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Originally Posted by fjtorres
Amazon disagrees.  |
I don't see Amazon's brick and mortar stores ever spreading out like B. Dalton books. Mostly I think they are an attention grabbing stunt. Time will tell if I am wrong.
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Hudson is also doing quite well with their formats. And they're not a small chain.
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I'm not familiar with Hudson, unless you are talking about Hudson News at the airport?
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You're right that the days of big giant-store chains are nearing their end but it won't be the end of (smaller format) chains or big destination stores (as regional draws).
B&N's problem is their stubborn insistence on being both big and everywhere and refusing to accept that a majority of avid readers have pivoted to online and ebooks, leaving them to compete with Walmart, Costco, newstands, etc for the casual reader market. And that market finds little use for the deeper catalog filling the big B&N stores.
For all B&N's problems, they still sell a lot of books. Around 23% of 2017 sales. Maybe 150M of them. They just aren't selling as many as they used to and not generating enough revenue to support the big store format.
I think there might be room for 30 or 40 big format specialty bookstores (Powell's, for example) scattered about and a ubiquitous chain or two of small shops focused on local casual readers. In the UK Waterstones is looking in that same direction, creating a set of small shops focused on their locality, some without the Waterstones name. Essentially a chain of Independent stores.
B&N could do that. But first they have to let go of their big store fetish.
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Yeah, I think it would be healthy for Barnes and Noble to shrink their stores.