Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
Oh, no question.
The problem is that all the evidence is indicating that giant warehouse stores *isn't* the right business model.
My own take is that the viable model is the old B.Dalton "small-everywhere" model, enhanced with ship-to-store and regional POD, and is more likely to provide the sales-per-floor space ratio needed to survive in an age of declining print sales.
To an extent B&N using its floor space for non p-book products is a variation of that model. And, as I pointed out above, if B&N in fact ends up doing a 50% floorspace reduction across the board, that would be the equivalent (from the publishers' point of view) of closing half their stores. Some of that floorspace reduction will be made up for by stocking less copies of individual titles but that has its limits and inevitably it will result in smaller B&M catalogs.
Less titles will be stocked and/or new release titles will be featured for shorter periods. Any way you slice it, it adds up to smaller B&M sales volume and more incentives for consumers to shop online and/or migrate to ebooks where practical.
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I always browsed Dalton's at the Mall when it was there and picked up some things from time to time. It is gone now. That Mall now has a BAM which like some have described is like a Toys-r-Us and a coffee and gift shop combined with books. The BAM was moved from another place where I used to go and buy magazines that were hard to find, but now it has lost a third of its magazine section. I have never bought anything at the new BAM.