<story><title>Barnes and Noble is dying, Waterstones in the U.K. is thriving. Why?</title><url>http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2015/12/barnes_noble_is_dying_waterstones_in_the_u_k_is_thriving.single.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Someone1234</author><text>TL;DR: Slash costs (i.e. fire tons of people, discontinue unprofitable stock) and target stores better for their demographics.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve spent a lot of time in both B&amp;amp;N and Waterstones. B&amp;amp;N has a lot of problems Waterstones never had even ahead of bankruptcy:&lt;p&gt;- The stores are too big. 1&amp;#x2F;2 of a B&amp;amp;N store is tat, reference books, niche stock, a Nook display area, and other nonsense. You could cut almost all B&amp;amp;N stores in half and not notice as a customer.&lt;p&gt;- They place them poorly. B&amp;amp;N is perfect for foot traffic. But B&amp;amp;Ns are typically located as drive-up &amp;quot;out of town&amp;quot; shopping. Somewhere you need to go to intentionally. They need to be in malls.&lt;p&gt;- No good Nook tie-in for the stores. My SO often goes into B&amp;amp;N and looks at books, and then says &amp;quot;I&amp;#x27;ll buy it on my Nook later.&amp;quot; They should have made an agreement with the publishers YEARS ago: When you buy a physical book, you get the Nook book included.&lt;p&gt;- The children&amp;#x27;s area is really nice, but poorly leveraged. No classes, no reading groups, no reason to come in. Stay at home parents WANT a reason to get out of the house, you offer a free reading group for small kids, the parents will buy the books after the group.&lt;p&gt;- Atmosphere in the coffee shop is bad. Waterstones feels like a nice little swanky coffee shop, somewhere you&amp;#x27;d go and work on your novel, B&amp;amp;N&amp;#x27;s coffee shop feels like a generic coffee shop at the airport.&lt;p&gt;- B&amp;amp;Ns has no brand, and keeps making it worse. 3D printers, toys, Nooks, what is it that B&amp;amp;Ns is? They&amp;#x27;re all over the place, and now when you go into a B&amp;amp;N store you&amp;#x27;ll never know what they&amp;#x27;ll be pushing this week.&lt;p&gt;I think B&amp;amp;N will go under. I just don&amp;#x27;t think the management is very good, and every attempt they make to right the ship makes it worse. The whole business needs to be restructured.</text></comment>
<story><title>Barnes and Noble is dying, Waterstones in the U.K. is thriving. Why?</title><url>http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2015/12/barnes_noble_is_dying_waterstones_in_the_u_k_is_thriving.single.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>hibikir</author><text>B&amp;amp;N is really suffering from a way bigger problem in the US: The death of retail. Other than a few big cities, the cost of going to a store in the US is far higher than in Europe, just because e have to actively go to a store, instead of passing them on the way to work. This is what made American stores into big boxes: Since people had to make specific trips to the store, it paid to make them big, fill them up with lots of inventory, and make them service large areas.&lt;p&gt;But then the internet happened, and as internet retail gets getter and better, the weakest stores suffer, and the weakest of the lot are bookstores and electronics stores. We&amp;#x27;ve seen competition in those areas dwindle already, because the market just couldn&amp;#x27;t hold: CompUSA, Circuit City, Borders, are gone, but it&amp;#x27;s not as if the survivors are thriving: Their sales are still getting eaten by Amazon more and more every year.&lt;p&gt;So B&amp;amp;N will probably manage to stay alive until the next economic crisis happens, consumers start buying a bit less, and the internet eats them alive.&lt;p&gt;In more dense urban areas, very efficient book retailers will still have a chance for a while, because it is often more convenient to buy at a local store than to buy online. They&amp;#x27;ll still have to be afraid of the switch to ebooks though.</text></comment>