Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrew H.
There's a reason that B&N and Borders drove smaller bookstores out of business, and the reason is that they carried far more books.
And Amazon carries even more.
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Uh, there are currently over 1000 independent bookstores in the US.
Barring a few that may be newly opened to fill in gaps from the Borders implosion, most are survivors of decades of chain store competition and over 15 years of Amazon competition.
*Somebody* is buying their books.
Just this past holiday season (if we believe published reports) at the same time B&N was seeing decreased traffic and significantly reduced sales, the ABA indies were seeing an 8% growth in revenue. Despite the bigger Amazon catalog, despite the lower Amazon prices, despite the point and click convenience.
I'm a value shopper myself but I try not to blind myself to the reality that there are other shopping experiences and other buyer profiles. Not every independent bookstore lives off a niche nor does every bookstore that *does* live *solely* off that niche. There *is* variation in shopper habits and it is a very fine-grained variation; the closer you get to the ground the more you see it. Conversely, the further away you get from the real world of the customer the less you see that variation; instead of little pockets of this or that, you only see a vast homogeneous "gray goo"; the lowest common denominator.
That is the issue that B&N must now grapple with: they are more vulnerable to the big cheap Amazon catalog than the indies because the indies have "evolved" to survive side by side with cheap giant catalogs whereas B&N hasn't. They haven't developed the customer-centric focus, the local sensibility, and the other survival skills needed when you're *not* the top of the food chain. (I'll skip the small mammal/big dino analogies.)
Amazon's strength is they can blend their volume sales-driven pricing and deep catalog with advanced analytics that approximate the local/personal savvy of a *good* bookstore operator. That works beautifully for a lot of us.
But other people have other priorities, other habits, other profiles. Some only buy NYT bestsellers, others prefer lit-fic; some like quick and efficient online, some like even more personalized focus than even Amazon's analytics can provide. Let's not dismiss the folks that actually like spending and hour or two walking among book racks just to see "what's out there". I used to do it with friends: a "night on the town" used to be an hour or so at Borders chatting about this book or that, a movie at the multiplex next to it, and dinner at a restaurant at the mall. Fond memories.
A simple experience for simple folk.
Again: I don't see B&N disappearing just yet but if it happens it will be because for too many customers they offer no compelling reason to deal with them; they are neither cheap/deep enough to appeal to value-focused shoppers nor focused enough to appeal to experience-focused shoppers. They have spent so much time pleasing their suppliers and planning their great war with Amazon they forgot they have to please the customers. "Win the hearts and minds of the natives".
Like it or not, the US is a wide-open competitive market.
There are few if any market-distorting protections for the incompetent so the result is a consumer dominated environment. Consumers vote with their feet and their mouse clicks and their wallets. Focus on anything else and you're at risk of getting left behind.