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Is it a corporate or store decision to remove seatings?
The BN store nearest to where I live closed its Starbucks store and removed its chairs. They use to have a bench near by the magazine section and sofas. Now there are only 3 chairs. There were always stray books and magazines. It's cleaner now. There aren't a lot of stray magazines floating about.
I think seatings can lead to a store's detriment. The only surviving Borders in my area has a Seattle's Best cafe, and a huge section of tables and chairs, and sofas. The sad thing is because of that, people treat the Borders as a noncirculating library. There are stacks of books, graphic novels, and magazines piled up by the sofas. It's obvious that the patrons aren't interested in buying the books. Their actions have made the book selections worse since the books and magazines returned to the shelves are grubby and creased.
The BN I usually go to now is a new one attached to a mall. It has its own cafe and some chairs and benches near the windows for seating and browsing. It seems to have fairly well business transactions to allow seating and browsing. It's nice and clean. Interestingly, the flagship BN in LA, which is attached to a movie theater, and gets the most foot traffic I've ever seen (from movie goers), removed all their chairs except for four of them. So maybe it's up to each store's own policy to remove seatings as they see fit.
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