Thread regarding Barnes & Noble layoffs

If Amazon didn’t exist?
BN would’ve made all the same bad decisions and be in the same sinking boat.

If nothing else, Amazon was born out of how badly, companies like BN ,were not taking advantage of doing business online correctly.
Shipping complaints and bad customer service is no way to get people to return.

Amazon isn’t to blame for BNs bad management. Steve Riggio bailed and all Lenny wanted to do was be a NY big shot. Hanging with Tony Bennett & being in a parade. They kept hiring poor CEOs who made things worse.
As long as they can save a buck ( who needs health insurance? Who cares if the stores are clean?) they cut without thinking. Guess what ? Customers care. They want knowledgeable Booksellers, a clean cafe & clean bathrooms ( especially during a pandemic!!)
Amazon didn’t do them in. They just treated customers like they mattered !

If Amazon didn't exist probably eBay would have filled its shoes as the Western World's eCommerce platform that sells everything, and some fulfillment company would have built out to fill in the shoes of Amazon's warehouses. B&N had the best market efficiencies that was crushing the competition before Amazon came along, so unless Target/Walmart wanted to seriously get into the game,Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan even made a movie about it. B&N had a very good chance of coming out on top. The tax holiday for pure Internet businesses that lasted for a couple of decades k–led bricks and mortars more than anything else before Amazon became the everything store, and other major eBook efforts like Sony and Rakuten's Kobo were just pathetic. Amazon had tax advantages, was willing to work with non-existent margins to order to gain market share, something that Amazon's shareholders were perfectly willing to do even after the dotcom fever wore off, and no existing company that cared about being profitable could compete against that. Jeff Bezo's technical decisions to make all internal software products interface with one another, and the accidental success of its cloud platform also gave it a logistics cost advantage that can perhaps only be matched by Walmart.

Sums it up.
If Amazon wasn’t around Barnes still would’ve F’ed up !

Perfectly put !

Yes .
The same bad CEOs still would’ve been hired. Lots of money to get rid of them.
The same poor DMs would’ve been hired.
The same bad customer service would’ve occurred.
The same pretentious attitude & inflated egos BN holds of itself would make them think they can do no wrong while making one poor decision after another.
Their .com could’ve been comparable to Amazon if they had focused on the same things Amazon did , to insure its success.
Instead of being innovative, BN rested on its once solid reputation and old ways thinking it would be enough to keep its customers ( who evolved into price conscious shoppers who learned that better customer service existed elsewhere)