Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
That was the business model of B.Dalton and WaldenBooks: be everywhere so you could capture sales whenever readers walked buy. "Drive-by bookselling". Instead of making book buying a purposeful decision (drive 20-30 miles to a temple of books) make it an incidental stop (Hey, Walden's just across the aisle! I wonder what's new...).
That psychology worked for a couple decades, it can still work today with a tweak or two on the logistics. Especially on *casual* book readers.
And casual book readers are always in play, unlike avid readers.
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It did work pretty well, and to a certain extent it seems a natural step in "devolving" the big stores.
One big problem, though, especially for the casual book readers, is that there is a lot of competition for popular books from non-traditional booksellers like Walmart and Target. I haven't actually counted, but these stores seem to carry several hundred titles at least: bestsellers and a lot of popular genre fiction. The selection tends to be wide and shallow, but I suspect that it's completely adequate for people who may read a few books a year in popular genres, and at least convenient for regular readers who may be interested in a book that just came out.
It's been a long time since I've been in a B. Dalton or Waldenbooks, but they tended to have *some* series depth, although it seems like it was limited.
They had an okay reference section and actually a lot of non-fiction - two areas in which Target and Walmart and grocery stores are pretty weak, so there is that.
A related issue is that malls have become significantly less popular in the US than they were in the heyday of B.Dalton and Walden: a bookstore in a mall today won't give you the same bang for the buck it did in the 80's.