the more I realize I work to put food in the table and to pay for my life outside. Working for “passion” is for suckers. As the dude in that one YouTube video about consulting says, fuck you. Pay me.
Pay me what market rate is and don’t give me sob stories about passion or making sacrifices to work on some life changing BS. Pay me.
Pay you for what? I don’t think many red blooded Americans resent leaders of companies that are kicking ass, reaping the rewards.
What’s eating away the civic fabric are those who put their own self interest above everyone else.
Once you get up into the millions in compensation, I don’t think the concern is that the poor naive CEO is being exploited by working for less than the absolute most they can get. Especially when the level of pay is so high, that it disproportionately impacts the bottom line.
I’m sorry, this primacy of market and money above all is sickening.
I'm supporting a family on a semi-remote job (work from anywhere, employer covers my airfare to our offices as needed), and when I unexpectedly parted ways with my previous employer last year, I doubled my compensation in 2 weeks. "F* you, pay me" is a legitimate operating philosophy as an employee when your skills are in demand. Also important to live below your means and have a 1+ year runway of savings to enable you to negotiate from a position of power, but that's a conversation for another thread.
Better said above, "Working for “passion” is for suckers."
That's interesting, but I'm pretty skeptical, and I don't even think it's relevant here, unless you were hiring executives for large but dying companies?
Here's more food for thought: the five biggest companies in the US are all data-driven tech companies that are renowned for paying ridiculously high compensation. Why wouldn't they apply your framework to both save on hiring costs and boost performance?
The fame of the high salaries at tech companies relates primarily to technical staff, not executive pay. These companies are also located in some of the most expensive areas to live.
S&P 500 is primarily a ranking by market cap. It’s a measure of how much the market values a stock. I can see it being a component of size (how “big”). There’s no doubt that the big tech companies are colossal entities.
The market cap of a company is largely based on a bet of the “size” of a company in the future.
Tesla is the most “valuable” US auto maker, by market capitalization. This illustrates that market cap is inherently related to predictions which have a large speculative component, which can be influenced by pure market phenomena.
> Here's more food for thought: the five biggest companies in the US are all data-driven tech companies that are renowned for paying ridiculously high compensation. Why wouldn't they apply your framework to both save on hiring costs and boost performance?
Because a) at their scale they need to hire in bulk b) their business (advertising, "media"...) simply don't inspire that level of passion in anyone, so money is all they can do.
If anything, that undermines the point I'm arguing against: why would these companies feel any need to collude to suppress wages if they could get better performance just by hiring cheaper workers?
Also, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, etc. weren't part of this suit, so again, not relevant.
person who really wants the job but is kind of underqualified > person who is highly qualified, but doesn't really want the job (unless the money is right)
edit: I'll add that, for CEOs who should all look amazing on paper and know how to sell themselves, maybe willingness to do the job for less than market is a better signal than most
> How do you pick this person? Based on the strength of their belief?
Apparently the qualification that they care about is "Willing to take $10 million in payments while laying off 1800 to save $40 million". Competence at the CEO level doesn't always have to look like malevolence.
I'm always amazed also at how slow cashiers can be. I worked at walmart nearly 20 years ago and briefly they had a bonus for speed. All of the "career" retail cashiers got pissed because new employees who had only been there for a couple months started making more than them, being twice as fast. Visiting walmart and some other stores when there are long lines can be excrutiating as I see cashiers just not caring about speed while wasting time of people in line. Customers should not be able to scan a full cart of items in self-checkout faster than the average cashier.
The app would likely be more expensive to develop and maintain than hiring a few seasonal part-timers per store (2000 people at, let's face it, minimum wage for a month is about $4M that immediately converts to sales numbers just by being conscious enough to operate a register - that's cheaper than ~10 software devs in America (at least two of which are specialists - iOS/Android devs), a manager, an office, their equipment and their benefits packages that takes a year to 18-months to produce anything at all). Maybe outsourcing it would be cheaper... but even then, your conversion rate is going to be lower than just hiring a damned cashier.
And apparently B&N was against even spending for that, even during heavy sales periods. If I were a shareholder before I wouldn't be after reading this news - I'd be going and buying Amazon stock. And a lot of this explains why Amazon has been crushing Wal-Mart - people are just done with going to stores and waiting in lines, looking around at empty cashier stations in frustration when they can point, click, and have something on their doorstep the next day with less effort.
> that's cheaper than ~10 software devs in America (at least two of which are specialists - iOS/Android devs), a manager, an office, their equipment and their benefits packages that takes a year to 18-months to produce anything at all)
Really? It would take 10 people 18 months to produce some type of ecommerce app that would
a) allow people to bar code scan something
b) pay for it on their phone
??
Yes, certainly there would be more tie ins to do - tie the same in to existing POS system for inventory purposes (real time or nightly), for one.
But... 18 months? $4M?
Walmart and apparently target are working on or piloting same day pickup. I can order online and go pick up at the store right afterwards. Saves walking around the store (which might cut down impulse purchases, but hey... we'll get bombarded with upsells on the future purchases, no doubt). I might not actually want something on my doorstep the next day, but want it in my hand or car 90 minutes from now, while I'm passing the store on the way home, etc.
My software development experience lies far outside of the web/mobile app development world, so perhaps this idea already exists...
Similar to how PG and RTM created Viaweb (a web application that allowed non-technical people to build online e-commerce sites), are there any sites/tools which allow non-technical people develop non-trivial retail/online purchasing iPhone/Android apps?
There plenty of limited functionality (trivial in your words) style WYSIWYG style app builders. But for non-trival apps the best I've seen is https://www.dropsource.com/ They do seem to be solving this problem but not focusing on complete non-technical people, just people without direct mobile experience.
Definitely depends on where you are. In cities or in California in general they are terrible compared to the rural Midwest (where they started and land/labor is much cheaper).
Next thing, you're going to tell me Santa is real ;). Every Walmart I've ever gone to, their checkout system is terribly slow.
Their self checkout is better but still gets overwhelmed easily.
I do. There are actually a few different kinds of Walmarts around that I have visited, and it's generally the same story.
I think it's a time based thing, not so much size, IMO.
It seems like no matter how large or what they offer, their prices draw crowds, and they both understaff, and either under train, or make sure to put the slowest humans on Earth as the cashiers.
But the time criteria is best said in terms of when to go, since that's a much narrower window than when not to go.
I don't go into Walmart often, but I've never seen lines deeper than 2 people, other than at the self checkout (one line serves 6+ lanes so a longer line obviously moves faster). Depends on where you live of course.
Walmart and Sam's Club have exactly that with their Pay & Go app.
You scan the UPCs on things as you put them in your cart. When you're done, you select pay and it displays a barcode on your screen. The checker at the door has a handheld device that they scan the barcode with, it gives them an item count, and you're on your way.
I've only ever used it at Sam's where there's always a door checker. I've heard it can be more of a pain to use at Walmarts because the door people don't always have the handheld around and have to go hunt it down.
Really, it shouldn't be surprising that they'd be a company willing to experiment in this field. Cutting labor costs to an extreme (which is actually one of the reasons I avoid Walmarts, but that's another rant) is pretty central to how they operate. And they became the behemoth they are by innovating in logistics. People often forget that they were a key figure in driving the adoption of product barcodes in the first place.
Apple has a sky high budget for shoplifting. They have no issue with somebody walking out with an iPhone case because it implies they bought an iPhone.
They’ve been chasing cost reduction for many years, reducing investment in total and in that specific case I’d bet they have considerable worries about shoplifting.
This happened to me yesterday - I ordered a book from Waterstones and popped out at lunchtime to pick it up.
The collection desk is the same desk as the front of the store (there are payment desks on each floor of the store) and it was rammed. I ordered on Amazon instead of waiting.
All they have to do is put a sign saying collections are on X floor and it would be a better all round experience.
I also noticed that people were queuing and then asking if so-and-so book was in stock. How is this efficient?
> The checkout line was at least 50 people long and probably estimated at over an hour. Two cashiers working out of 8 or so possible registers, and as far as I could tell a singular employee on the floor itself.
This is a perfect instance for self-checkout kiosks. They're everywhere: big retailers like Target, chain groceries, national pharmacies, home improvement stores, and they're turning up in smaller places and even fast food venues. This suggests to me that the kiosk price is dropping and there's less reason to have empty registers and long lines except for deliberate ignorance.
There was an article posted 2 weeks ago on HN about how (some) stores are scaling back on self-checkout because it's causing their theft rates to rise: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16293747
Tesco stores in London are removing from self checkout kiosks cash payment. A middle size store in the City, two sides of a aisle, left accept cash, on the right the machines only accept cards. The card only kiosks were all vacant. On the left, backing up a frustrated queue tailing behind me another twenty people at least, were a dozen self checkout kiosks, all confounding anyone's ability to pay for any goods. With the random completion of the process, the queue for the cash kiosks became chaotic. It was about 11pm. The store was otherwise almost empty. In other words, people were able to"do all their shopping" quickly, and then spend considerably more time being pissed off, probably like me, also unable to price see several items before getting to the kiosk, which is not a uncertainty I much care for.
At the kiosk, I realized I needed a carrier bag, and asked for one, none being visible. "A ten pence one is fine!" I said hopefully, the mandatory five pence ones nowhere. "We've only those." He said, pointing to one pound fifty fancy bags. Off I went, my basket left behind me. No sale.
Last night. Another Tesco store. This one has had random kiosks changed to accept card only. So I asked, as I approached the head of the queue and was told... This store doesn't accept cash. Another abandoned basket.
I have been able to complete less than half of every attempt at shopping in the second of those two stores, walking out each time over two years. Sainsbury's stock was paying ten percent dividends,last I looked. I see a classic long - short position.
By "inventory nightmare" you mean "theft", right? Because that's the real problem. There are already self-serve lines in many stores, but they still have to watch people to try to prevent theft. And it turns out people are really, really slow if they aren't trained as a cashier.
Sure, the cellphone eliminates the slowdown, but it also eliminates the primary way they currently prevent theft.
Amazon is working on a store that works a lot like you said, with your cellphone, but doesn't rely on the customer doing anything other than logging in. After that, tons of cameras take care of the rest.
Imagine that each piece of inventory had a per-item unique RFID permanently attached to it. Not just a model unique RFID, unique to that particular instance. Imagine that your phone can read that RFID. Your phone also has an app that can connect to a database, identify the particular product that the RFID represents, and complete a transaction online. Once the transaction is complete, the store's security systems are updated so that that RFID can pass through the entrance scanners without the alarm going off.
Potential pitfalls include the cost of the RFIDs, the ability to detach the RFIDs at any point, the ability to read the RFID on your phone, and alternative entrance / exits of merchandise (e.g. toss through a window).
more self-service kiosks would be an easier solution rather than building an entire new system.
If you used your phone, then it would easy to shoplift. Buy 7 items, but "forget" to scan the last two. Self-service kiosks at least prevents this with weight sensors, cameras, and a human kiosk manager.
Whenever I have ordered online from BN the shipping has taken a ridiculously long time, as in weeks not days. I'm not a huge fan of Amazon so if BN had at least been able to do 2-3 day shipping they would have had my business. Regarding their retail experience, it wouldn't surprise me if some executive is selling them on the concept of long checkout lines as it results in people buying more books from the discount tables at the front. It is very unfortunate that corporate dictates operational policy to individual stores like that, I have always only had positive experiences with BN employees so I wish them well.
>I put my selections back and walked out the door. Granted it was near peak shopping season - but that was inexcusable.
Scaling retail is hard. Especially if you're against "be on call 24/7 for minimum wage without additional on call compensation".
They could buy self-checkout terminals, though, but I imagine they don't want assets like that and would rather let the business fail. That's the writing on the wall (if not the stock trend)
Scaling retail is hard to get perfect to the same precision of auto-scaling AWS, maybe, but scaling to an acceptable (measured in profit and customer satisfaction) level really isn't. Or rather, the solution is known.
Especially in December - during prime holiday shopping hours - you staff up. It's more profitable to have a little bit of employee slack time than to have customer satisfaction way down and customers walking out without buying things.
This is a bad take - the whole "oh retail will die without self-checkout terminals" overlooks the realities of retail, what consumers want when they choose to go into an actual brick and mortar store, and how businesses can succeed. And it does so in a way that perpetuates the implication that we have to treat employees like computers to be successful.
>It's more profitable to have a little bit of employee slack time than to have customer satisfaction way down and customers walking out without buying things.
For big box stores, but B&N are on the decline, while real estate and lease prices have likely risen.
"you staff up" works when you can actually pay for the excess, but B&N clearly don't want to. But you missed the point of my take in that they aren't willing to invest in assets for customer satisfaction. They're on the way out, so why would they care to staff up for holidays either?
Or, alternately, the company could do what every other company in existence does and what B&N has always done and have people work during what they know will be the busiest time of the year instead of sending everyone home, destroying the company and letting the CEO pocket the savings.
Even worse. I wasn't able to buy online from them. My credit card charge was declined (two different cards). I contacted the Card bank and they said that it is B&N that cancelled the sale.
I contacted B&N support and they gave me a response that it is due to their fraud detection service. There was no solution to buy. They didn't offer PayPal or another gateway. So I had to walk away.
Barnes and Noble did some dumb things as this article points out, but they are NOWHERE near what the CEO of Sears is doing. That is corporate malpractice, gross negligence, and perhaps high treason all rolled into one. Literally look up anything online for “Sears CEO is terrible” and you will get links from NY Times, WaPo, etc.
Also with BN, I mean they were going up against one of the biggest most powerful companies in human history. Their survival so far is impressive at least, and they did try with the Nook, but Amazon was always a software company so BN has a difficult and late challenge.
If anything, the best strategy for now with BN is to increase cash-flow, cut expenses, etc and wait for the legal and cultural environment to turn against some of the tech companies. Personally I don’t think Amazon has done that much wrong, but I imagine they will suffer some collateral damage from the move against first, Facebook, followed by second Google. Although Google is smart and already broke themselves up years ago to avoid just this fate, Facebook is still in denial......
Note that they have decreased staff numbers, but increased efficiency.
For example my local store had 2 people on the main till at Xmas[1] but the wait was short as they were turning them over very fast. I walked in 2 days before Xmas and was out within 10 minutes.
Also, at the bottom of the article, they say they're opening new stores, 5 last year, 15 more planned this year.
[1] Another poster said they'd walked out of a B&N store with 50 people in a queue and 2 servers at Xmas.
At the end of the article the author makes it very clear what she thinks is happening: they are deliberately scuttling the company and attempting to wring it dry in the process.
The Sears situation is just sad. I'm not sure why shareholders are putting up with it, except... most probably have just accepted the narrative that sears is dead, and are OK with the sell off and ... yeah, treason isn't a bad word. But... selling off assets you control to another company you also control would seem like... oh.. what's the term? Conflict of interest? I don't understand in the slightest why this has been allowed to go on. I can't imagine if, say, Target's CEO started cutting store budgets, then closing and selling the bad performing stores and real estate to another company the CEO owned, and then made a profit repurposing those stores to other companies. It's truly bizarre.
Sears was/is a total mess. Went there to buy something (before they closed the local store) and it took 10 minutes to checkout, with the clerk fumbling between the iPad, a CRT register, and credit card scanner. What a cluster F.
I figure the board must be getting their pockets lined as the CEO guts the company as fast as possible. It's going to be sad but completely predictable when Sears goes under.
It's pretty unlikely either Amazon or Google will face much headwind as they fulfill necessary roles. Facebook isn't necessary from what I can see (though I personally like it and use it) and contributes to known social ills.
Zuck is redirecting a lot of effort into community organizing which I think is a necessary role, though meetup already has that space and isn't really that big of a company. I think he's going to find out that it doesn't pay as well as feeding general narcissism does.
For any company that can, increasing cash flow is a great way to proceed assuming you don't muck around with the balance sheet.
Unfortunately, I don't see a way for BN to really do that, the sun set on their business a long, long time ago. Sure they could morph into some kind of WeWork/Starbucks thing, but its not like that's an open playing field begging for competition either.
For the record, I do like that idea. I recently started working remote, and while I like my office it's nice to go to a coffee shop and get out of the house for a while. But, the WiFi usually sucks and it can be too noisy. A quiet place with decent WiFi and coffee would be superb. I don't know what books other professions need, but it'd be pretty neat to go and checkout TAOCP (or something) and do some work for a while. Like a library meets coffee shop meets BYOD internet cafe, or something. Idk.
The stores of the French chain Fnac - which sells mainly books, movies and consumer digital equipment - often have coffeeshops inside, where you can sit with a book if you buy something. And during working hours, they're usually quiet enough. I'm not sure if they have wifi, but I've seen people studying there.
The downside of somewhere like a library is that you really can't take a phone call from there. I'd pay some money for an environment that's as pleasant as my library, but that also has phone booths.
> [...] and wait for the legal and cultural environment to turn against some of the tech companies. Personally I don’t think Amazon has done that much wrong, but I imagine they will suffer some collateral damage from the move against first, Facebook, followed by second Google
It may be too late. Even if Amazon stopped selling books, people have gotten used to buying their books online. They will just switch to AbeBooks.com, Biblio.com, Thriftbooks.com [1], or others.
[1] I had never actually heard of Thriftbooks before today. I found them when I looked up a book on Barnes & Noble's website, and on the bottom of the page at B&N they had Google ads for other place selling the book, and Thriftbooks was one of them (and they were cheaper than B&N). B&N sure did not get their money's worth for the $1.4 million they paid their CMO in 2017.
> The people who lost their jobs had been actively assured this would NOT happen for the past several months.
My last employer did this. Not so much the exact scenario, but they constantly assured us they were fully committed for the long-term to our satellite office that they opened. They went out of their way to reiterate this quite regularly and put a good of effort into it. Until one day they showed up and shut down the entire office.
I just don't understand why. Who treats people like that? It's not like these decisions just suddenly pop up out of the blue one morning and a decision to fire people has to be made immediately. Clearly companies have to mull over this type of stuff for quite some time. I don't understand why you reassure people like that only to completely up-end their lives. Knowing that B&N pulled this crap, I'll definitely be avoiding them moving forward.
So moral of the story is, when I company has to start assuring you that you most definitely won't be let go any time soon, it's a pretty good indicator that it'll be happening very soon.
I've been through probably 3 DOZEN layoffs so far in my career. If management comes in one day out of the blue and assures you there won't be layoffs I can 100% guarantee there will be soon. (Especially when it is an executive from corporate or _military_ HQ) It happens every time. It is one of the biggest red flags of an impending layoff. You have much better hope if they are not saying stuff like that.
But I'm not suggesting they tell everyone the company is in dire straits and they are on the verge of getting fired. Just don't willfully lie to them on a daily basis and tell them that things are amazing and their jobs are totally secure. In my scenario, we weren't actively asking questions regularly. But they were offering the (mis)information on an almost daily basis.
The prior post called it out. It's people in the decision making chairs who are choosing short-term stability over long -term trust.
>You know that people won't work as much. Will disengage.
Will cause trouble and cost you money, time, efforts.
It may be jaded of me but I believe it's rare to see a company with management that actually has the courage to be transparent and fully honest with its employees. I find that a good smoke test to see what type of management your own company has is probing what people in your company think about "transparent salaries" where everyone knows what everyone else makes. You'll see some enlightening responses if you're privy to the conversations.
The minute they leak that there are layoffs coming, every talented individual is going to start spending all their time job hunting instead of working even if they weren't going to be laid off; likewise, untalented individuals will stop giving a shit. You also have security problems if you provide advanced notice. It is inevitable that the data will get leaked which will affect share price before a narrative can be composed, you give vindictive employees time to steal IP, data, or physical goods before they are out the door, and you provide a window of time for people to damage systems.
Unfortunately the best way to do it from the company's perspective is to be sudden and surgical, giving people 0 time to sabotage the company.
In my experience the actual axe coming down is done in a terse, bloodless manner for legal reasons. Up until that point, managers are comfortable being cordial.
Managers I've known are terrified about being sued and decide being heartless is the safest option (for the company, and for them).
That's an american point of view, but in France not letting anyone know would actually make your more likely to be sued. Yet they have the same attitude.
they do it so employees don't quit beforehand, so that they can keep using them to make money until the last second, while not giving them any opportunity to find a new job so they don't miss rent the week after they're fired
if it's not illegal it should be, and I'm sure there is some ground for a civil lawsuit in the fact they they assured them they would not lose their jobs, thereby costing them thousands in lost income when they're laid off and having nothing else lined up, in this case it could be a class action.
We have no compassion as a society anymore (if we ever had any), its been supplanted by greed.
Also, I suspect, so they can have some control over who leaves.
When employees start leaving on their own, the first to leave are going to be the highly skilled but underpaid ones. They are attractive, relatively inexpensive to attract away, and have relatively little incentive to stay. They're also the ones the company most wants to hold on to, for similar reasons.
I'm not sure what the terms of these employee's termination actually is. The article leaves the impression that they were essentially tossed onto the street, but it could be that they were all given the required 60-day notice.
Great points, this is very much also true on my experience. Once the decision is made to lay off, often work is done to make sure that they don't use company resources to get their next job. It's quite accepted in business circles, but from the outside it really sounds heartless.
I'm not saying they need to let the world know. But don't actively tell them on a daily basis that the company is in excellent shape and everyone is safe and secure for the foreseeable future.
This is actually very typically “thou dost protest too much” behavior. You should always read management signally counterfactually and look for inside information via private communication.
> I just don't understand why. Who treats people like that?
The people making the decision to do the layoffs are distanced from the people being laid off by one or more levels of hierarchy, so they never have to look the employees in the eye. It's left to middle management to do the dirty work.
I remember back when Circuit City fired all of its floor staff and replaced them with entry level (and bottom run wage) workers. Oddly, they went out of business not long after that.
You can't race to the bottom in retail, the bottom is already taken by walmart and online stores (like amazon). You can't be cheaper or more convenient, you need to offer something they don't. For bookstores that means you have to have good selection, a good environment, author signing/speaking events, and so forth.
The retail apocalypse is not being driven primarily by lack of revenue, there's plenty of meat on those bones for companies to survive on in perpetuity, and many continue to thrive. Rather it's being driven by poor business decisions. Hedge fund driven leveraged buyouts that load down retail chains with enormous levels of debt. Complicated expansion schemes designed to enrich some particular set of owners or executives at the cost of business health. And so on. B&N is just another example of how retail chains have becomes playthings for the business elite. Business fundamentals are irrelevant. The fate of the business itself or the workers are irrelevant. All that matters is how many golden eggs they can cut out of the goose's body before it dies.
I think your point about offering what your competitors are not is spot on: a hub that facilitates community and study, events with widely known authors and public figures, and so forth. Portland's Powells book store in the Pearl District nails this, with multiple stories of books that seemingly never end and centered right in the middle of the hustle and bustle of the city. I hope B&N replicates this because I would hate to see them go and it's why any book I buy is only from one of these chains.
I hate to rain on your parade but Powell’s isn’t exactly thriving. There were layoffs about 5 years ago and they’ve scrapped big renovation projects and even plans to move the main store because of revenue problems.
I think this is a very important point; independent bookstores in general aren't "thriving" in the normal Wall St sense of the word. I wonder: is their whole resilience is due to more of a downshift in expectations? I.e., earn enough to make a living but not to expand? To give your employees a liveable wage but no healthcare?
Indeed. I live in an area (Seattle) that has multiple excellent local bookstores (specifically Third Place Books and Elliott Bay). What sets them apart is they have a good selection of books, they have an environment that is conducive to hanging out and reading (Third Place especially), they have lots of recommendations from staff and local book clubs, and they have regular events like book signings and author Q&As, etc. I just checked the closest B&N and they have one non-kids author event between now and the end of March, in contrast the local Third Place has 15, Elliott Bay has even more. Stepping into a B&N it just feels like a generic, lifeless experience, there is basically nothing to recommend it over simply buying a book online. But there's still money and life in selling books at retail, you just have to do it well.
(And yes, for the record Powells is a world class bookstore, every time I visit I always enjoy it and it's always packed.)
> You can't race to the bottom in retail, the bottom is already taken by walmart and online stores (like amazon). You can't be cheaper or more convenient, you need to offer something they don't. For bookstores that means you have to have good selection, a good environment, author signing/speaking events, and so forth.
I made the effort to visit a B&N earlier this month because I was looking for good translations of texts from Ancient Greece (Homer, Herodotus). I wanted the ability to compare different books to determine what I would actually enjoy reading, as opposed to trusting online reviews. There were two options for each. Herodotus sort of makes sense, but Homer ought to have several translations. It’s considered a masterpiece, after all.
This was probably the final visit to a chain bookstore for me. I will still pop into mom and pop shops on occasion just to browse, but I no longer believe that I can find the things I want in a megastore.
Don't believe it's wrong to say you are a very niche customer. Their selection of Hemingway isn't much better, but that's because they've got limited floor space.
Not sure how they could solve your specific issue unless they had much bigger locations.
Is it so unrealistic? When I wanted a copy of _Beowulf_ in 2003 or so, what I did was I wandered into my local Borders and found it, and compared 5 or 6 different books; I ultimately settled on Heaney's translation which I liked the bits I read the most of, and then picked the volume with the most additional historical essays providing context. And _Beowulf_ is surely less read than Homer.
The problem with bookstores is your inventory only ever increases. They probably made some cost calculation that carrying multiple translations of Homer translated to a few more sales a year. It's a hard business. I've wandered in there and found esoteric history, the kind that I was surprised they even carried. You add Homer #2, something like that gets axed.
Maybe they could stop selling the kind of books that are really big for a year and then nobody ever reads again, but it can't be easy.
That was 15 years ago, though -- a veritable millennium in the internet age. Although Amazon was around, a lot of people still accessed the internet over a cable modem (or even dial-up!) or some other technology which didn't provide ubiquitous internet access. Most people surfed the internet from their desktop, as opposed to using their phones from a wide variety of places from the couch to the toilet.
(a) higher sales volume and higher profitibality meant that they could afford some loss leaders.
(B) online not being as popular meant they were still a market for niches. Today niche interests are almost all entirely online
(C) The one big thing people are ignoring is that with the abundance of alternate media, books in general are almost certainly being read less. It's not just sales but actual consumptions of books that have likely dropped. The number of readers of certain niches has almost certainly reduced.
>> Rather it's being driven by poor business decisions
Agreed. It's that plus a healthy dose of panic and a refusal to accept reality - that contraction of revenue is necessary to stay alive - that causes these companies to make idiotic Hail Mary decisions that never pan out.
That, or, as the author makes clear at the end, the execs do not care about saving the company and just want to make as much as they can for themselves before it all falls apart.
Yes this is creative destruction, but Amazon is able to sell at a loss because Wall St. sees the infinite dollar signs at the end of this road when they’ve literally killed off all competition. Selling at a loss is anti-competitive and should get them hammered by anti-trust, but somehow the US government has decided that, in this generation at least, monopolies are fine as long as they don’t raise prices.
As a customer I like Amazon, but as a citizen they deeply worry me.
Does Amazon sell at a loss? I'm pretty sure they've been profitable for a couple years now. And how could Amazon be a monopoly? They have larger competitors.
That may be true, but their retail business still is profitable. Last year they made around $1 billion of profit from selling a lot of stuff ($120 billion in sales).
This is the flip-side of creative destruction. Amazon and ecommerce in general have given us a world where brick and mortar retail often just can't compete. 99% of these layoffs and restructurings, etc. are just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. The writer of this article seems to think that the executives are just trying to milk the company all the way down, but it's not even clear to me there's a better option. You can't lose money indefinitely, you can't compete in the sector you grew huge in (because it's rapidly dying), and so what's the end game here? Yes, they could handle this better, and maybe they overpay their executives (although what experienced executive would even want this job unless the pay was awesome?), but this is just quibbling. Whether it happened now or happened in six months or two years, this is inevitable.
Now, it's definitely sad when people lose their jobs, but that's kind of the devil's bargain we've made with capitalism.
Some of the startups that grow out of HN will be in new sectors that only add to the economy, but many will replace, supplant, cannibalize, and dominate companies and industries that aren't strategically or operationally capable of adapting. That means a LOT of people are going to lose their jobs in the process.
It sucks, but I'm not sure there's a better option. Maybe the best we can do is try and structure a society where getting laid off from a decent job isn't so damaging and scary on a personal level.
> It sucks, but I'm not sure there's a better option. Maybe the best we can do is try and structure a society where getting laid off from a decent job isn't so damaging and scary on a personal level.
Maybe we need to acknowledge that we're moving towards having a society where "everyone has a job that earns them their living" is untenable, because there will be less work for humans to do than humans to do it, and we have to find a different kind of social contract to survive on.
Maybe, but it seems a weird argument to make during record low unemployment. Yes, I'm aware of labor force participation rates, and that the pay for many of these jobs is too low, AI is predicted to destroy jobs, etc, but that's not what we're talking about, right?
Amazon employs way more people than B&N, the company they put out of business. Maybe those jobs should be better (OK, they definitely should), but that's different from saying there are no jobs, isn't it?
> Maybe, but it seems a weird argument to make during record low unemployment. Yes, I'm aware of labor force participation rates, and that the pay for many of these jobs is too low, AI is predicted to destroy jobs, etc, but that's not what we're talking about, right?
Admittedly, I'm driving the conversation towards a general problem from this specific example. But I think that even if I accept the premise that right now, things are OK, we still need to prepare for the future that's coming. Automation is coming for truck and taxi drivers, for restaurant workers, for the last remaining factory jobs. It's even coming for relatively skilled workers in some fields. It's not directly what this post is talking about, but it's the context in which this post takes place, and we shouldn't avoid it.
> Amazon employs way more people than B&N, the company they put out of business. Maybe those jobs should be better (OK, they definitely should), but that's different from saying there are no jobs, isn't it?
Amazon employs more people than B&N, but B&N is by no means the first or only company they have destroyed, and there are more to come. And as soon as Amazon can make the same amount of money while employing fewer people, they will do so. Every company does. The cycle repeats, only this time more people lose and fewer people gain.
we still need to prepare for the future that's coming
I disagree, honestly. Not because I don't think all the things you're saying will happen will happen, but because of all the things that are also going to happen that we're not talking about, because we don't know what they are. Yes, tons of jobs are going away (although I think it'll be 10-20 years for most of these, not 3-5 years like many seem to think), but what new sectors, opportunities, jobs, etc. will be created? I'm an optimist, so I genuinely think we'll adjust and adapt. I think we'll end up with most people doing jobs that don't exist today.
I could be wrong though.
However, no one knows the future, and the prediction that tech will destroy more jobs than it creates has been made since the start of the industrial revolution. So you basically have to fall back on the claim that "this time it's different". Which has also been made repeatedly during that time period :)
But honestly, at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter whether we should prepare or not, because we won't. Not in America at least.
There is no chance in hell that our political system will get its act together in the next two decades to get ahead of this problem and put policies in place for a bad situation that's coming but hasn't arrived yet. Look at all the problems that we know are problems because we're already living through them that we won't even fix now. We just put patches in place (maybe) and keep kicking the can down the road. Seriously, if half the jobs in America get destroyed in the next 20 years, it'll take us 40 years (or violent revolution) to address it.
> Yes, tons of jobs are going away (although I think it'll be 10-20 years for most of these, not 3-5 years like many seem to think), but what new sectors, opportunities, jobs, etc. will be created?
How many of the people whose jobs are destroyed will be able to move into the jobs that are created? In something like 30 states [0] 'truck driver' is the largest single occupation; where would those skills be re-applied?
I agree that nothing will be done regardless due to a lack of political will, but I don't share your optimism. I suspect that the change will be gradual to begin with, but that suddenly there will be a whole category of people unable to earn a living with their skills, and unable to afford to re-skill into something that can be used.
I think we are pretty far from truly replacing truck drivers. There will be a long period where the truck driver is in the car but not really driving, maybe even a very long time depending on if it is enshrined in law.
Even if the truck did drive itself, would it also load/unload and deal with flat tires and other vehicle damage conditions? I don't think these problems are insurmountable but I do think they will further extend the life of the truck driver profession.
I mean trains and subways don't even drive themselves right now somehow, so I think truck drivers will be fine.
I think the first step will be replacing long-haul truck drivers with autonomous trucks, they'll start at a depo near a freeway and end at a depo at the other end, then a human will drive to make the local delivery. Freeways are (relatively) easier to navigate than local streets.
That takes a 30 hour long haul job and turns it into a 30 minute job -- a single driver can do 10 of those a day.
Autonomous trucks will handle flats and other roadside breakdowns the same way many human drivers do -- pull over and wait for the repair service to come.
There's less incentive to replace train/subway drivers due to the high driver to passenger/cargo ratio (plus union rules get in the way) -- 1 truck driver to 40 tons of cargo versus 1 train engineer to 10,000 tons of cargo
>Autonomous trucks will handle flats and other roadside breakdowns the same way many human drivers do -- pull over and wait for the repair service to come.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but you clearly have no idea how the trucking industry works.
There are dozens of fully-automated train lines, some with attendants but many with absolutely zero personnel onboard, and the number is expected to quadruple within 10 years.
You may be right, I don't know. I'm not saying we shouldn't worry about this, just that I'm personally skeptical, and not really in favor of restructuring society for a problem that might be coming. If we had done that all those times in the past...
To take the truck driver thing, here's a plausible scenario (to me anyway).
First of all, "top job in X states" seems like a really weird way to express this. It honestly feels like a way to make it seem as dire as possible.
There are something like 3 to 3.5 million truck drivers in the US. That's a lot. However, BLS reports that only about half of these are heavy and tractor trailer truck drivers [1]. So maybe the rest are driving smaller trucks and vehicles around town? Those seem safer from job loss to me, I suspect that any job that requires driving a truck here and there and loading / unloading things will not be replaced by AI as fast.
Side note: BLS is predicting 6% growth in this job from 2016 to 2026, which is about average. But let's assume they're wrong.
So let's say that 1.8 million are long haul truckers that can be relatively easily replaced by AI. How long will that really take? I know everyone thinks that self-driving cars are around the corner, but I'm really not convinced. We've been hearing that for a few years now, and it seems like lots of teams are hitting some roadblocks (heh) in terms of their ability to solve some of the remaining issues. Just my ambient observations though, I'm no expert.
Even if we do get there with some cars in the next 3-5 years, are we really going to be ready to put heavy loads on highways unattended? We're going to handle the technical issues, security issues, legal issues, insurance, in a few years? I'm really skeptical. Maybe we can do point-to-point on highways in 5 years, but then what? Do we have huge lots where these trucks park and then drivers ferry them to local warehouses to be loaded / unloaded? What about fueling these things along the way with no drivers? How do we keep these loads safe from theft? None of these are insurmountable, but are we really going to solve these things in the next few years such that we're ready to start laying people off?
I think 10-20 years is much more realistic to put the majority of truckers out of a job. Not all, but the majority. But truckers are already old (49 average) and many will be retiring over that period anyway. Why can't we just not replace them as those jobs dwindle?
The other stat I think is relevant is that the average car today is 11.5 years old. Or looked at another way, in 11 years, HALF of the cars on the road are the cars that are on the road today. I guess if we cut down the number of cars total due to efficiencies of self-driving carshare maybe that goes down but still... If Level 5 autonomous drive were available TODAY, it's still a long metaphoric road towards complete switchover.
It's hard to tell what the average tractor age is, but it looks between 6 and 10 years old so you have the same rough math in the 6-10 years after we have fully autonomous self-driving trucks where we'll still have half the trucks on the road as human-driven.
Plus if autonomous trucks increase capacity and/or efficiency and cut shipping costs, that might also stimulate shipping demand and therefore keep human drivers on the road longer as well.
Your 10-20 years guess feels right to me, but only after we actually have the autonomous truck thing fully sorted out, IMO.
You say that in 10-20 years, tons of jobs are going away. You say it seems very unlikely the American political system is going to address it without violence in any successful manner.
But you also say that you think we will adjust and adapt and thereby keep the work a job, make a living system that we have. I don't see how that optimistic result follows from the pessimistic future you predict. And I think we're talking about the same problem - a period of volatility due to a lack of available work and a refusal to acknowledge the failures of our current system - but looking at different resolutions. I don't accept violence to restore status quo as the only possible solution.
This is what I think: Your predictions are relatively spot on, if nothing changes, but we have the opportunity to change them if we act now. If we install a government dedicated to addressing these problems, if we begin to think seriously about solutions rather than spending time repeating the same arguments about whether the problem exists at all, we can fix it. Yes, we've failed to do this on other things (e. g. climate change, North Korea, etc.) until it was more than a little too late, but the fact our society still exists and functions suggests that we must have had some success, too.
Remember that it's only in the last couple centuries that we transitioned from most countries being monarchies or what we'd now call dictatorships to most countries being at least some level of democracy. It's only in the last couple centuries we've tried systems of economy and government other than direct rule by a ruling cast. Some of those systems didn't work (full communism, fascism); some have worked out quite well thus far (modern capitalism, democratic socialism a la much of Europe), and of course many are in the middle. We can work out systems which are better still, and we can transition into them without violence or (too much) societal strife, but only if we can at least acknowledge that it's necessary or even just wiser to do so than to try and maintain the system we've got just because it's what we have.
TL;DR: You're right that we don't know what's coming, but, in my opinion, it's a mistake to assume we can't decide for ourselves if we move quickly.
You say that in 10-20 years, tons of jobs are going away. You say it seems very unlikely the American political system is going to address it without violence in any successful manner.
But you also say that you think we will adjust and adapt and thereby keep the work a job, make a living system that we have. I don't see how that optimistic result follows from the pessimistic future you predict.
Very fair, I wasn't clear. I don't think this terrible future is coming, but even if it is, and the majority come to agree that it is, we're not going to do anything about it. Even if the number of jobs does plummet and we have record-high unemployment, we still will take forever to do anything about it, assuming anything can be done. It might be that all the ideas we've come up with (which really just seems to be variations on UBI) won't work and are just rearranging the deck chairs again. Except now the AI is Amazon and we're all B&N :)
if we begin to think seriously about solutions rather than spending time repeating the same arguments about whether the problem exists at all, we can fix it
Yeah, I'm not really in favor of that. The arguments are necessary. We shouldn't be putting huge changes in place without even having the argument as to whether it's necessary.
I think you're underestimating how destabilizing and destructive these changes are going to be. If AI is going to be as bad for employment as many think, the solution is massive and represents a completely fundamental shift in economy, culture, politics, etc. For example, switching to meaningful UBI would entail huge tax increases, slashing of other benefit programs (and dealing with their supporters), and decades of fighting about the amounts, administration, waste / fraud / abuse, etc. There has never been a coalition in American politics strong enough to get something like this done. The abolition of slavery would be the closest thing, and we had to fight a full-blown bloody civil war to get that done, and we're still dealing with the cultural fallout of that change 150 years later.
I also think you're way ahead of the vast majority of Americans as to whether it's as necessary as you claim. To wit: Republicans have exactly zero interest in fixing any of this (or a bunch of other problems) and 18 months ago voters decided they should hold all three branches of government. Yes, popular vote, gerrymandering, voter suppression, etc, etc.
The point is that it's all well and good to say "enough talk, let's put these solutions in place!", but I don't think you realize how hard the opponents to those solutions are going to fight, and how powerful and entrenched they are.
The part you're missing is that jobs will also be created while others are destroyed. We lost tons of horse caring jobs as we switched to the automobile but it didn't wipe out society.
The folks who are worried about AI destroying jobs are aware of this cycle, but they think that it's different this time.
Specifically, that technology has previously allowed workers to be more productive by shifting away from manual labor and towards cognitive work that requires the human mind. But AI is a unique threat because it can match (and then quickly absolutely dominate) humans for any kind of work that requires cognitive power.
It's not a ridiculous argument, but I'm not convinced for several reasons:
1. I'm not convinced that AI can actually achieve something like the general intelligence that's required to perform in rapidly changing and dynamic environments.
2. Even if they can, there are lots of artistic and creative jobs that AI may not be able to do. Maybe we'll all be writers and poets and songwriters and sculptures in the future.
3. Also, doesn't incredibly smart and capable AI that can do any job that humans can do mean that the price of everything should plummet? Maybe post-scarcity will look different than we expect; maybe all the things we need for life will be effectively free, and companies will give them away the way they do with advertising schwag now.
4. If AI gets so cognitively powerful that it puts most of humans out of a job, we'll have either much bigger things to worry about (war with AI), or nothing to worry about (they'll either just squish us quickly or save us from all this).
At a certain point, rather than trying to radically reengineer American society for a post job world, I think are far more palatable solutions (palatable to our crazy system as it stands).
Shorter work week!
Higher taxes, spent on social services. There is tremendous need for all kinds of social services in the US. Such occupations could fill a lot of jobs. Social workers, teachers, judges, police, EMTs, soldiers, programmers, managers, infrastructure building, doctors, financial counseling, career advisors. If the Republicans could let go of their incoherent,burn the house down strategy of governing, things could really be put on a better footing.
Limitations on amount of AI that can be utilized in a company. It’s simply not viable to exclude large percentages of citizens from the working economy, and think that the technicians and managers will capture increasing proportions of the economy’s output. There’s no rule that we simply have to accept unfettered and increasingly Darwinian capatilistic competition, as it destroys society. I doubt it’s even possible in the US, as the sort of brutality required to maintain this type of extreme system is antithetical to the spirit of America. US citizens have some notion of themselves as having worth and rights.
The history of the labor movement shows that constraints on trade in the name of improving working conditions is possible.
My view is that we see the ugly rumblings of what a backlash might look like in the election of Trump. I understand some of the frustrations behind Trump as protest. I don’t think that is working that well. Things aren’t actually that bad in the US, compared to what they could be. There will be time to change course if things really start to disintegrate.
>But AI is a unique threat because it can match (and then quickly absolutely dominate) humans for any kind of work that requires cognitive power.
Only at very specific tasks. As you point out later there is no evidence that AI general intelligence where it needs to be for this actually to be a threat to humans who can adapt to unexpected circumstances.
General AI that can totally replace humans in a job isn't really the problem. The real issue is specialized AI that lets one person do work that previously required five or ten, whether because it increases their productivity directly, or the human is working as an AI-minder, letting them do the routine stuff, supervising them for quality, and taking over when they hit unexpected circumstances.
You are totally right. In the very least no politician would be willing and tell people that there no longer is a need for someone with their skill level to participate in the economy and that we are just going to give them money so that we don't have to worry about them.
>>And as soon as Amazon can make the same amount of money while employing fewer people, they will do so. Every company does. The cycle repeats, only this time more people lose and fewer people gain.
Not every company does, every public company does. It seems hard to believe in this day but there are some privately owned family-run businesses that care deeply about their employees and aren’t looking to cut labor costs as a means of profitability.
> Amazon employs way more people than B&N, the company they put out of business. Maybe those jobs should be better (OK, they definitely should), but that's different from saying there are no jobs, isn't it?
Amazon doesn't employ them, they contract certain services from them. Your first post talks about "getting laid off" but it won't even be that, it'll be not extending their contract.
Most people can still, for the time being, contribute to the economy - but already not at a level where the economy is comfortable hiring them for the long term. The "jobs" Amazon offers are explicitly designed to be automated away.
> Maybe we need to acknowledge that we're moving towards having a society where "everyone has a job that earns them their living" is untenable
No, we need a society that guarantees everyone a job, a job that will generate the income necessary for survival. We shouldn't give up agency and become simple wards of the state, waiting hand stretched ahead for the UBI to fall from the crumblings at the tech billionaires table. UBI without jobs is humiliating and lacks vertical mobility. Self reliance is good.
The slogan should be "Give us jobs or give us the means of production!"
In the future it will be easier to be self reliant by using solar energy, agro-bots, 3d-printing and various biotech and materials research technologies. We can be self reliant, we don't need no stinking BHI. We don't like to be passive and hand our dignity out for a penny.
As a final argument, think about this: what is cheaper? what is more tenable - to hand out free money to everyone, or to create jobs that pay for themselves? The jobs could be - cultivate your own food, raise your own house, educate the children of your community, repair cars and electronics for local people, etc. Most of the jobs emerge from the needs of the community, so the community can hand them to itself. Then only a small amount of external aid could go as far as a huge amount of UBI.
I welcome the crumblings of the tech billionaires table. Let them think they're the masters of the universe while subsidizing my ability to spend my time the way I want.
Let the tech billionaires be saddled with the moralizing virtues of self-reliance and feelings of humiliation. Certain societies raise their youth to value work as a means of proving themselves. The truth is that perspective is completely subjective and in many ways a pathology more than a guiding principle.
Humans will work. That is what we do. If we're alive we will create reasons to do things. The problem is who is deciding the values we're supposed to work toward. Distributing work will fail because people don't agree on what is important and will even act against their own self interest. When that happens what do you do? Do you punish them? Do you leave them to die? Do you ostracize them from the community? That's why the system we have now in the industrialized west works at all, because it allows us the illusion of choice. Our shared language of moralizing and virtue signaling is how we cope with the fact that we actually don't have a choice, we're just pragmatically putting our heads down and picking our poison.
With UBI it's scary to think of millions of people unmoored from work because work is a form of social control. UBI will turn hundreds of years of social convention on its head. As much as we want to believe it there are no iron laws of culture. Some values will be destroyed and new values will be born. That's the nature of change.
Our descendants at some undefined point in the future will find our moralizing about work absolutely quaint.
I agree, but for this attitude to work, we need to recognize that this situation won't happen by itself. It will take massive cultural shifts, a lot of money, and a lot of time. We've already seen what happens to communities when all the jobs leave, and help isn't sufficient (imagine any crumbling city). It's a lot harder to, for lack of a better word, rehabilitate those communities after they succumb to generational poverty.
I think a much better alternative to UBI, which is just a modern twist on bread and circuses, would simply be larger inheritance taxes that are kept by the state. That way work that actually contributes to human betterment still gets rewarded, but society doesn't begin to stratify into rich and poor people in a world where it becomes almost impossible to move from poor to rich.
That said, your idea isn't mutually exclusive with UBI. One interpretation of UBI is that it acts more as a social safety net than as a long-term solution.
What if the economy evolves in such a way that most people are unproductive?
What if the cost of creating a job (creating a jobs bureaucracy, administering it by assigning jobs to people, making sure they show up to work, etc.) is actually higher than the economic value that those jobs generate?
In that case, 'jobs for all' would just be a subsidy, or UBI, with many more steps, no?
I agree that giving people a share of the means of production makes sense. We should experiment with granting a share of equity to all citizens and sitting an equity floor.
Then make the job one that enriches lives. "Entertainment" comes to mind as today's best example (acting, sports trainers, players, etc).
However that comes to my mind because what I really think that the job should be is a more general category of 'problem solver' and right now society is really bad about making it easy for people to make good choices and have positive impacts.
You might read up about the history of the communist block, where such a system was in place. The government was literally obliged to give every single person a job, and it caused a ton of problems.
Seriously, UBI is better than inventing jobs just so that people could have jobs. At least in this system, you can get cash, and become a home maker, an artist, or invent some other occupation for yourself that you wouldn't otherwise have. Unlike the "guaranteed job" program, where you would be pushed to do barely useful stuff, that not only would break your spirit, but would not give you time to do something truly productive.
Except local production is often less efficient/more expensive. UBI would create a floor for job quality, and allow people to pursue riskier or less capitalistic ventures.
Eventually, when the current people are long gone, maybe it will be standard practice to rely on UBI and it will have a decent value. But in the meantime, there will be huge resource allocation problems.
We need people to defend themselves from big corporations that suck the money out of communities, such as Walmart, Amazon, Comcast, Verizon, large banks, Samsung, Apple, Monsanto, etc as they start automating jobs and paying less in wages.
We could give everyone in the world a job right now by banning construction equipment, computers, cars, assembly lines, or any form of automation really.
I think the proportion of private sector to public sector jobs might shift, but as long as our cities have subways that haven't been built, our roads and highways have potholes, our bridges aren't rated to survive the next earthquake, our power generation isn't 100% carbon-neutral, and so forth, there is more than enough work for the humans we have.
> we have to find a different kind of social contract to survive on
I do believe we already have that. Open any kind of news website and it'll be all over you.
This new social contract is entertainment. I know it is right now considered "work" as well, but to think about it, most of it doesn't contribute in any other way that helps other people (most often - workforce) kill time. Celebrities, tv & internet personalities earn not because they do only because they are.
Some time ago being a celebrity or internet personality would gain you a huge pile of cash. Right now that starts to get watered down. You can get reasonable known YouTuber show on your sons or daughters birthday party for reasonable amount just because there is so much content that fan fragmentation starts to show up.
What I believe we're seeing is world transitioning from "live to work" to "live to work or entertain those who work" with sad turn to "entertainment through hate" happening lately...
I agree with the beginning, especially about the deck chairs as its an expression I often use. Let's be clear its people like me who killed Barnes and Noble not its executives. I have two or three sets of bookshelves downstairs in my office filled with books, many of which were bought at B&N. I spent hours sipping coffee in their cafe's. Then I bought my kindle. And I basically have not been back since. When I do buy a physical book it is typically a rare math or finance book which B&N is not going to carry. And my life is richer for it. I bought two books today for my kindle that were mentioned on a podcast I was listening to. B&N is just a dead company that has not gone out of business yet and I agree that there is little to nothing that can be done to keep it existing in its current form.
The company today is only worth $340M dollars. Maybe it could restructure as some sort of higher end boutique store, but that would probably require a significant downsizing and realignment. Its hard to see a positive way forward but maybe someone else will.
The tragedy, for me, is that while I agree with most of what you've said and my transition to ebooks has been similar to yours, I've also begun realizing what we're losing by moving away from brick-and-mortar retail.
I look back on my childhood in the 80s and 90s and remember retail as not only fulfilling the need of acquiring stuff but also as a central meeting place. Going downtown to buy stuff was an activity as much as it was an errand. There were movie theaters, restaurants and all sorts of other business that existed in an symbiotic ecosystem with all the retail outlets. Over time, each of these business has been or is being replaced by a more-efficient, internet version of itself. We now order more and more food delivery rather than eating out. We now stream more of our entertainment in our homes and many people haven't been to a theater more than a couple of times per year. And while none of these shifts is bad in and of itself, the common theme is that we've replaced the social version of each of them with a version that we use alone, interacting only with a computer and not another human being.
I don't think it's a coincidence that we're having an epidemic of drug addiction and overdose considering how often drug addiction is a side effect of lack of human connection. We've taken all of these services and removed the human interaction and I think we're seeing that that human interaction was more than just fulfilling a transactional need. It was also keeping us sane in minuscule increments that, overall, added up to something tangible.
It's a tough duality for me to accept. I love my Kindle and I find the reading experience to be so much nicer than a physical book. On a recent year-long trip abroad, I was able to bring enough books for the entire trip and it weighed less than a single physical book. In one sense, it was great. Every book I read was something I wanted to read and I probably enjoyed them more because of it. On my first prolonged trip abroad back in the late 90s, I could only bring a couple of books with me. After I'd finished them, I had to find people to trade with to get new books. I probably didn't enjoy those books as much as ones I would've selected for myself, but I also ended up reading things I'd never have even considered reading before because I just didn't have any other options. There's a distinct part of me--the person that's able to look beyond the immediate fulfillment of my needs--that thinks that things were much better back in the days where stuff cost a bit more, it took more time to buy and I had to actually talk to a person to buy it.
I too remember with fondness going to the 2600 meetup at a B&N. I am not sure I would link drug addiction to the lack of people going to bookstores, but I do agree that they were a social place as well and I used them as such.
Some of this may be the lack of companies reinventing themselves. I am more likely to go see a movie now that the one near my house has reserved seats. I would be more inclined if they served adult beverages and maybe something a bit more advanced than a hot dog or nachos. There are theaters that I have seen that I could see myself going to if they were near my house. Maybe there is a model of a bookstore that I would be inclined to go to should it pop into existence.
Yet on the flip side, here we are in the public square of HN having deep meaningful conversations about he world around us and sharing nostalgia. The future giveth and the future taketh.
I go to movie theaters pretty much all the time for that reason. I wanna go where people are and not sit in my house. Plus usually Netflix doesn't have any shows i care that much about watching except for oa or a backstreet boys documentary
I can't say how much of an effect customers like us -- people who owned a ton of books but have switched to the Kindle -- have had on the bottom line of Barnes and Noble, but my experience completely echoes yours. I even find myself purchasing books on the Kindle that I already own in physical form just for the improved experience.
The main thing I miss is browsing for books; the experience on the Kindle or on the web is terrible compared to walking down an aisle and flipping through books that draw my interest. I have young children now, so I purchase a fair number of physical books for them, mostly through Amazon, but occasionally browsing in our local Barnes and Noble. Whenever I'm there, I find myself rooting through the shelves, finding all sorts of interesting books that I want to buy, and then I guiltily take a picture of them to buy on Amazon later for my kindle.
EDIT: One thing I have noticed, though, is the increase in price gouging in ebook sales. I think a result of the Hachette deal; lots of things that would have been $6 mass-market paperbacks are instead $10. Unfortunately, this is not local to Amazon, so leaving the ecosystem is no help at all.
In Canada we have Chpaters-Indigo instead of Barnes and Noble. They stock very expensive, but very attractive, home design crap (think pottery barn minus the furniture). They also sell scarves, mitts, slippers, fragrances, purses, chocolates, and children's toys. Basically a convenience store for these items, and they have a regular turn-around so they always sell new versions of all this stuff. It's working very well, and I don't know if Barnes and Noble does this too but Chapters-Indigo is actually expanding where I live. People still like going to the store for physical books-- it's something about the atmosphere-- but they definitely need a little push to stay, and another reason to be there.
Waterstones came back, and recently, too. [0] They're a similar company that faced similar issues - it CAN be done. This is about a lack of vision and will from the management to re-position the company, make hard cuts, and tap into the best things it had going for it. Stripping the company down to book value assets with no repurposing or new goal is what you do when you've given up and become a liquidator. Even "Kodakcoin" is a better plan.
> Now, it's definitely sad when people lose their jobs, but that's kind of the devil's bargain we've made with capitalism.
It's not so much a "bargain" as it is how we discover which jobs are useful. Capitalism is very efficient at exposing useless labor, and this is a good thing. Having a bunch of humans laboring at jobs no one needs or wants is wasteful.
What is it wasteful of? What if someone working such a job feels better about being alive, because they have a role to fill in a community? Why is having people doing forms of “make work” worse than letting people waste away into despair? Would you feel good about having your aunt thrown to the curb, because she has no marketable skills?
The ideas of “efficiency” as they are used in economic theory are very narrow, and reflect a technical understanding of a vastly over simplified model of reality. Such models do provide insight into real life, but they are analytical tools, nothing more.
Economics, as field of study, has a big problem with the concept of “value.” The price of things tends to stand in for the value of things, as it is easily measured.
You don’t have to look hard to see the absurdity of taking this compromise too far. Look at military spending. Since dollars are spent buying a weapon, and workers get paid, profits are made, the “value” of the sale gets added into GDP. Then we take that missile, and blow it up. If we kill our enemies, then maybe one could say we got our money’s worth. If we kill only innocents, then I see it as more of an “anti-value.” What if it just blows up in the desert, and makes a multi-million dollar hole in the sand? Sort of a modern, high tech version of paying one group of workers to dig holes, and another to fill them in, is it not?
> Why is having people doing forms of “make work” worse than letting people waste away into despair?
How would you suggest choosing who gets to do the "make work" versus who must toil away at the necessary? How would you suggest compensating those whose work is more vanity than value if no one pays them for their output?
If someone is lacking marketable skills, and is forced to take a “make work” job, I would hardly call that a “vanity” project.
This was done in the Great Depression, to try and keep the economy going.
There are ways to create work that is valuable, but the market value is below what anyone can afford to live on. So the government could subsidize salaries, in addition to hiring people.
Getting back to my comment about military spending: I see it as a destructive waste. How does that get decided? It’s decided by people operating in a complex political-financial-industrial-military complex.
If we, as a society, can decide to waste lives and wealth on idiotic military action, we can decide to spend wealth on helping our own citizens.
This has an assumption built in: The more money you control, the more your your opinions ought to shape what work someone else does. Some people think the assumption is very true, some think it is very false.
That's what government services and the electoral process is supposed to be for. If you're one of those who believes that the electoral process is broken though (and I count myself a member), then I guess there aren't many options. Philanthropists maybe.
You are making the completely unwarranted (and demonstrated false by modern history) assumption that decisions coming from capitalism are made objectively and rationally.
"Capitalism" doesn't make any decisions. It's emergent behavior. People make all kinds of decisions and bets and tradeoffs, some of which work better than others and "win".
That doesn't mean we always like those outcomes, hence the need for regulations, social safety net, etc.
Overall, it's a pretty shitty system, since it means that some people are always losing, but it also seems to be the best we've got.
> "Capitalism" doesn't make any decisions. It's _emergent behavior_. People make all kinds of decisions and bets and tradeoffs, some of which work better than others and "win".
> Overall, it's a pretty shitty _system_, since it means that some people are always losing, but it also seems to be the best we've got.
_Emphasis mine_.
Is it a system or emergent behavior? I'd argue that these are mutually exclusive and that capitalism falls squarely in the latter category. It is the result of individuals being free to exchange whatever they find valuable.
It's destructive, and Amazon can get away with being a crap book store now. I've ordered many thousands of dollars worth of computing books from them over the years. In the past six months, and especially the past couple months, "new" books come with massive creases, scuffs, and dents. Or a bad print with hard-to-read text. A copy you'd never buy in person, or B&N would knock something off the price because of the damage. When you paid $80+ for the book, it sucks.
I haven't been returning the books for two reasons: When you get ten books in the mail and eight of them are damaged, and some of them are immediately useful, are you really going to go through Amazon's return process for all of them, photograph each one, package, ship, etc.? Second, I just know that if I do this, it will contribute to some poor schmuck losing his job at a fulfillment center, or some LAZR driver getting taken off their route, because DATA-DRIVEN.
Now I just order used books, sadly most of the vendors are on Amazon so I can't really take my business elsewhere. At least I don't feel quite as ripped off when my "Like New" book arrives in "Good" condition. Even sweeter, those vendors don't sit on my order for a week for funsies like Amazon does if you resist their PRIME offering.
Has anybody else been receiving damaged "new" books from Amazon lately?
I think it's sort of like first-class flying. There's no logistical reason for not boarding the plane rear-to-front, but you can get people to pay for the privilege of being first, so why not? Non-Prime customers are second priority, and expected fulfillment is adjusted accordingly.
The reckoning would be you no longer using their business, wouldn't it?
While I still get some books from Amazon, I've been increasingly purchasing through Abebooks. They tend to be more accurate in what they stock with regards to ISBN, which is what I go by when purchasing a book as I like to get specific editions.
I doubt they go out of their way to delay the order, simply because that isn't the most cost-efficient thing for them to do. I would assume that they just have a priority queue of orders to process, and sometimes that queue gets backed up and takes a few days to clear out the non-Prime/expedited orders.
> It's important to note that the vast majority of workers (>90%) before the industrial revolution worked in agriculture, and that this number is now less than 5%. Why did the automation of agriculture not lead to widespread, long term unemployment? This is because disruptive technologies have multiple effects. They:
* Destroy existing jobs
* Complement existing jobs (by making them more efficient)
* Create new jobs
* Reallocate the workforce to where it is most productive
Note that only one of those four effects causes long run job loss. Two of those cause job loss in general (job reallocation implies job loss in the short term, after all).
For automation to cause long run structural unemployment, the new technology needs not only to destroy jobs and create no new jobs, but it also needs to somehow prevent reallocation of workers to other sectors of the economy.
-------
The issue as I see it is not so much automation, which is inevitable. The issue is that humans are hard to retrain, unless you spend a lot of expensive human power to make the transition.
This makes it un-economical (you need to give people money, and time, and teachers, and then IF they certify, they need to qualify/compete with people who were already in the industry).
Re-training is an unsolved problem (In my opinion), and it is possible we may not want to solve it.
As the internet has shown, any communication technology is morally neutral. If you found a way to re-train huge groups of people faster than ever before, then that tool could be used to indoctrinate people faster than before as well.
EDIT: It is pretty important to note that this is the current weak spot in the over arching economic model that drives the world.
Tech advances are mathematically responsible for improving the size of the economy - they are necessary and critical for humanity.
The general answer by economics is that people move to other sectors where there is demand for them.
Unfortunately, if you cannot make that move, the system doesn't work that well.
Or worse - you make a move from being a manager to a burger flipper.
One side effect of this is an increase in inequality of wealth distribution.
So figuring out if re-training works, and if it is working at the scale needed to deal with creative disruption, is obviously a major component of future human well being.
I sometimes think our views might be to 'current-centric' when considering a post automation era.
In my mind one of the most distinguishing features of the labor world today is the growth of complete independence. You have solitary people start software companies and independently design, develop, and publish products that go on to earn billions. I think a big part of this is the efficiency created by current systems. The economic systems to handle payments are almost entirely automated. The system of publication processes payments and delivers product in an entirely automated fashion. And consumers can learn about and purchase your product also using fully automated systems. Compare that to times when software was sold exclusively in retail outlets. For that matter you don't even have to go that far back to times when computers themselves were outside the reach of all except the most elite of society rendering such economic possibilities moot.
And I think this trend of independence is something that will likely continue going forward. Imagine in a post automation world where things like industrial level machining and eventually even things like semiconductor fabrications become as accessible as PCs were let's say 30 years ago. This is a game changer that I think is going to be extremely difficult to predict the implications of. For that matter imagine automated construction bots capable of executing building designs all the way from ground clearance on up.
Let's get more agrarian. Consider things like automated micro-farms. People could use these for their own nourishment, but then there's also the possibility of automated delivery systems enabling user-to-user distribution systems where people could even make a living off of their land in an autonomous fashion. Right there are vast amounts of great arable land in the US that's for sale for next to nothing. In some cases you can get land literally for free. But without automation it's not so straight forward to monetize this. What would be the implications, if it did become possible? 4 acres and a bot?
The whole point here is that I think by focusing on training as a means of contributing to a large company as a means of earning a living is not necessarily something that will be a given in the future. These large companies are the ones that have the means and motivation to eliminate these jobs. The present already rewards independence vastly more than dependent labor and this is a trend I think we'll see grow exponentially in the era of automation. And that has very difficult to even imagine implications.
IMHO, a large number of idle people is not good for society either. People need a purpose in life, and a great many people don't seem very good at making up their own. Otherwise there's a strong chance that they'll become depressed, and often start abusing drugs, and then it's just a big spiral downward.
As dumb as it is, that stupid job at least gives them a reason to get up in the morning, maybe even a bit of satisfaction from time to time.
These universal income ideas have the notion that your average joe will decide to learn an instrument, or maybe practice swimming, or maybe backpack across the country. In the real world they'll sit on the couch all day watching TV or playing video games and/or getting high. Universal income won't work until we figure out how to not turn the country into rural West Virginia with it.
Or as Picard put it: You see, one of the most important things in a person's life is to feel useful.
I don't feel that you've really engaged the arguments of the post, particularly the failure to hire any seasonal employees for the holiday season and the "ship from store" change.
He's saying the arguments of the post are irrelevant. Sure they could have hired seasonal workers for the holidays, and maybe had better results, but either way they are doomed.
I haven't bought a book at a retail outlet in probably 10 years. There's just nothing about the retail experience at B&N that's even worth the effort to drive there and park. It's not salvageable.
You don't think there is space in the United States' market for even a single major brick-and-mortar retailer of books? I find that pretty hard to believe.
I love wandering around in my local B&N and in my local independent bookstore, but I don't find it at all hard to believe that this sort of thing is a small niche that is not sustainable in the long run. I find it harder to believe that you find this hard to believe.
If there is such space, it will have to be run by kiosk and a few minimum wage employees.
B&N's 'competitive advantage' today is not experienced staff. I can't ever recall an employee up-selling significant amounts of merchandise, or having a customer relationship that might move a needle.
Like Sears, it has real estate and a terrible retail position. If you treat the stores like mini-warehouses, with Amazon-warehouse-worker-hours, it might work. My guess is that failing to staff-up for the holidays was, seen charitably, a way to get the full-timers through the holidays.
> If there is such space, it will have to be run by kiosk and a few minimum wage employees.
I don't think so. Outside of the airport that's not useful to anyone. At that rate you can just go to the section where they have bestsellers at Costco or Walmart. A bookstore with no selection is practically pointless.
No, kiosk-based service, not kiosk-sized stores. You want a big selection, but software or other merchandising helping customers locate things and up-sell.
Target has more merchandise than B&N, but there's no career employee on the floor to suggest that you might like Mossimo if you bought Merona.
Not really. Not for the long term. Certain independents and specialty shops -- sure. We still have record stores here and there, but the big chains are all gone.
Never heard of 'em. Where I live, we used to have Musicland - gone. Sam Goody - Gone. Tower - Gone. Several other smaller shops -- all closed years ago. There's only one record store here, an independent dealing mostly in new and used vinyl.
Sure, there's room. Amazon just opened a giant store right here in Manhattan. You can even ship your Amazon packages there, or pay for books online and pick them up on your way home from work. Plan on seeing more Amazon stores. They'll probably buy up a few B&N spaces.
Many amazon stores are B. Dalton mall store sized, not B&N super store sized. It’s weird, because we are basically back to where we were before the super book stores.
> There's just nothing about the retail experience at B&N that's even worth the effort to drive there and park.
The last book I bought at B&N wasn't so long ago. They pulled it off the shelf and had it waiting for me when I arrived. I appreciated being able to preview it to decide it was worth buying.
I don't have a local B&N anymore, but a local independent book shop is pretty good. They've ordered new books for me to preview too.
I skipped over those because I think they're totally irrelevant. See the "rearranging deck chairs on Titanic" part of my comment.
Yeah, they could have managed the holiday season better. They could have a better strategy for ecommerce. So what? It doesn't fundamentally change anything. It maybe delays the inevitable for a year or two? But in the end, B&N is almost certainly going out of business.
EDIT: I guess there are two other possibilities:
1. B&N finds another B&M strategy that works beyond just selling books. But it's not clear what, given their financial situation, existing stores, employee base, etc. Either way, lots of layoffs between here and there.
2. They pivot to selling books online solely. This actually seems likely, at least for awhile, because it's a decent brand, and they're already doing this, so this would just mean shutting down all their stores. But all these employees are still losing their jobs in that scenario.
Your contention implies that there are no differences of import to how a company is managed, if business failure is inevitable. Sadly, I think this is not that rare of an opinion amongst a certain class of managers who disproportionately consider their own welfare, above all.
You don’t have to think that hard to realize the callous absurdity of this viewpoint.
The "ship from store" argument does not make sense.
Many healthy retailers use omnichannel, ship-from-store, buy-online-fulfill-in-store, etc. These methods can improve fulfillment, increase inventory utilization, and reduce stale inventory.
If a retailer wants to draw down inventory, then just cut replenishment. I believe Target Canada was accused of doing so. Implementing "faux omnichannel" and the associated IT, store processes, etc. would be much harder.
What the author is saying is they used the “closer to customer” argument as a smoke screen to cover the fact that they performed a logisticextomy last year.
The fact of the matter is logistic operations in the Midwest are favorable for the medium range retailer. In the post-warehouse age, when the book your NYC customer wants is in Seattle, you’re paying Zone 8 rates to USPS instead of Zone 3 from Indiana to NYC (or Seattle).
I don't see the logistics argument in the article.
The article states i) distraction from in-store sales for employees, ii) removing inventory from store shelves, and iii) no credit for stores.
The "stores don't get credit" argument is weak. The article implies that corporate is siphoning credit from stores to online. Sales are down 6% across the board. Samestore sales down 6.5%, online sales down 4.5%. Omnichannel does not create those numbers.
Anyway, the logistics argument depends on more than rates. Fulfilling from a midwest warehouse can be cheap; a warehouse full of product sliding down a markdown curve can be expensive.
I've been surprised by the merchant pushback to omnichannel. I've been hearing "there are no cash registers in the warehouse", etc. for years. Now we expose more inventory to customers and stores complain about selling to the wrong (usually ecommerce) customer.
It’s an illustration, not an argument. The prior deletion of the logistics operation illustrates the company has been on the chopping block / raider mode for some time.
Yeah internet shopping is decimating physical retail. The old multi story bookstores were you could find all kinds of stuff are dead. What's left is stores selling only the best sellers.
A reasonable litmus test for monopoly is whether they would fail if they started exploiting their customers.
Time Warner and Comcast pass this test. They refuse to compete and then aggressively raise prices, seemingly to no end, knowing full well their customers have no choice. Microsoft's Windows 10 also passes this test with extreme anti-customer behavior that relies exclusively on consumers tolerating only due to a lack of choice.
Now back to Amazon. If they started ramping up their prices they would fail, fail hard, and fail practically overnight. There's a difference between a company being incredibly efficient and passing, with great success, that efficiency onto consumers and monopolies. Another general trend in monopolies is that they generally rely on tertiary forces to prevent competition. For the telecoms, this is the lack of access to wiring or even simply poles. For Windows, it's native execution of decades of third party software as well as the vast majority of all consumer software written today. There's no barrier to competing with Amazon, you're just not going to do it as well as them. It's the same reason WalMarts destroy small local businesses.
Haha, you literally just came upon the realization for the economic use cases for unemployment benefits and also the main reason our government has one. You should read some economic textbooks as the world will make a whole lot more sense once you do.
This breaks the HN guidelines in two ways. First, it's uncivil. Second, it falls far short of this:
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."
Could you please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow those rules when commenting here? It does take an effort, but it's an effort everyone needs to make if we're to succeed in having a bit higher quality here than internet median.
> This breaks the HN guidelines in two ways. First, it's uncivil.
Did you read my other responses because I 100% agree with him. I was just laughing because he made a textbook economic argument but didn't actually mention economics.
> "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."
What? I am 100% in agreement with OP. What argument do you think I am making?
Possibly I misunderstood you, in which case I'm sorry. We often have to guess at what people meant in their comments. On the other hand, we're no different from other readers in that respect, so if I guessed wrong, almost certainly others did too.
This post is condescending without any real substance. "Read some economic books" is not meaningful in the context of one particular government safety net.
Apparently my comment is being misinterpreted since I completely agree with his points because they are well agreed upon concepts in economic textbooks. I was laughing about it because he made no mention whatsoever of economics despite his argument being so economically rational so I suggested reading up on economics as it seemed like a subject he was unaware of but one that he would love.
Believe it or not, I didn't just "come upon" this realization and I've taken multiple econ classes (though I'd like to take more). Also, our unemployment benefits are a pretty sorry excuse for a social safety net, which is why I wasn't specifically talking about them here.
Sorry, you didn't mention economics at all but all of your points are discussed thoroughly and pretty well agreed upon in economic textbooks so I assumed you weren't aware (since if you were, I thought you would have sourced them).
In general, conversations are more interesting and edifying when they consist of more than someone just saying "my reaction on this topic is what economics textbooks say" :)
That part was 100% me suggesting you read up on economics as it seemed like a subject you were unaware of but one that you would totally love since it completely matched your logic.
My main point was bringing up unemployment benefits.
A long history of good things adds up in one's mind. If your employer has benefited you, it's hard to maintain a mentality of pure rational self-interest.
Yep. Some employers are really good to their employees, even if they do layoffs and downsizing. One place I worked had an employee with terminal cancer, in the later stage he told them he'd never be able to come back to work but they kept him on the payroll anyway so he didn't lose his health insurance, right up until the day he died. Doesn't mean they didn't also close unprofitable locations and lay employees off sometimes too.
Businesses are cold-hearted machines, but they are staffed by humans. And sometimes those humans make good decisions.
Wework just bought meetup.com - now you have more locations for meetups.
B&N often has pretty good locations, and covers areas of the country wework doesn't akready have prescence.
There's already a coffee shop built into B&N
If you implemented a cashierless checkout process, and had ship from location, you now can compete with Amazon, and the retail prescence is an attractor for weworkers and meetups.
I'm not sure of the B&N commercial real estate holdings, but wework seems to be all into that.
Of all the possible fates of B&N - If I saw that happen, I'd be be pretty pleased with it.
Remote working spaces have amazing untapped potential IMO. Right now they're mostly concentrated in downtowns of major metro areas which might be nice for the heavily concentrated populations living there, but sucks for anyone in residential neighborhoods outside of the downtown core. Take Chicago for example: there are six WeWork locations within 200 miles of the city, and the furthest distance from one to the other is less than 2 miles. If you live in Schaumburg or Skokie or Aurora or Joliet, to get to your closest "office" you have to commute downtown just like everyone else, every morning and back home every evening. And in my metro area of 1.5m, there are no WeWork locations at all, the closest is over three hours away. There are some other co-working locations in my city's downtown, but I don't want to commute downtown every day.
I think there's potential for co-working spaces in residential or suburban areas, but it's a smaller market so it'd be pricey... unless you already own space in the suburbs. Like Barnes and Noble does. And they already have Starbucks available at most of them, and many of them are in areas with plenty of food choices around for lunch. Many of them are near plazas with nice places to walk and get some fresh air.
We're just getting started with co-working spaces, there's a lot of untapped potential in smaller markets yet.
I also think that this is what Staples and Office Max/Depot should do. Turn half of it into small offices and mini conference rooms. People will even pay 10% for the supplies if it means they can just go get them in 10 seconds. They have a lot of economies of scale to take advantage of.
Amazon's primary customer has shifted to the 3rd-party seller, i.e., it's not profit off water coolers that allows low prices.
Looking at Amazon's financials, they make more profit off of selling advertising (lightning deals, search ads & "related" sponsored listings) than margin off sales.
It really shows when you look at the lightning deals and find product after product with artificially inflated reviews. Amazon has zero interest in fixing this because customers are its product not its customers.
Hard to see how a traditional retailer can begin to compete with this.
Not just any 3rd party seller, only the ones willing to systematically spend ad dollars to promote products.
But even non-spending sellers send a lot of transaction revenue Amazon’s direction. You don’t get good treatment however because you're a disposable commodity. Treating you well doesn’t increase revenue.
Yeah, they have no trouble finding the next person in line or cutting their own deal to replace the supply they have kicked off for anything remotely high volume.
I likes this article. This point, though, seemed off:
I would double-down on what we can offer that Amazon can’t: enthusiastic staff that can find and upsell books...
But it's already been proven, sort of, that this isn't what people want, at least in sufficiently large numbers. That kind of underscores the difficulty of recovering this franchise.
"He said book sales were partly being driven by Waterstones’ tactic of allowing staff to stock and push titles they believe would work in their store as well as helping readers discover new or less promoted authors."
What can be easier than using the Amazon search bar? And as far as upwelling goes, Amazon's ML-driven 'suggestions' algorithm results often seem to interest me.
For the books you already know you want, I agree that Amazon is hard to beat. However, it’s hard to replicate the “discoverability” of a brick and mortar bookshop. Even without having a specific title in mind, I can always find something that looks interesting, just by walking around. Sometimes a blurb on the cover draws me in, sometimes it’s a recommendation by the staff, and sometimes seeing a title or author jogs my memory.
Meanwhile, logging into my Amazon account recommends several books (out of order) in a series, some updated versions of textbooks I once bought, and a few titles I recognize from the NYT best seller list but have no interest in. Since I recently bought one, there are also a good dozen screwdrivers for what Amazon assumes is my burgeoning collection of flatheads.
Also, books don’t cost very much, but they are a big investment in terms of time. Thumbing through the actual book is a great way to make sure you like your prospective purchase. This isn’t quite the same online—Look Inside is carefully metered out so you can maybe get a sense of the books style and level, but it’s often not enough to draw me in.
there's a big bookstore nearby that does a few things right: (1)the staff know a lot. It's not just about 'I liked this book give me something like it', it's about where you don't even know where to start. I've walked in there a dozen times looking for gifts for people aged 4 through ~60, with mostly a vague description of what they're like and what interests them and they know a bunch of choices that fit. Amazon, Google, etc can build profiles on you and figure you out, but they cant figure your friends and gifts out (or even more out of the box recs, or have a more thorough look at what does or doesn't interest. (2) they have coffee. Yay. (3) they have two sections of interesting sales: books that are soon to be out of store (but still on the website) that are on clearance, prices going from €80 to ~€10 or whatever. Great sales. Or just old secondhand things, with books in there that are unique, rare etc, and you would be hard pressed to find online, or if you could you're mostly back at the discoverability issue IMO.
So they know their strengths for meatspace stores, and supplement that with a good online presence (e.g. same day delivery in this city).
Reading that Storytime guy’s tweet, I really wondered:
Has this guy never taken a look at his situation and noticed something off?
He works in a relaxing huge retail store reading books to kids for free, and makes above min wage and keeps his job for the next 20 years and supports 5 kids???
That’s insane, and completely abnormal. No one else with that same type of job has that kind of life.
It reminds me of someone I know who lived in an in-law with no rent control and no law against eviction, for 15 years, paying 60% of market rate. And then was completely stunned and devastated when the landlord gave 60 day notice. Really???
Your comment is so uniformed. Relaxing? The guy is a receiving manager. That's a physically tough job, requires a high level of organization, and he still takes time to help on the book floor by doing storytime.
A receiving manager at B&N makes around $15-17/hour. If his partner works, that's a reasonable enough amount of money to live, but not in a high COL location. How is this abnormal?
What's abnormal is thinking that this is abnormal. $35k/year isn't a high salary.
I couldn't agree more with this. I think it's the OP that hasn't taken a close enough look at the B&N employee's "situation" and just spouted off an opinion.
I would assume he has WAY more responsibilities than just reading stories.
That said, I agree on the evictions front. One of the worst things I saw in the debate about evictions in SF was tenants getting compensation based on how much their rent would go up post-eviction -- so they're PUNISHING landlords for letting tenants have cheap rent for decades??
In Canada, Indigo is a chain of bookstores just like B&N. To counter the threat of Amazon, they have dedicated a large amount of their stores’ square footage to a lifestyle concept that sells aesthetically pleasing stationery, home goods, and gifts. AFAICT this has allowed them to keep afloat and they do still sell quite a bit of books.
As far as I've seen, every chain bookstore has tried this, and most have subsequently gone belly up. It's a little like RadioShack going into cellphones. Maybe you can keep your head above water for a minute, but there's an existential risk in pivoting away from your raison d'etre.
Is that ironic? Amazon has also become the electronics retailer as well. I don't recall the last time I've bought anything at Newegg or Monoprice, or BestBuy. It's basically Amazon or bust, at this point - if I desperately need something right now, I'll gamble on Walmart maybe having it in stock, but chances tend not to be good, and the selection awful.
> To counter the threat of Amazon, they have dedicated a large amount of their stores’ square footage to a lifestyle concept that sells aesthetically pleasing stationery, home goods, and gifts.
The floor space is anecdote, but I have yet to see a B&N that didn’t conform to that in the last few years. As for the cafe profits see articles like http://www.nrn.com/onsite/barnes-noble-expand-food-and-bever..., downscaled cafes already bring in 10% of all sales for the store, the profit margins on those must be much higher than books.
The thing that frustrates me most about the slow, drawn out demise of first Borders and now Barnes & Noble is that there has never been a bold vision for the future. The mega-bookstore was a great model in the 1990s, but post-Internet, they really needed to leverage their space to do something magical.
One idea I would have loved: Browse your books in store, but buy them for Nook or Kindle -- at the same prices you pay on Amazon. Maybe that's even a loss leader and you upsell $5 lattes.
Or perhaps they double-down on really awesome kids sections, where you want to try out a book on you kid before buying. Or maybe they aim to make the store more like a "community center" and build in meeting rooms, or make certain stores specialized in a particular topic (e.g. the "tech" store downtown).
But running the same, tired playbook year after year ultimately is, just as the author suggests, a way for current executives to milk the cow until it falls over. I hope when my son is old enough to enjoy sitting down to read on his own, I'll still have a nice book store to enjoy with him.
Great idea. Don't carry physical books at all; maybe just a postcard-size flyer to advertise a particular text. Buy the postcard--which could be signed by the author--and get a code to download the book. Turn the spaces into, a la FNAC, exhibition spaces, deliberately permitting 'cataloging' of similar products.
Keep in mind that the publishers don't really have skin in the game. Theirs, at least in the U.S., is wholly a consignment business.
Put in an Espresso Book Machine for those who want paper copies.
Make the stores membership only: blend bookstores and libraries. Offer an experience not obtainable elsewhere.
I feel for the grown man who dresses up in costumes to read stories for children. I respect him. And yet if there were some subjective corporate performance metrics he had to game to keep his job, I think other employees may know how to work the system better than him. A lot of the best employees are bad at office politics, because they simply love what they do. If there's something to be said about mass-layoffs, it's that they're maybe better than targeted and subjective firings.
I think B&N was a wonderful place and concept while the underlying forces were working: it seems like a lot more people want to work with books than there are/were jobs at Independents or Libraries, and B&N got them into a business with the cashflow to support dozens of people on the floor. Are there enough jobs in the brick and mortar book business for everyone without B&N? Probably not right now, but there might be a new franchise concept at some point? Time for one of these people to start it.
It would probably help some if their website didn't GIVE YOU LINKS to places you can buy the book you are looking at for less.
I was looking up a book I'm thinking of buying, and right below the customer reviews section on the page they have a Google ads block, and the first ad was for the book at thriftbooks.com. The ad touted it for cheap used there, but clicking it also shows they have it new, too, for $25 (B&N online price is $30).
Below that is another block of Google ads with pictures of the book and links to other sellers. Those ads show the new price right in the ad. Two are $25 (the aforementioned thriftbooks.com and biblio.com) and two are more than B&N's price.
When I was at BN around 7 years ago or so, we were experimenting with this capability on the site, and we had some processes like 1) rules around allowing no competitive sales ads and 2) if the probability of purchase calced by a set of models was higher than the estimated ad revenue, we supressed ads. This worked really well, in that "browsers" who tended to visit and not buy on the site (and who, based on models combining digital and loyalty card data, were not expected to go to a store) might see ads (non-competitive, so no other booksellers, for example) and every visit, even non-purchasers, had some chance of revenue on the visit.
Obviously, we knew that many visits are shopping visits on the journey to buy in a later visit or at store, so the models needed maturing, but the concept had legs.
But as BN looked to add 3rd party sellers of the same products they offered in store and on site (ala amazon, ebay, etc.) and with the myriad leadership changes, clearly they went away from our original approach... And you wind up with this comment's experience.
>As a side note: people often want to know why Amazon’s prices are so much lower than B&N’s, and why B&N doesn’t price match. There’s a lot of different reasons, but the biggest is that Amazon loss-leads their books: that is, sells them at a loss, then makes up the money with expensive add-ons, like Echos or Kindles or other non-book stuff.
Well no, Kindles are breakeven and Amazon makes it up by selling more books (digital ones with good margins though)
Barnes and Noble had a huge high-margin section, just like Best Buy did... their ridiculous physical video and music section. I think the availability of streaming services did as much to hurt those "book" stores as reasonable competition from Amazon.
Is best buy going out of business too? I had a surreal experience while trying to buy a camera lens at Best Buy. The employee in the camera section first directed me to phone camera addons (cool, but not what I wanted) then once explained that I wanted camera accessories (I gestured like I was taking a picture) I was eventually lead to the camera section. I was able to find the Nikon lenses eventually, and the employee returned... I was hoping he'd explain to me what lens would be good for zooming in, but instead he fiddled with the floor model until he managed to take a picture with it, showed me the picture and said, triumphantly, "camera." I gave up and left.
I was wondering about Best Buy too. Does anyone know what's going on with them?
Last I heard (2017), they were trying hard to be more "on-demand" in response to Amazon. They were quite fully aware of people "demoing" items in store and buying them online, so they dropped prices and updated their e-commerce. If it worked is a separate question entirely...
> Barnes and Noble had a huge high-margin section, just like Best Buy did... their ridiculous physical video and music section.
They didn't have that as a large section until deep into the time Amazon was eating their book sales; I'm pretty sure it was a response to the competition from Amazon.
I can see how the author views this as company mismanagement, but I'd offer a possible counter:
Online is killing retail, full stop. High touch sales models everywhere have lost profitablity due to "showrooming" -- curation and upselling aren't profitable for B&N, and they won't ever be again. To adapt, management needs to move to a lower touch model based on thin margins, web sales, and simpler stores. To do this, they need cash and they need to make staff cuts.
Everything in the article fits perfectly with this course of action.
Retail seems to be killing retail though -- it's a death spiral. Going to a lot malls right now is depressing. And I need to buy things, mostly clothing, but the selection and quality has gone down significantly in the last decade.
There is no way back to profit for booksellers and publishers, because fewer people are buying paper books, nowhere near enough to sustain the existing industry, and authors can simply publish direct via schemes like Amazon. They've tried overpricing ebooks, taking things off Amazon, setting up their own online readers/stores (nook). Every publisher is now having real trouble making money, every bookseller also, and significantly cutting jobs - the industry is being turned upside down at every level and no-one except some big brand name authors has a viable business model. Those that are not affected because they live in a profitable niche like academic publishing will meet the same challenges soon, because they are driven by the introduction of computers and the internet, which has radically changed how people write, and how they read.
Of course the management handled this incredibly badly, and have extracted huge fees for passively overseeing the death of the company, and the story is correct in saying it is not bleeding out, but the demise of Barnes and Noble and other booksellers like it is not, it is the inevitable consequence of the shift of content online, and the huge and ongoing disruption across a range of industries that the internet and free copying of information has brought.
Ironically this may lead in the short term to the resurgence of small bookstores who sell second hand copies of books, at least until a generation grows up which has never bought a paper book, just as they have never bought a paper newspaper or magazine. But in the long term I think new mediums will arise more suited to the medium of production and transmission - now everyone in the world can access the store of the world's knowledge in their hand, mostly for free and share their thoughts with others, again for free - this will radically change our perception of culture, and our consumption and production of stories, so the disruption is just beginning.
I've worked in the publishing industry in the UK - it is experiencing long term decline. To illustrate this, see the multitude of publishers merging, cutting staff and closing imprints. Very few publishers are making money any more. The story is the same for bookstores - there is one significant UK-wide chain now (Waterstones).
The article you cite doesn't even show healthy figures - it shows a bump in 2015, then fall to almost zero growth in 2016 for the UK, and a dramatic decline in growth for the US from 2015 to 2016. Hardly signs of a healthy industry. This is just the kind of cherry-picked data the industry has been deluding itself with for years. The figures produced by the industry are unreliable, and the interpretation of those is equally suspect, as evidenced by the article you've found. They've tried to manipulate stats by doing things like pricing ebooks higher or just below physical books for example.
Barnes and Noble will close soon (as this article predicts), as will all the other big brick and mortar booksellers, and soon after that mass-market paper books are doomed as Amazon has little incentive to promote them over ebooks, and no interest in sustaining publishers.
My wife has worked for B&N for 21 years. I met her there, and worked there for a bit over a year. I've followed this company since then, and the amount of sheer stupidity exhibited by upper management is astounding. Decisions from the regional and main corporate offices that were just amateurish. Money wasted, time wasted, people wasted. I'm amazed they've lasted this long.
Around 2000-2002, you could walk into most B&N stores and find nice comfortable chairs to sit in. These chairs encouraged book lovers to grab a book, sit down, read a few pages, and actually enjoy the book buying experience. So what did B&N do over the next couple of years? Get rid of the comfortable chairs, and replace them on a 1:2 basis with hard, uncomfortable wooden chairs. Then slowly phase these chairs out completely.
This did a couple of things; discourage people from reading books on the book floor, while encouraging them to read in the Cafe, where the books and magazines get damaged easily. But the core idea of having an inviting bookstore died that year.
Another issue was the Cafe relationship with Starbucks. The Cafe's use Starbucks components, and often follow their recipes. They have tons of "Starbucks" branding as part of this relationship. BUT you can't use a Starbuck giftcard at a B&N Cafe. Try explaining this to someone who received a giftcard over the holidays. They order a coffee after waiting in line, and get hassled about the form of payment. It wouldn't have been hard for B&N management to work out a deal with Starbucks for handling these cards, but B&N never did.
Also, bookstores have the ability to send a majority of their inventory back to the publisher (yeah, crazy legacy stuff). Inventory levels are largely decided by Corp HQ yet despite modern inventory mgmt software being a thing, they continually botched it. So you would get huge shipments. Then when cash flow for the company would get tight, they'd have you pull the books off the shelves and send them back to the publishers. This would be a continual process that consumes tons of time, time that would be better spent on customer service.
Corp HQ would also decide to change the store layout frequently. The staff would pack up all the Sci-Fi/Fantasy books, move them to a completely different part of the store. Customers would come in, head to their favorite section, and be flummoxed. Since so many labor hours were spent doing this type of thing, (and the aforementioned book pulls), there weren't as many employees on the book floor to help. I called it the Titanic chair shuffling...
Staffing levels were always a problem. On busy holiday weeknights, you might have 4-5 people working. One manager, one head cashier, two in the cafe, and one on the book floor. Employees need breaks, so often you would end up with one cashier, and one person on the book floor. If you get a rush of people, that line at the register can get awfully long. B&N only pays lip service to the customer experience.
A lot of these types of decisions add up overtime to create a crappy customer experience. B&N never could compete with Amazon on pricing, and never should have. They should have embraced the book buying experience, and made customers love coming in. But that's a long long game to play, and their management made continually bad choices (like Nook) that distracted them, took capital they didn't have, and confused customers.
Just wanted to say that in NYC, the quality of book selection at Barnes and Noble is just amazing. In my opinion, it's way better then the hyped Strand, for example. So, maybe, go to your local B&N some time and just buy a book? Support brick-and-mortar bookstores, while we haven't succumbed to Amazon just yet.
It would help with this if B&N would fix their website to make it less annoying to try to find out what is at your local store.
Suppose there are several books you are thinking of buying. You want to know which of those are at your local B&N. You go to their website and search for the first book. On the book's page you click the "Check Store Availability" link.
That pops up a form to enter your zip code. You do, and it brings up a pop up that shows the availability of the book in the nearest few stores.
So far so good.
Now you want to check the second book. You find its page, click the store check link. And you get the zip code pop up again...and it isn't even smart enough to pre-fill the zip code. You have to enter it again!
This is just irritating.
At the very minimum it should pre-fill the zip.
Better would be to skip that pop up completely if it already knows the zip and go straight to the results. This would not inconvenience people who want to change the zip to check a different area's stores, because the results pop up has a zip entry field for doing that.
Better than that would be to, once it has the zip, automatically show on the book pages whether or not they are available in nearby stores.
Even better than that would be to also put that on the search results pages and on the browsing results pages, like Best Buy does. At Best Buy it tells me right there if it is available for pick up today at my local store. If not, it tells when it can be if I order online for local pick up.
Once they do all that, they should add a way to filter results to only show locally available items. Best Buy again is a good example. On search and browsing pages, there is a tab that limits it to only items you can pick up today in your local store.
In Boston the downtown B&N is actually pretty uninspired, and the store is probably 60% non-book items. It's like an airport bookstore (Hudson News in the US).
And yet, from my experience no place in the city has a more comprehensive catalog of magazines (some come close). Go figure!
Barnes and Noble and Borders effectively destroyed the independent book stores of the nation, because at the time they had a better business model. I don't have a lot of sympathy for their business model getting the same treatment from the internet sales model.
Calibre is fantastic, and open source too! It's primary a library management system with all the features you could ask for, but there are also open source plugins to remove DRM that make it a go-to for creating libre libraries.
'The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act of 1988 (the "WARN Act") is a US labor law which protects employees, their families, and communities by requiring most employers with 100 or more employees to provide 60 calendar-day advance notification of plant closings and mass layoffs of employees, as defined in the Act.'
It's sad that old-school books are dying. I love books, especially older hard cover books; but, if you know your business and industry are dying, then you owe it to your team who got you there to engineer a soft landing. That's simply the ethical thing to do.
> Personally, I think it's sad that old-school books are dying.
They're not.
US printed book sales climbed for the fourth or fifth straight year in 2017 (depending on how you're measuring it), at 687 million units sold. That compares with 648 million for 2004 for example. Further, independent book stores have been doing quite well [1].
"Unit sales of print books rose 3.3% in 2016 over the previous year, making it the third-straight year of print growth"
A sidenote in the article, but I'd like to know why people think that Amazon treats books as a loss-leader... Last I checked in tech news, it was the common assumption that Amazon retail in general has razor-thin margins or might even be losing money, but AWS was making money hand over fist.
Bezos cheerleaders and their ilk never seem to be willing to acknowledge that creating wealth is much harder than extracting it, and either out of bad faith or naivety will misidentify ventures that specialize in the latter as being exemplars of the former. In this case, we have the incalculable loss of so many person-years of experience in a deep topic, literature, that’s being shrugged away as a case of the market moving on in a post facto justification of the actions of some corporate raiders that never even considered alternatives beyond stripping a company of its assets for their own sake. I just wish we could be honest about what actual competition, what actual wealth creation, looks like, because this isn’t it.
> Bezos cheerleaders and their ilk never seem to be willing to acknowledge that creating wealth is much harder than extracting it
I am utterly confused by this statement. Are you implying that Bezos isn't one of the largest creators of wealth in the history of the world?
When I think of all the time and money hundreds of millions of people have saved by the revolution in online shopping and shipping, not to mention AWS, my mind boggles.
As you say, you can also generate wealth my extracting it (e.g., mining) but Amazon has not done that at all. The entirety of the wealth they've generated comes from increasing efficiency and productivity. That is, to go from trees and dyes to a book in my hand used to cost $Y and now costs $X. $Y - $X is the wealth created by the efficiency gains in those processes.
Bezos has created a lot of wealth, made a lot of lives better. I've got a lot of joy out of reading the kind of books that would probably never be published on paper, and certainly never recommended by those with "person-years of experience in a deep topic, literature", because Amazon opens it all up so that virtually anyone can publish and their books sink or swim on their merits, and their algorithms can recommend things to those of us with weirder tastes just as easily as it can recommend the literary establishment line.
Well, that’s the point of the article, isn’t it? The long-time employees that were laid off were almost certainly there out of love of their wares, and the parent business could have put the work into making value out of that distinguishing fact. But beyond that, they had institutional knowledge, both of how the business works and what their customers want. I know it’s hard to imagine that retail work could involve any amount of skill or knowledge, but this is no doubt a loss of value.
> and the parent business could have put the work into making value out of that distinguishing fact
The fact that you can easily make vague pontifications about what else they might have done doesn't mean that any of those things are actually viable for the business.
> I know it’s hard to imagine that retail work could involve any amount of skill or knowledge, but this is no doubt a loss of value.
But probably not enough value to be worth keeping them on staff, unless they did the layoffs on whim, like you seem to think. It is possible that they examined a lot of scenarios and are privy to a fair amount of relevant details to which the public isn't.
When B&N decided not only not to compete with Amazon on books ("No, we will not price match these books". "Pay money to join our club to get a discount") but become a wacky showroom of wacky products ( sushi making kit, anyone? Would you like a reading lamp? Oh, wait, no, it is not a reading lamp, it is just a lamp that you could use for reading. How about our Nook thing? Not that we can run anything electronic ) it signed its own death sentence.
(Taking the article at face value for the sake of argument.)
I have to imagine there's going to be a smarter way to finance and manage companies that don't have huge growth prospects. Sure, creative destruction and all that, but isn't there some size at which a bookstore works profitably?
So figure out that size, which is maybe smaller but still a chain, and get organized around that concept. Is that unrealistic somehow? Does it really need to be financed in public markets?
I'll be sad to see my local B&N disappear, but it's not unexpected: the writing has been on the wall for years. I generally hang out in the cafe, drink coffee, read magazines. If I see a book I like, I'll probably buy it on Amazon.
Did retail ever deserve to live anyway? What kind of life and satisfaction does one get by selling someone else's work? It's easy, low skill and is just plain 'busy work'. Perhaps we are entering the golden age where one's worth is more closely related to the value they add to other peoples lives through their real work as human beings - not as middle men (middle people?) The trades for example are thriving. The food industry is burgeoning. Tourism is growing.Good riddance to mind numbing dehumanizing work - the assembly line, the stock clerk, the delivery person.
The real tragedy here is that US has laws which allow employers to fire someone on the spot. What a travesty - 20 years at work and they can get rid of you in a day? Just wow.
Legally, there is a difference between layoff and fire. Depends on the state, but employers of a certain size have to give warning that a layoff is coming. The article says they were given notice their positions were going away; that is probably legally enough. Even firing requires documented poor behavior.
From what I understand, this wasn't considered a mass layoff because each site only lost a handful of workers. The definition of a mass layoff according to the law is that the "mass" applies to each site that experiences layoffs.
It's time for BN to suck it up and put signs around the store saying 'Found a book you love here but are choosing to buy it from a competitor? Please use our referral code: xyz".
The writing is on the wall for Barnes and Noble, and I can't help but see what they've done here as mirroring what Circuit City did just before they shut everything down. IIRC, they ditched their most experienced sales-people, who were also the highest paid, and not soon there-after, they were done.
That said, I don't entirely agree with the assessment of the author. She sounds like one of the employees that was let go and her view of things might be colored by that. She seems to be over-valuing the contribution these employees made to the bottom line of the business. She may or may not be right; I can't, personally, speak to that -- where I live, there hasn't been a Barnes & Noble nearby in a long time. In fact, the place I work is located on the second floor of what once was a Barnes & Noble. When there was one a couple of miles from my home, I rarely purchased anything from them other than coffee.
This is anecdotal, of course, but I don't know that pulling employees from the floor and putting them to work boxing and shipping orders from the store was such a bad idea. If it did, indeed, decrease shipping time and costs, it would have been a fine use for that staff assuming they could find enough people to buy books online when those people could often save money at Amazon. In the decades that I did spend time at Barnes & Noble, my interactions were limited to the "kinda-Starbucks" folks and the (rare) store teenage cashier. Maybe I am a very specific customer[0]; I went there because of the selection of obscure programming books. I'd often need something not available at my library. They'd have a few options and I wanted to review them before having the library order it.
I buy the argument that it's not necessarily Amazon that was B&N's downfall -- it hurt, a lot, I'm sure and I know former B&N customers who now exclusively purchase via Kindle -- but there are a lot of people like me, who didn't buy books from either place. In a twist of irony, I own a second-generation Nook with the e-paper/color screen. I have never owned a Kindle.
Here's my take on where B&N fell over:
(1) Failure to recognize who the competition actually was. Amazon needn't be mentioned; it's obvious. But the big one for me was my local home-town library. They are just as close, a little bigger, just as nice (sans Fivebucks coffee), but I don't have to spend anything there and being a speed reader (skim/scan style, not the gimmicky nonsense), I get through my book during the borrowing window. They also have an automated self-checkout and self-dropoff, so I wait in far fewer lines. So I'm already inconvenienced by having to gasp drive somewhere, but my library handles the experience entirely better.
(2) Very expensive real-estate: I mentioned that my employer is in a former Barnes & Noble location. Our office is in an incredibly desirable area. I have no idea what the cost is, but I know that homes with fewer bedrooms than I have and half the square footage go for twice the price of my home (and homes just a few miles up the road) in less desirable parts of this suburb. The stores are very pleasant to be in, with expensive furnishings in expensive, convenient areas. These things don't come cheap. There's a reason the mom-and-pop book-sellers are located on the dumpier side of town, often have "use other door" signs posted on 8.5x11 paper with ink-jet Comic Sans all caps print and the books are jammed together on shelves stacked floor to ceiling separated by aisles that are barely large enough to meet ADA requirements... books are low-margin items. Every time I visited a Barnes and Noble for Fivebucks coffee I wondered how, on earth, they stayed in business.
(3) Staffing costs had to be high. Ignoring the whole thing about the CEO and executives making stupid amounts of money[1], the staff requirements to provide the level of customer service required of those customers who do need help, especially those who purchased a Nook and mistakenly thought that driving over to B&N would be helpful in solving their problems, is impossible to do profitably. And I don't think that the quality of their staff would have been the same as the mom-pop bookstores described in point #2. The few mom/pops that I've been to are staffed by book-obsessed individuals; those individuals are often also the owners of the place, and the owners of the place are often the only employees. Thinking back about a decade, when I last went to a B&N, I'm not entirely sure that I never needed help, but I am sure that I never received any. I don't ever recall seeing an employee anywhere other than at the coffee shop or behind the counter ringing people up. Where they had employees, they had to few of them. It always took forever to get out of there with a (rare) purchase; even a (less rare) coffee purchase. I think they are the record holder for me of saving me money through waiting . . . how bad did I want that coffee? 15 minutes, bad? Or that 2600 magazine that had the cool payphone photo that I wanted to keep; do I really want to wait in line behind those 9 other people for the one cashier who's ringing everyone up in their (pointless) common-feeder line?
(4) Inventory costs had to be high. I went to B&N only because I knew they had a huge selection, yet I rarely purchased anything from that selection[2]. I would have never walked into the store if they didn't have that selection, though. It's a lot easier for Amazon to handle that problem. My local library, as well, is massive and actually larger than the B&N was (though they had a more limited programming book selection). Back to point #1, their competition has far fewer difficulties doing what they do.
Of the problems I can see, fixing any of the bottom three would be customer-hostile in (probably) equal ways -- different impacts, but would take enough away that they'd lose a lot of business. Staffing -- the third -- is the only one that can be done quickly and have an immediate impact on the bottom line. The problem, though, is that it's like borrowing money at a higher interest rate to pay off debt[3]. They'll lose high- and probably medium-maintenance customers, and they'll lose customers sympathetic to the employees' circumstances which will drive them into cutting more. It's a downward spiral and they're so close to the bottom, I don't see them having a chance at this point.
[0] Generally, I ended up there in search of books related to programming, networks and other computing topics. They had the largest selection and I could crack the books open and see if they were worth burning the time on, which I would often then do in their coffee shop over a few weekend days. I'd occasionally look over the fiction titles under topics I like, but I don't read fiction, I listen to it and I generally did that by grabbing the CDs or (gasp) tapes from the library.
[1] I'm not disagreeing; it's absurd given that they're failing at their actual job, it's just obvious enough, IMO, that it doesn't require more detail.
[2] PSA- I feel that way about Microcenter, somehow they have almost everything that I can find on Newegg, and they manage to be nearly competitive, price-wise, with them. I don't want them to vanish, though, so I make it a point to do as much of my geek spending there, in-store, even if they are a little pricier; plus ... instant gratification is nice.
[3] Or, as is said all too often by people who aren't thinking about what it is they're actually saying, the equivalent to "digging yourself out of a hole".
Anyone know the source of that awesome breakdown of comp for the execs? That is, I know it's from the filings, but it's a pain to manually assemble, so that's a powerful image...
The one in Bethesda, Maryland, is closing. Whenever I have looked in--usually because I'm in Bethesda to see a movie or to take my car to the dealership--it has been busy.
I think many people tend to grossly overestimate the profit levels of large companies. Let's take Amazon since they're arguably the reason for the failure here and a company I think many perceive to be lush with money largely because of 'greed.' It also hits on notions from this paper like companies just not hiring enough employees, even if only at certain times.
Amazon currently grosses $178 billion. However, their net income is what matters. That's what's left over after paying cost of goods, salaries, rent, taxes, and so on. Basically what's left over after the mandatory expenses to keep your company running. And that's only $3 billion. 'Only' sounds funny preceding $3,000,000,000 and is undoubtedly what leads to complaints against Amazon (and here as well) that they're just being greedy, not paying employees enough, and so on.
But that's not really accurate. Amazon has 566,000 employees. If they gave each employee a $1000 raise. For those working your average 2000+ hour year that's a whopping $0.50/hour raise. Yet that marginal raise amounts to $0.56billion, or 1/6th of their entire remaining revenue. Interestingly enough 1 executive earning $1million in compensation is, by contrast, only 1/3000th of their remaining revenue. This critical calculation on the number of workers to fill any given role is why compensation and things can seem so lopsided. The sheer magnitude of the number of workers at many of these companies is very counter intuitive.
And this is the case for most large small margin companies. Back to Barnes and Noble, in 2016 they had a net income of -$24.5 million with 26,000 employees. Try to keep those figures in mind when considering this. I think the post that described any real solution for them as akin to 'shuffling chairs on the Titanic' is very apt.
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If anybody has a counter point here, I'd love to hear it. From my perspective it seems people are replacing reality with ideology, whether intentionally or not. We want to blame companies for being greedy, even when in reality the numbers don't really support such views. All jobs are disappearing, when we have 4.1% unemployment (even the U6 is down to 8.2%!), etc. I used to feel very similarly, but the numbers simply don't support these incredibly cynical views.
I think people are more bothered by the stupidity of BN leadership than by their greed. Corporate is defining policy which is actively contributing to significant drops in store sales and then laying off all of their full-time retail employees which will further drive down their revenue. They used to be a very strong brand.
You are being downvoted because Amazon is a bad example. They are intentionally not profitable so that they can lower prices to drive others out of the market and reinvest all revenue into R&D and horizontal expansion. They could net way more than $3B if they wanted to.
I could not care less about downvotes, but I enjoy discussion. And I certainly think people would like to disagree with me, but it seems none are really able or willing to form coherent counter points - which I think puts a very sad frame on the disagreement. So I thank you for changing that, though I think there's something you may not have considered in your logic.
At the most basic level we can view a company's profitability as a price vs demand curve. If your price is too low then you're leaving money on the table. If it's too high then you're also losing money since you could earn more by charging less to more people. And I'm sure you'd agree that all companies are really trying to maximize that curve.
But the thing here is that competition is not some tertiary element not considered in our basic price vs demand curve. It's in most cases the single biggest driving factor of the demand function. When there's no real competition, you can increase your prices quite recklessly - see Time Warner or Comcast. But the amount that Amazon can increase their prices is strictly limited due to competition. If you're going to buy an electronic component do you buy it at e.g. New Egg or Amazon? It doesn't really matter if its the same thing - you're just going to go with wherever is cheaper in net (e.g. factoring in rewards/shipping/etc), even if that price difference is really quite small. The point here is that while you may think that Amazon could raise their prices let's say 5% and see a 1-2% growth in profit, but this is a question that they are undoubtedly constantly researching - and they disagree.
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And in any case this is literally the case for most all small margin businesses. For instance WalMart has 2.3 million employees and $13.6 billion net. Our $1k/year raise costs them $2.3 billion, or 1/6th of their entire available income. The only companies that are truly lush with money are companies that sell their product at extremely high markups, or companies whose product enables the minimize labor, such as software. For instance Apple, as an example of the former, nets $48.4 billion with 123,000 employees. A $1000/year raise there would work out to 1/400th of their available revenue. Google/Alphabet, as an example of the latter, had a bad year last year, but generally net around $20 billion on 72,000 employees. Their $1k raise works out to about 1/278th of their available revenue. It creates an ironic result that few people would complain about the wages Google or Apple offer, yet they actually offer their employees a far less 'fair' share of revenues than do the companies that people consider greedy.
What's sad about Barnes and Noble is that the book industry never saw the ebook and online buying coming. So they kept the price of books high, pressured by big name authors who were use to the big royalty checks, and they can't move away. Imagine if B&N could compete on price with Amazon, and the booksellers had to take what the market is willing to pay.
pressured by big name authors who were use to the big royalty checks
Um. Goodness. Traditionally, publishers set a wholesale price and a "suggested" cover price. Retailers set the retail price, what the customer is actually going to pay -- but the royalties paid to authors are based on the publisher's suggested cover price. If the book lists for $24.95 and the author's contract stipulates 17% royalties on hardcovers, it doesn't matter if you, the consumer, pays $24.95, $18.75 or 25¢ -- the author is going to get $4.24.
Amazon, like Walmart, can afford to price physical books at or even below wholesale price, because they're making the money up in other ways. B&N and most other booksellers can't compete on price with Amazon because they can't do that. Amazon has long been weirdly close to the old joke of "we lose money on every sale, but we'll make it up in volume"; the vast majority of their profit comes from AWS.
Also, B&N was actually selling books online before the consumer internet, via Prodigy. They were selling on the web by 1997, and the Nook ebook reader was introduced in 2009, only two years after the Kindle. Whatever their historic and current faults have been, being entirely ignorant of the electronic world isn't really one of them.
Never saw ebook book buying coming? What? In the '90s we were selling books for the Palm Pilot. I remember when a sample of the Rocket showed up at the office. We thought, hey, now maybe people will start buying ebooks!
I also remember when Amazon first started selling books online, and they were getting their data from Books in Print. Despite the name, BIP lists a lot of books that are not in print. Some effort was required to get them to clean up their data.
In those days, B&N was rapidly expanding their superstore system, and trying to drive out the independents by, you know, discounting. And we said, hey, once they've gotten rid of the competition, those discounts will go away. And they did.
Yeah, it like how Kodak "never saw digital coming." Actually they had PhotoCD long before digital cameras were a widespread thing. You can recognize a shift to electrons and still not figure out a way to make a large chain B&M business work.
Smaller scale, but one of the first larger bookstores around me to discount books on a consistent basis effectively helped drive a lot of the smaller bookstores that had been around forever out of business. Ten or twenty years later, they were complaining online when they were effectively driven out of business by Amazon.
But, rather infamously, a Kodak engineer cobbled together a rudimentary digital camera out of parts lying about in the lab, c. 1975, showed it to management, and they were like, who would want that.
Oh, Kodak did plenty of things wrong. But the technology wasn't really there for a mass market digital camera for almost 25 years after that. And replacing a consumables business that was so big Kodak owned their own chemical company at one point was going to be difficult in any case. Fujifilm transitioned much better but they were much smaller and also had their own struggles.
Not to mention that B&N went in big on ebooks. B&N's Nook platform was the only competitor comparable to Amazon's Kindle ecosystem.
It didn't work out, of course, but that's something very different than missing the coming tide of ebooks altogether.
> Imagine if B&N could compete on price with Amazon
One of the points of the article is that they can't*, because Amazon has other lines of business and B&N does not. So Amazon can use the revenue from those other businesses to swallow losses on book sales in order to drive out competition.
I am just a single data point but still I have a story to tell: I had a B&N Nook. Then I didn't and I still was buying Nook eBooks. You know why? Because DRM was a fig leaf. They had their DRM solution which was so easy to strip it's not even funny -- they encrypted your books with a key based on your name and credit card number (this might've originated with ereader.com). Then in 2015 March they changed algorithms and it was not so easy any more and I walked.
Don’t ever count on “loyal and faithful service” on keeping your job. I’ve seen engineers with 25 years of service laid off with 5 minutes notice. The only relationship you should have with an employer is extracting as much pay and benefits in exchange for work.
I don't agree with the basic premise of the article wrt job security. B&N does not owe you a job. Nobody does.
You got to work at the same company for 20 years? You should be happy and gracious. All things come to an end.
I'm 37 and the longest I've worked at a company was 3.5 years, and that was my own startup. I average about 2-3 years/company. I'd kill to find a company/job where I can stay for 5 years without becoming a dinosaur. But I can't, because it's the startup/tech sector, things move fast, even here in Europe. On the flip-side, you could chose to be more static, risking increased irrelevance, in which case you'll be more upset upon losing your job. But that's the risk/tradeoff.
Plus these sound like mostly entry level, no-qualification jobs. I can't imagine why anyone would feel like they had any real measure of job security at jobs like those.
Because treating people to lots of free kindness, ra ra spirit, free cheap food, team building is a great way to retain people so long as the wages you pay them are enough to get by. If you persue this strategy successfully your business will be chock full of people who love you and think you all are family even though you don't pay them much..
People that need more monetarily will of course notice that raises are minimal and long term growth meh but many people have modest needs or spouses that make more money and they have no particular reason not to collect the same money adjusted for inflation and stay comfortable.
Grabbed the magazine, wandered the aisles a bit and picked up another book then went to check out. Basically I was their marketing department's dream - walk-in traffic coming to buy something cheap and specific who made an impulse retail buy of a much higher margin item.
The checkout line was at least 50 people long and probably estimated at over an hour. Two cashiers working out of 8 or so possible registers, and as far as I could tell a singular employee on the floor itself.
I put my selections back and walked out the door. Granted it was near peak shopping season - but that was inexcusable. There were quite a lot of really pissed off looking people in that line.
So that is to say my experience lines up with the article. They entirely botched their Christmas season and it wasn't the employee's or consumer demand's fault. Just that one store bled hundreds of dollars in lost sales just from the 5 minutes I watched people walk in and immediately out after seeing the line.