It's a long read, but it's well worth it in my opinion.
A revolving door of CEOs and failed attempts to boost stores with restaurants have plagued the retailer's turnaround efforts. Some say that's because there's no place left for big-box book retailing.
https://www.retaildive.com/news/can-barnes-noble-be-saved/532416/
Joel Silver
Former president of Indigo Books and Music
Keeping experience at the core has helped shelter Canadian book chain Indigo Books and Music from much of the digital disruption faced by others in the industry. The company, which has 85 super stores and 121 small-format stores under various banners, has branded itself as something of a cultural department store, where books play a central role but other mass merchandise categories like toys and gifts are embraced too, Joel Silver, former Indigo President and chief merchant, told Retail Dive in an interview.
"Cross merchandising in the store enabled [Indigo] to sell new products, and it wasn't just folks slapping them up on new shelves, but selling them in an integrated way that also drove the sale of books," said Silver, who was most recently CEO of DavidsTea. "[I]t was always important to us that people wanted to spend time there [in our stores]. We were thinking about that 10 to 15 years ago."
Another thing that has helped Indigo stay relevant in the digital era was its spin off of e-reader Kobo into a separate business from the onset and ultimate sale to Japanese retailer Rakuten in 2011.
The company is now moving into the U.S., slated to open a store at the Short Hills Mall in New Jersey this September. That move has spurred some speculation that it could have been the bookseller that made an offer on Barnes & Noble, although the company has not commented to multiple media outlets.
Silver spent eight years on Indigo's management team, during which he said he learned a lot about what it takes to keep a brick-and-mortar book business relevant today.
"It has to feel good, it's got to be a place you want to be. Some big-box stores just start to feel stale and old and the consumer knows that and they don't want to go there," he said. "They won't stop in if the lines aren't efficient, if it's not a nice place to sit down, if the lighting is c-ap, if the carpet is ripped and stained. Nobody wants to be in there."
A lot of it comes down to the basic block and tackling of being a good retailer. To Silver, the independents are winning because they've held on to the advantage that Barnes & Noble seems to have lost somewhere along the way — the ability to use neighborhood stores to hand sell books that people didn't even know they wanted.
Can Barnes & Noble make a comeback?
Right now, the company is focused on "healing" and "fixing," Lindstrom said, adding that the search for a new CEO will begin after the company's annual meeting in October. While the search criteria hasn't been made public, industry experts say that experience in books, digital retailing and financial restructuring will all be crucial to the success of that position — and the future of the business.
Convincing the best person for the job to take on such a turnaround will be its own challenge, especially ahead of the critical holiday period.
"The thing to do is to put Barnes & Noble in hospice."
A veteran in the book business
In the upcoming months, the company is focused on specific improvements in toys and games, bargain and gift categories. To drive sales in books, executives are planning local store events to "create excitement," and educational toys and games will be a "critical category" for the holidays.
But Barnes & Noble may have lost its opportunity to radically right the ship, Raff said. "It might be that being a physical bookstore chain on a very large scale just isn't such a promising future," he said. "The real challenge for them is to manage what is going to be in the long term a decline, but that is still a perfectly viable idea with a profitable interim."
Others hold a grimmer outlook. "The only sensible thing to do with Barnes & Noble, is to accept the fact that it will die and take as much cash out as you can over as long a period as you could take cash out," a veteran in the book business told Retail Dive. "The thing to do is to put Barnes & Noble in hospice. And obviously you want to keep it alive as long as you can, you want it to be comfortable, you want them to feel as little pain as possible, but the fact is it's going to die."
A comeback at this stage of the game would indeed be challenging to say the least. What the company needs to do is pay its bills, find new revenue and reduce overlap with Amazon, Forrester Analyst Sucharita Kodali, told Retail Dive in an email. "It's tough," she said. "I don't know that there's an easy solution at this late juncture."