In the spring of 1978 I was a senior in high school. I was getting seriously interested in pop music, purely as a listener. My friends and I - to this day - marvel at the serendipitous timing we enjoyed, having been prime age to be amazed and energized by LA radio weakling KROQ going for 2 months straight without a commercial, while all the while hosting a fascinating and motley bunch of DJs spinning insanely eclectic, stream-of-consciousness sets. They finally cratered and were bought-out by young marketeers who recognized the value of the rogue rep; they pulled a bril move by wedding it to a ‘new wave’ sound and that begat the template for a lot of 80s rock radio. Those who missed the miraculous fortnight(+/-) will simply never know...
Agreed 100%! If it were possible to make a company nonexistent with the sheer force of loathing, ClearChannel and all its foul ilk would instantaneously disappear, and the world would be a better place. I miss good radio so much.
We have a radio station in Raleigh (That Station 95.7] that promotes North Carolina artists (via the station and concerts) and allows the DJs to curate the songs they play. They obviously love the music and it makes the station the best thing on the radio around here.
I remember once there was an hour special around rush hour on Q101 Chicago where these new DJs were playing really good, obscure music. I was tuning in every day and within a month or so, they were fired.
It is. It's called WFMU. Listener-sponsored freeform radio since 1958. A full education in radio programming and in musical discovery. It happens to be such a great radio station that I sometimes have to turn it off.
In St. Louis, we have a station - 88.1 KDHX. Listener supported, all volunteer DJs, allowed to spin what they love. That's how you end up with "Papa Ray" during the afternoon drive-time - record connoisseur and owner of the last real record store in the city, Vintage Vinyl - playing the most awesome out of print blues. There's a bluegrass show on Saturday morning and (God, do I miss it) they used to do 2 hours of the Grateful Dead from 10 to midnight on Saturday nights. Twice a year, the DJs do a pledge drive; support your favorites and they'll be back for another year. If they don't earn their keep? Well... KDHX is THE best station in the country and a harbinger of what could be, if only. Constantly on the verge of bankruptcy and making life a little more bearable in my city for many years. No, I don't work for them, but if you have a few extra bucks for local radio, go to kdhx.org. ;)
The recipe for engaging radio seems so easy to the individual listening. I think there is a tendency to overlook the importance of looking favourably on a radio station that is often right down your alley and then just as often not in line with your personal taste. The mediocrity of commercial radio is premised on the assumption that it must never challenge or repel the listener. If it is all for you all the time we end up with mediocrity soup for no one. I try my best to acknowledge my favorite station WFMU for being just as great when I have to turn it off (because I have had my aesthetic battles with musique concrete and I just don't like it).
I don't listen to music radio much anymore, but the music in my local diner and supermarket will prick up my ears. They both subscribe to Muzak or some similar service, which is no longer what my sister and I used to call "the Dripping Strings". One night I was in the supermarket and they played a whole sequence of incredible rockabilly recordings that I'd never even heard of. Another time, I swear the programmers had deliberately chosen the theme "1960s stars who died of heroin overdoses". Anyway, it's so much more interesting than the radio.
I find myself discovering music from TV, restaurants/breweries and stores. I just went on a cruise out of Miami and made a playlist of all the artists I discovered.
The best music station near me is listener supported at a university. It uses that model. Jazz, blues, roots music, NPR and more. It's about the only station I ever listen to.
The B&N near me (new last year) used its front-and-center table, during the holiday shopping season, for those well-made hardback Penguin Classics editions with the elegant foil-stamped covers and no dust jackets — a book lover’s dream, probably not going to catch anyone else’s eye. Of course the new releases were two steps away, but still, it was quite a statement about what kind of store it was: by book lovers, for book lovers. It made me happy. Maybe I’m weird and maybe it’s a niche, but it’s a niche that isn’t going away, and I can’t see how you grow a niche without showing that kind of enthusiasm for it!
The best bookstores, independent or not, get this: books—like vinyl records—are objects that people cherish and collect. I'm still shocked to see the romance novels and "bestsellers" (in quotations because of what Ted just said) sold at drugstores and supermarkets. Could that possibly still be profitable?
Romance novels may not get a lot of respect, but they are the biggest single genre. They're aimed at women, and women read a lot more than men. If nothing else, they've been on a tear lately with sales rising during COVID.
(P.S. I was at an aviation show in Nashville, and among the weather forecasters, radar equipment, airport fixtures, de-icing systems and flight planning services was a romance novelist researching her next book to be set in the exciting and, presumably romantic, world of air traffic control. She was magnificently out of place with a floral themed booth and a long flowing dress, but she said she was getting a lot of great story and background info.)
But -- the cafes are great! Just amazing! When my wife and I were both getting our PhDs and entertainment was expensive and we had an infant we would take her to B&N and take turns browsing books and she could sit with one of us in the cafe and have a cookie and cocoa before going over to the revamped kids' section and picking a board book out. Still if I am out and need a coffee the B&N is the best option, not because it is the best coffee but because it gives me an excuse to go to the bookstore.
I lived in London in the 1970-80s around the corner from Daunt's first store. It had been purpose-built as a bookstore generations earlier. Then back in the USA I worked for Barnes & Noble for the best part of 20 years, until I had back trouble and couldn't stand behind a till anymore. (I hoped they would give me a retirement employee discount, but no such luck.) In the stores it was always us against corporate -- they were unbelievably stupid. Daunt was appalled when he took over that they had fired so many of their most experienced people. And now, since Daunt took over, when I visit the last store I worked in, the change in the atmosphere is dramatic -- everybody is happy!
Hurrah! "If you want to sell music, you must love those songs. If you want to succeed in journalism, you must love those newspapers. If you want to succeed in movies, you must love the cinema."
I could tell essentially the same story about sales of musical instruments, specifically those of the electronic persuasion. Saw it "up close and personal" with Moog synthesizers, Gibson guitars, and a whole line of others . . .
Guys from Quaker Oats and Beatrice Foods, no matter how "smart" they are–simply can't cut the mustard–because they don't know the territory!
We shopped at B&N for Xmas this year after not being in a bookstore for years. We both realized we had missed the “old” bookstore vibes. We saw cards written and signed by staffers about why they liked a certain book. Nice touch. Bought many and will be back again.
Its always struck me as crazy that so many corporate overlord types don't get this. Instead of trying to make every single location completely homogeneous, why not offer local flavor? Empower staff to make decisions in terms of offerings and design to attract people in that market. Good bosses advocate for hiring quality staff and then trusting them to make smart decisions while in accordance with basic guidance from on top. Barnes and Noble is successful because they are breaking out of the everything must be completely devoid of soul approach.
I used to go to Blockbuster Video a lot. One of my favorite spots in the store was the shelf that had employee favorites. Generally, it was all very solid, and I tried more than a few things I didn't know that were on that shelf.
Good curation is a thing that has value. I'm not anti-Algorithm per se, but the Algorithm has to be specifically tuned to serve <em>me</em> rather than the shareholders. It's not that hard to tell when the goal of a corporate enterprise is shaking you down, rather than serving you.
Maybe the disintermediation of the internet has made it easier for us to tell that.
As someone who spent his career in the investment field, I believe the root of the problem you're writing about is that the financial services industry has mutated into the financial mastery industry. Rather than existing to support various fields of endeavor, the financial sector has systematically reduced virtually every sector of the manufacturing and service fields into subservience. They exist only to support and glorify the financiers that have taken them over. This column describes the efforts of one person who in his own way has embodied the protagonist of the famous Apple "1984" advertisement. It will only be when hundreds or thousands have accepted that role and thrown off the shackles of their enslavers that creativity will again rise to the fore. The truly unsettling aspect of this dynamic is that much of the wherewithal that enables these financial types arises from endowments from educational institutions; the very bodies that should be focused on facilitating the future are aligned with the forces that are arrayed to stunt it. Go figure.
Good post, Owen. Hudson’s explanation of what we’ve witnessed and gleaned these last decades is cogent. It explains so much more than B & N. Thanks for this broader perspective.
Thank you. Hudson is great because he is not a doctrinaire lefty. He uses examples from the Bible and ancient Babylon to explain the difference between productive and unproductive debt.
Cheshire Books, a publishing company and bookstore in Melbourne, Australia, was run the same way. The employees, choose the books that went on the display table and window display. Each employee was in charge of a category and was expected to have read many books in their section, plus, they were required to read one new book from the display, each week. It was a great place to work. We all got on well and a block away there was a children's bookstore, run by the same company. The woman wore dresses or skirts and blouses and the men wore suits, or slacks and ties. That was in 1967. Alas, the store is no more.
Speaking as a publishing industry reporter & observer, I couldn't agree more with your assessment of James Daunt's leadership and business strategy. Unfortunately, the picture isn't quite as bright for B&N as those numbers would have you believe. B&N stores were once quite large (e.g., 25,000 square feet); the new stores opening are less than half that in some cases. And they're largely re-opening stores that closed during the pandemic.
It's also concerning that during a record two years for book sales (the pandemic was great for book sales of all kinds), Barnes & Noble didn't see the same percentage increase, indicating they've lost market share. Some industry insiders believe the current private equity owner is trying to position the company favorably for sale.
Thanks for sharing this information. I’ve had the ‘pleasure’ of working with private equity firms on a number of occasions. I think it’s safe to say that they’re ALWAYS looking to sell their businesses. So there’s always a bit of spin going on. Probably the best option is for them to find a caring owner or relist the company on the stock exchange. The key is to hold on to the decentralized book-friendly approach.
I highly recommend Matt Stoller's writing on private equity shenanigans, as far as that goes (and I suspect it explains a lot of these industries – managerial thinking also plays into it but there'd be less of that if financiers hadn't bought most of American business). He's also on Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/mattstoller?utm_source=share
Yes, if you're a private company you generally do everything possible to look your best to the outside world. And you try to keep actual financial figures close to your chest.
Would love to be more optimistic regarding the future of book shops. But long-term trends concerning faithful paying customers seem to be discouraging. Same story for print newspapers and magazines. When this type of climatic change hits an industry, the typical strategy for business owners is to find a buyer, hopefully a sympathetic buyer.
Jane, I don't think the smaller size of the stores means anything. As I've commented elsewhere, I found more variety at small B. Dalton stores at the mall in the 1970s than I found at huge Borders and Barnes & Noble stores post-2000.
I’ve been a pilot for Southwest Airlines for over 35 years. I’ve given my heart and soul to Southwest Airlines during those years. And quite honestly Southwest Airlines has given its heart and soul to me and my family.
Many of you have asked what caused this epic meltdown. Unfortunately, the frontline employees have been watching this meltdown coming like a slow motion train wreck for sometime. And we’ve been begging our leadership to make much needed changes in order to avoid it. What happened yesterday started two decades ago.
Herb Kelleher was the brilliant CEO of SWA until 2004. He was a very operationally oriented leader. Herb spent lots of time on the front line. He always had his pulse on the day to day operation and the people who ran it. That philosophy flowed down through the ranks of leadership to the front line managers. We were a tight operation from top to bottom. We had tools, leadership and employee buy in. Everything that was needed to run a first class operation. When Herb retired in 2004 Gary Kelly became the new CEO.
Gary was an accountant by education and his style leading Southwest Airlines became more focused on finances and less on operations. He did not spend much time on the front lines. He didn’t engage front line employees much. When the CEO doesn’t get out in the trenches the neither do the lower levels of leadership.
Gary named another accountant to be Chief Operating Officer (the person responsible for day to day operations). The new COO had little or no operational background. This trickled down through the lower levels of leadership, as well.
They all disengaged the operation, disengaged the employees and focused more on Return on Investment, stock buybacks and Wall Street. This approach worked for Gary’s first 8 years because we were still riding the strong wave that Herb had built.
But as time went on the operation began to deteriorate. There was little investment in upgrading technology (after all, how do you measure the return on investing in infrastructure?) or the tools we needed to operate efficiently and consistently. As the frontline employees began to see the deterioration in our operation we began to warn our leadership. We educated them, we informed them and we made suggestions to them. But to no avail. The focus was on finances not operations. As we saw more and more deterioration in our operation our asks turned to pleas. Our pleas turned to dire warnings. But they went unheeded. After all, the stock price was up so what could be wrong?
We were a motivated, willing and proud employee group wanting to serve our customers and uphold the tradition of our beloved airline, the airline we built and the airline that the traveling public grew to cheer for and luv. But we were watching in frustration and disbelief as our once amazing airline was becoming a house of cards.
A half dozen small scale meltdowns occurred during the mid to late 2010’s. With each mini meltdown Leadership continued to ignore the pleas and warnings of the employees in the trenches. We were still operating with 1990’s technology. We didn’t have the tools we needed on the line to operate the sophisticated and large airline we had become. We could see that the wheels were about ready to fall off the bus. But no one in leadership would heed our pleas.
When COVID happened SWA scaled back considerably (as did all of the airlines) for about two years. This helped conceal the serious problems in technology, infrastructure and staffing that were occurring and being ignored. But as we ramped back up the lack of attention to the operation was waiting to show its ugly head.
Gary Kelly retired as CEO in early 2022. Bob Jordan was named CEO. He was a more operationally oriented leader. He replaced our Chief Operating Officer with a very smart man and they announced their priority would be to upgrade our airline’s technology and provide the frontline employees the operational tools we needed to care for our customers and employees. Finally, someone acknowledged the elephant in the room.
But two decades of neglect takes several years to overcome. And, unfortunately to our horror, our house of cards came tumbling down this week as a routine winter storm broke our 1990’s operating system.
The frontline employees were ready and on station. We were properly staffed. We were at the airports. Hell, we were ON the airplanes. But our antiquated software systems failed coupled with a decades old system of having to manage 20,000 frontline employees by phone calls. No automation had been developed to run this sophisticated machine.
We had a routine winter storm across the Midwest last Thursday. A larger than normal number flights were cancelled as a result. But what should have been one minor inconvenient day of travel turned into this nightmare. After all, American, United, Delta and the other airlines operated with only minor flight disruptions.
The two decades of neglect by SWA leadership caused the airline to lose track of all its crews. ALL of us. We were there. With our customers. At the jet. Ready to go. But there was no way to assign us. To confirm us. To release us to fly the flight. And we watched as our customers got stranded without their luggage missing their Christmas holiday.
I believe that our new CEO Bob Jordan inherited a MESS. This meltdown was not his failure but the failure of those before him. I believe he has the right priorities. But it will take time to right this ship. A few years at a minimum. Old leaders need to be replaced. Operationally oriented managers need to be brought in. I hope and pray Bob can execute on his promises to fix our once proud airline. Time will tell.
It’s been a punch in the gut for us frontline employees. We care for the traveling public. We have spent our entire careers serving you. Safely. Efficiently. With luv and pride. We are horrified. We are sorry. We are sorry for the chaos, inconvenience and frustration our airline caused you. We are angry. We are embarrassed. We are sad. Like you, the traveling public, we have been let down by our own leaders.
Herb once said the the biggest threat to Southwest Airlines will come from within. Not from other airlines. What a visionary he was. I miss Herb now more than ever.
#SWAPA #SouthwestAirlines
This article dovetails with your analysis of the B&N recent success story. A company's failure or success always depends on the management, always. A caveat to remember: The unexamined process deteriorates.
People ADORED Herb. He was an amazing leader and if you wanted to see how trickle down actually worked this was your model. He made his employees feel something good and they wanted to share that with their customers. It was indeed a totally different airline.
I love books, and as a young man I got a job at a large used and antiquarian bookstore. While my friends in high school and university got summer jobs in food service, I stuck with bookstores. I worked my way up to Barnes & Noble and by 1995 I was an assistant manager at the largest Borders megastore on the east coast. I enjoyed the work, even though I wasn't making much money. But there was a dark cloud on the horizon.
At that time both B&N and Borders were still building more stores and expanding their retail operations. Around this time I heard about Amazon and took a chance ordering a new title from them with my credit card (believe it or not, in 1995 buying books over the internet was considered an unusual and risky proposition: why, I was asked, couldn't you just drive to your local bookstore to buy the book?) and was delighted when the book arrived a few days later. Not long after this, there was a big all-hands meeting at Borders with top management from HQ, and they were detailing plans for further bricks-and-mortar expansion. I approached the CEO of the company after the meeting, and after a few pleasantries I couldn't help dropping the bomb:
"Amazon is going to eat our lunch."
I told him that expanding retail outlets is the last thing he should be doing, and that they should be fronting that money into online bookselling and delivery infrastructure before Amazon beat them to it. He laughed at the audacity of my remarks, and replied that he was "watching Amazon" but "physical bookstores are not going away, this internet stuff is just a fad."
And that was that. I moved on to a different, more lucrative career a few years later, and a few years after that Borders was on the ropes. The last year that Borders turned a profit was 2006. By 2011 they were bankrupt, and B&N acquired Borders' trademarks and customer list.
A good way to get young men to discover nonfiction is to give them magazines geared toward their interests. It doesn’t feel like reading if it’s interesting.
This is an interesting case study, and I don't disagree with the lesson, but it should also be noted that it was the chain bookstores that originally killed literature.
In the olden days, publishers had nearly complete dominion on whether an author stayed publishable. If they had a talented author whose first book flopped, they'd still give more push to his second and third. They knew the books were good; they trusted that he'd build an audience over time, and if the sales weren't coming they'd get a short story of his in the New Yorker, or they'd get him a teaching gig.
This changed in the late 1980s, because bookstores had enough data now to pull an author's national sales numbers, and would simply choose either not to shelve the author's work, or to extort the sort of "co-op" payments that B&N has, and good for it, apparently done away with. Publishers could no longer back their authors. The chains could also abuse the consignment model and rotate stock quickly, which they did. This led to the emphasis on the first 8 weeks of a book's sales, disenfranchising reader word-of-mouth and requiring publisher pre-selection (lead title) for a book to have any chance of success. That's where we are now, even still, and traditional publishing is dying, but there's nothing to replace it--self-publishing is great, if you have the money to do it properly, but 90+ percent of authors don't. The voices that traditional publishing excludes are still excluded, but by black-box algorithms instead.
It's easy to make publishers out to be the bad guys. No one likes traditional publishing, not even the people who work in it, anymore. However, the history suggests that it wasn't the publishing houses, but the chain bookstores with their mountains of sales data--MBAs do love data, especially when they don't know what it means or why the numbers are what they are--who created the environment where a book either gets a massive push before it's even finished or lingers in oblivion forever. Publishers then had to play the preselection game, and play it aggressively, because they knew they'd lose their decent authors if they couldn't, in essence, guarantee sales through publicity, marketing, and co-op.
It's going to take a long time before literature recovers from the damage done to it in the past 30 years. Whatever the healing process is, it'll probably start with self-publishers. AI will probably be involved somehow, even though AI is also the gravest threat (fake book spam) to publishing (traditional and self-) there is right now.
There is nothing in the world quite like sitting down with an actual book in your hands and reading. I have always thought if I had any real money I would have a large library in my home. It has always, to me, signified thirst for knowledge, entertainment and the sublime feeling of what a good story can do for you. I still use the library often, because though I agree that books should not be under valued, I can't always afford them. I have been to B&N several times during the holidays and it does feel different there. My problem is I can find 20 books in 10 minutes I wish I could buy and take home to my little book shelf. Kudos to B&N and Mr. Daunt for their success.
This would be a perfect model for radio if the corporate overlords would allow it.
You’re absolutely right.
In the spring of 1978 I was a senior in high school. I was getting seriously interested in pop music, purely as a listener. My friends and I - to this day - marvel at the serendipitous timing we enjoyed, having been prime age to be amazed and energized by LA radio weakling KROQ going for 2 months straight without a commercial, while all the while hosting a fascinating and motley bunch of DJs spinning insanely eclectic, stream-of-consciousness sets. They finally cratered and were bought-out by young marketeers who recognized the value of the rogue rep; they pulled a bril move by wedding it to a ‘new wave’ sound and that begat the template for a lot of 80s rock radio. Those who missed the miraculous fortnight(+/-) will simply never know...
Agreed 100%! If it were possible to make a company nonexistent with the sheer force of loathing, ClearChannel and all its foul ilk would instantaneously disappear, and the world would be a better place. I miss good radio so much.
We have a radio station in Raleigh (That Station 95.7] that promotes North Carolina artists (via the station and concerts) and allows the DJs to curate the songs they play. They obviously love the music and it makes the station the best thing on the radio around here.
The overlords are the ones who destroyed it. I watched them do it from close proximity. You can't wait or depend on the overlords. They do not care.
I remember once there was an hour special around rush hour on Q101 Chicago where these new DJs were playing really good, obscure music. I was tuning in every day and within a month or so, they were fired.
When I grew up and lived in Chicago WXRT lived by that mantra and had a devoted following. Wondering if that’s still the case?
It is. It's called WFMU. Listener-sponsored freeform radio since 1958. A full education in radio programming and in musical discovery. It happens to be such a great radio station that I sometimes have to turn it off.
In St. Louis, we have a station - 88.1 KDHX. Listener supported, all volunteer DJs, allowed to spin what they love. That's how you end up with "Papa Ray" during the afternoon drive-time - record connoisseur and owner of the last real record store in the city, Vintage Vinyl - playing the most awesome out of print blues. There's a bluegrass show on Saturday morning and (God, do I miss it) they used to do 2 hours of the Grateful Dead from 10 to midnight on Saturday nights. Twice a year, the DJs do a pledge drive; support your favorites and they'll be back for another year. If they don't earn their keep? Well... KDHX is THE best station in the country and a harbinger of what could be, if only. Constantly on the verge of bankruptcy and making life a little more bearable in my city for many years. No, I don't work for them, but if you have a few extra bucks for local radio, go to kdhx.org. ;)
The recipe for engaging radio seems so easy to the individual listening. I think there is a tendency to overlook the importance of looking favourably on a radio station that is often right down your alley and then just as often not in line with your personal taste. The mediocrity of commercial radio is premised on the assumption that it must never challenge or repel the listener. If it is all for you all the time we end up with mediocrity soup for no one. I try my best to acknowledge my favorite station WFMU for being just as great when I have to turn it off (because I have had my aesthetic battles with musique concrete and I just don't like it).
I don't listen to music radio much anymore, but the music in my local diner and supermarket will prick up my ears. They both subscribe to Muzak or some similar service, which is no longer what my sister and I used to call "the Dripping Strings". One night I was in the supermarket and they played a whole sequence of incredible rockabilly recordings that I'd never even heard of. Another time, I swear the programmers had deliberately chosen the theme "1960s stars who died of heroin overdoses". Anyway, it's so much more interesting than the radio.
I find myself discovering music from TV, restaurants/breweries and stores. I just went on a cruise out of Miami and made a playlist of all the artists I discovered.
Yes. I'd love to see this philosophy replicated in the news business.
Alberta's donor-supported CKUA is a prime example of this working. Each host is actually a DJ, choosing their playlist.
Will check it out. If you enjoy that sort of thing give WFMU a shot if you don't know it already.
The best music station near me is listener supported at a university. It uses that model. Jazz, blues, roots music, NPR and more. It's about the only station I ever listen to.
As a former radio host, I agree 100%
The B&N near me (new last year) used its front-and-center table, during the holiday shopping season, for those well-made hardback Penguin Classics editions with the elegant foil-stamped covers and no dust jackets — a book lover’s dream, probably not going to catch anyone else’s eye. Of course the new releases were two steps away, but still, it was quite a statement about what kind of store it was: by book lovers, for book lovers. It made me happy. Maybe I’m weird and maybe it’s a niche, but it’s a niche that isn’t going away, and I can’t see how you grow a niche without showing that kind of enthusiasm for it!
The best bookstores, independent or not, get this: books—like vinyl records—are objects that people cherish and collect. I'm still shocked to see the romance novels and "bestsellers" (in quotations because of what Ted just said) sold at drugstores and supermarkets. Could that possibly still be profitable?
Romance novels may not get a lot of respect, but they are the biggest single genre. They're aimed at women, and women read a lot more than men. If nothing else, they've been on a tear lately with sales rising during COVID.
(P.S. I was at an aviation show in Nashville, and among the weather forecasters, radar equipment, airport fixtures, de-icing systems and flight planning services was a romance novelist researching her next book to be set in the exciting and, presumably romantic, world of air traffic control. She was magnificently out of place with a floral themed booth and a long flowing dress, but she said she was getting a lot of great story and background info.)
Those books are also royalty free (dead authors and all) and thus easier to price favorably even with that gilded treatment!
The covers on those Penguin books are indeed beautiful. Unfortunately, they’re plagued by the cheap binding endemic to so many Penguin volumes.
But -- the cafes are great! Just amazing! When my wife and I were both getting our PhDs and entertainment was expensive and we had an infant we would take her to B&N and take turns browsing books and she could sit with one of us in the cafe and have a cookie and cocoa before going over to the revamped kids' section and picking a board book out. Still if I am out and need a coffee the B&N is the best option, not because it is the best coffee but because it gives me an excuse to go to the bookstore.
I mean otherwise, yeah. But keep the cafe!
I guess I need to give up the espresso and switch to cookies and cocoa.
I feel the same way. Maybe it’s because ours is well-run and quiet.
Quiet is so key!!
I lived in London in the 1970-80s around the corner from Daunt's first store. It had been purpose-built as a bookstore generations earlier. Then back in the USA I worked for Barnes & Noble for the best part of 20 years, until I had back trouble and couldn't stand behind a till anymore. (I hoped they would give me a retirement employee discount, but no such luck.) In the stores it was always us against corporate -- they were unbelievably stupid. Daunt was appalled when he took over that they had fired so many of their most experienced people. And now, since Daunt took over, when I visit the last store I worked in, the change in the atmosphere is dramatic -- everybody is happy!
Hurrah! "If you want to sell music, you must love those songs. If you want to succeed in journalism, you must love those newspapers. If you want to succeed in movies, you must love the cinema."
I could tell essentially the same story about sales of musical instruments, specifically those of the electronic persuasion. Saw it "up close and personal" with Moog synthesizers, Gibson guitars, and a whole line of others . . .
Guys from Quaker Oats and Beatrice Foods, no matter how "smart" they are–simply can't cut the mustard–because they don't know the territory!
We shopped at B&N for Xmas this year after not being in a bookstore for years. We both realized we had missed the “old” bookstore vibes. We saw cards written and signed by staffers about why they liked a certain book. Nice touch. Bought many and will be back again.
Its always struck me as crazy that so many corporate overlord types don't get this. Instead of trying to make every single location completely homogeneous, why not offer local flavor? Empower staff to make decisions in terms of offerings and design to attract people in that market. Good bosses advocate for hiring quality staff and then trusting them to make smart decisions while in accordance with basic guidance from on top. Barnes and Noble is successful because they are breaking out of the everything must be completely devoid of soul approach.
I used to go to Blockbuster Video a lot. One of my favorite spots in the store was the shelf that had employee favorites. Generally, it was all very solid, and I tried more than a few things I didn't know that were on that shelf.
Good curation is a thing that has value. I'm not anti-Algorithm per se, but the Algorithm has to be specifically tuned to serve <em>me</em> rather than the shareholders. It's not that hard to tell when the goal of a corporate enterprise is shaking you down, rather than serving you.
Maybe the disintermediation of the internet has made it easier for us to tell that.
As someone who spent his career in the investment field, I believe the root of the problem you're writing about is that the financial services industry has mutated into the financial mastery industry. Rather than existing to support various fields of endeavor, the financial sector has systematically reduced virtually every sector of the manufacturing and service fields into subservience. They exist only to support and glorify the financiers that have taken them over. This column describes the efforts of one person who in his own way has embodied the protagonist of the famous Apple "1984" advertisement. It will only be when hundreds or thousands have accepted that role and thrown off the shackles of their enslavers that creativity will again rise to the fore. The truly unsettling aspect of this dynamic is that much of the wherewithal that enables these financial types arises from endowments from educational institutions; the very bodies that should be focused on facilitating the future are aligned with the forces that are arrayed to stunt it. Go figure.
Milton Friedman wanted this result. If stock prices are the only measure of success, then it doesn’t matter how management gets high stock prices.
I think Michael Hudson is pretty accurate in his evaluation of industrial capitalism v financial capitalism
https://youtu.be/cD_UcRtljDU
Good post, Owen. Hudson’s explanation of what we’ve witnessed and gleaned these last decades is cogent. It explains so much more than B & N. Thanks for this broader perspective.
Thank you. Hudson is great because he is not a doctrinaire lefty. He uses examples from the Bible and ancient Babylon to explain the difference between productive and unproductive debt.
Cheshire Books, a publishing company and bookstore in Melbourne, Australia, was run the same way. The employees, choose the books that went on the display table and window display. Each employee was in charge of a category and was expected to have read many books in their section, plus, they were required to read one new book from the display, each week. It was a great place to work. We all got on well and a block away there was a children's bookstore, run by the same company. The woman wore dresses or skirts and blouses and the men wore suits, or slacks and ties. That was in 1967. Alas, the store is no more.
Speaking as a publishing industry reporter & observer, I couldn't agree more with your assessment of James Daunt's leadership and business strategy. Unfortunately, the picture isn't quite as bright for B&N as those numbers would have you believe. B&N stores were once quite large (e.g., 25,000 square feet); the new stores opening are less than half that in some cases. And they're largely re-opening stores that closed during the pandemic.
It's also concerning that during a record two years for book sales (the pandemic was great for book sales of all kinds), Barnes & Noble didn't see the same percentage increase, indicating they've lost market share. Some industry insiders believe the current private equity owner is trying to position the company favorably for sale.
Thanks for sharing this information. I’ve had the ‘pleasure’ of working with private equity firms on a number of occasions. I think it’s safe to say that they’re ALWAYS looking to sell their businesses. So there’s always a bit of spin going on. Probably the best option is for them to find a caring owner or relist the company on the stock exchange. The key is to hold on to the decentralized book-friendly approach.
I highly recommend Matt Stoller's writing on private equity shenanigans, as far as that goes (and I suspect it explains a lot of these industries – managerial thinking also plays into it but there'd be less of that if financiers hadn't bought most of American business). He's also on Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/mattstoller?utm_source=share
I second the suggestion for reading Matt Stoller!
"Industries" maybe isn't the best word for some things – fields, the arts… but I presume you see what I mean.
Yes, if you're a private company you generally do everything possible to look your best to the outside world. And you try to keep actual financial figures close to your chest.
Would love to be more optimistic regarding the future of book shops. But long-term trends concerning faithful paying customers seem to be discouraging. Same story for print newspapers and magazines. When this type of climatic change hits an industry, the typical strategy for business owners is to find a buyer, hopefully a sympathetic buyer.
Jane, I don't think the smaller size of the stores means anything. As I've commented elsewhere, I found more variety at small B. Dalton stores at the mall in the 1970s than I found at huge Borders and Barnes & Noble stores post-2000.
Voices From The Line: Larry Lonero
What happened to Southwest Airlines?
I’ve been a pilot for Southwest Airlines for over 35 years. I’ve given my heart and soul to Southwest Airlines during those years. And quite honestly Southwest Airlines has given its heart and soul to me and my family.
Many of you have asked what caused this epic meltdown. Unfortunately, the frontline employees have been watching this meltdown coming like a slow motion train wreck for sometime. And we’ve been begging our leadership to make much needed changes in order to avoid it. What happened yesterday started two decades ago.
Herb Kelleher was the brilliant CEO of SWA until 2004. He was a very operationally oriented leader. Herb spent lots of time on the front line. He always had his pulse on the day to day operation and the people who ran it. That philosophy flowed down through the ranks of leadership to the front line managers. We were a tight operation from top to bottom. We had tools, leadership and employee buy in. Everything that was needed to run a first class operation. When Herb retired in 2004 Gary Kelly became the new CEO.
Gary was an accountant by education and his style leading Southwest Airlines became more focused on finances and less on operations. He did not spend much time on the front lines. He didn’t engage front line employees much. When the CEO doesn’t get out in the trenches the neither do the lower levels of leadership.
Gary named another accountant to be Chief Operating Officer (the person responsible for day to day operations). The new COO had little or no operational background. This trickled down through the lower levels of leadership, as well.
They all disengaged the operation, disengaged the employees and focused more on Return on Investment, stock buybacks and Wall Street. This approach worked for Gary’s first 8 years because we were still riding the strong wave that Herb had built.
But as time went on the operation began to deteriorate. There was little investment in upgrading technology (after all, how do you measure the return on investing in infrastructure?) or the tools we needed to operate efficiently and consistently. As the frontline employees began to see the deterioration in our operation we began to warn our leadership. We educated them, we informed them and we made suggestions to them. But to no avail. The focus was on finances not operations. As we saw more and more deterioration in our operation our asks turned to pleas. Our pleas turned to dire warnings. But they went unheeded. After all, the stock price was up so what could be wrong?
We were a motivated, willing and proud employee group wanting to serve our customers and uphold the tradition of our beloved airline, the airline we built and the airline that the traveling public grew to cheer for and luv. But we were watching in frustration and disbelief as our once amazing airline was becoming a house of cards.
A half dozen small scale meltdowns occurred during the mid to late 2010’s. With each mini meltdown Leadership continued to ignore the pleas and warnings of the employees in the trenches. We were still operating with 1990’s technology. We didn’t have the tools we needed on the line to operate the sophisticated and large airline we had become. We could see that the wheels were about ready to fall off the bus. But no one in leadership would heed our pleas.
When COVID happened SWA scaled back considerably (as did all of the airlines) for about two years. This helped conceal the serious problems in technology, infrastructure and staffing that were occurring and being ignored. But as we ramped back up the lack of attention to the operation was waiting to show its ugly head.
Gary Kelly retired as CEO in early 2022. Bob Jordan was named CEO. He was a more operationally oriented leader. He replaced our Chief Operating Officer with a very smart man and they announced their priority would be to upgrade our airline’s technology and provide the frontline employees the operational tools we needed to care for our customers and employees. Finally, someone acknowledged the elephant in the room.
But two decades of neglect takes several years to overcome. And, unfortunately to our horror, our house of cards came tumbling down this week as a routine winter storm broke our 1990’s operating system.
The frontline employees were ready and on station. We were properly staffed. We were at the airports. Hell, we were ON the airplanes. But our antiquated software systems failed coupled with a decades old system of having to manage 20,000 frontline employees by phone calls. No automation had been developed to run this sophisticated machine.
We had a routine winter storm across the Midwest last Thursday. A larger than normal number flights were cancelled as a result. But what should have been one minor inconvenient day of travel turned into this nightmare. After all, American, United, Delta and the other airlines operated with only minor flight disruptions.
The two decades of neglect by SWA leadership caused the airline to lose track of all its crews. ALL of us. We were there. With our customers. At the jet. Ready to go. But there was no way to assign us. To confirm us. To release us to fly the flight. And we watched as our customers got stranded without their luggage missing their Christmas holiday.
I believe that our new CEO Bob Jordan inherited a MESS. This meltdown was not his failure but the failure of those before him. I believe he has the right priorities. But it will take time to right this ship. A few years at a minimum. Old leaders need to be replaced. Operationally oriented managers need to be brought in. I hope and pray Bob can execute on his promises to fix our once proud airline. Time will tell.
It’s been a punch in the gut for us frontline employees. We care for the traveling public. We have spent our entire careers serving you. Safely. Efficiently. With luv and pride. We are horrified. We are sorry. We are sorry for the chaos, inconvenience and frustration our airline caused you. We are angry. We are embarrassed. We are sad. Like you, the traveling public, we have been let down by our own leaders.
Herb once said the the biggest threat to Southwest Airlines will come from within. Not from other airlines. What a visionary he was. I miss Herb now more than ever.
#SWAPA #SouthwestAirlines
This article dovetails with your analysis of the B&N recent success story. A company's failure or success always depends on the management, always. A caveat to remember: The unexamined process deteriorates.
"Gary was an accountant by education...". Oh God, your heart must have dropped right then.
People ADORED Herb. He was an amazing leader and if you wanted to see how trickle down actually worked this was your model. He made his employees feel something good and they wanted to share that with their customers. It was indeed a totally different airline.
Ted, I posted this on Hacker News, and it shot to #1 on the front page! 430+ comments so far. Check it out.
I love books, and as a young man I got a job at a large used and antiquarian bookstore. While my friends in high school and university got summer jobs in food service, I stuck with bookstores. I worked my way up to Barnes & Noble and by 1995 I was an assistant manager at the largest Borders megastore on the east coast. I enjoyed the work, even though I wasn't making much money. But there was a dark cloud on the horizon.
At that time both B&N and Borders were still building more stores and expanding their retail operations. Around this time I heard about Amazon and took a chance ordering a new title from them with my credit card (believe it or not, in 1995 buying books over the internet was considered an unusual and risky proposition: why, I was asked, couldn't you just drive to your local bookstore to buy the book?) and was delighted when the book arrived a few days later. Not long after this, there was a big all-hands meeting at Borders with top management from HQ, and they were detailing plans for further bricks-and-mortar expansion. I approached the CEO of the company after the meeting, and after a few pleasantries I couldn't help dropping the bomb:
"Amazon is going to eat our lunch."
I told him that expanding retail outlets is the last thing he should be doing, and that they should be fronting that money into online bookselling and delivery infrastructure before Amazon beat them to it. He laughed at the audacity of my remarks, and replied that he was "watching Amazon" but "physical bookstores are not going away, this internet stuff is just a fad."
And that was that. I moved on to a different, more lucrative career a few years later, and a few years after that Borders was on the ropes. The last year that Borders turned a profit was 2006. By 2011 they were bankrupt, and B&N acquired Borders' trademarks and customer list.
I remember a mathematician saying in the mid 90s that nobody would make money on the internet. Smart guy, dumb prediction.
I used to ditch high school and go to B&N to read and learn about what I wanted instead. I loved the comfy chairs and the extensive magazines.
It was always the only reason I ever went to a Mall. The Books the Vibe & the large magazine selection.
A good way to get young men to discover nonfiction is to give them magazines geared toward their interests. It doesn’t feel like reading if it’s interesting.
This is an interesting case study, and I don't disagree with the lesson, but it should also be noted that it was the chain bookstores that originally killed literature.
In the olden days, publishers had nearly complete dominion on whether an author stayed publishable. If they had a talented author whose first book flopped, they'd still give more push to his second and third. They knew the books were good; they trusted that he'd build an audience over time, and if the sales weren't coming they'd get a short story of his in the New Yorker, or they'd get him a teaching gig.
This changed in the late 1980s, because bookstores had enough data now to pull an author's national sales numbers, and would simply choose either not to shelve the author's work, or to extort the sort of "co-op" payments that B&N has, and good for it, apparently done away with. Publishers could no longer back their authors. The chains could also abuse the consignment model and rotate stock quickly, which they did. This led to the emphasis on the first 8 weeks of a book's sales, disenfranchising reader word-of-mouth and requiring publisher pre-selection (lead title) for a book to have any chance of success. That's where we are now, even still, and traditional publishing is dying, but there's nothing to replace it--self-publishing is great, if you have the money to do it properly, but 90+ percent of authors don't. The voices that traditional publishing excludes are still excluded, but by black-box algorithms instead.
It's easy to make publishers out to be the bad guys. No one likes traditional publishing, not even the people who work in it, anymore. However, the history suggests that it wasn't the publishing houses, but the chain bookstores with their mountains of sales data--MBAs do love data, especially when they don't know what it means or why the numbers are what they are--who created the environment where a book either gets a massive push before it's even finished or lingers in oblivion forever. Publishers then had to play the preselection game, and play it aggressively, because they knew they'd lose their decent authors if they couldn't, in essence, guarantee sales through publicity, marketing, and co-op.
It's going to take a long time before literature recovers from the damage done to it in the past 30 years. Whatever the healing process is, it'll probably start with self-publishers. AI will probably be involved somehow, even though AI is also the gravest threat (fake book spam) to publishing (traditional and self-) there is right now.
There is nothing in the world quite like sitting down with an actual book in your hands and reading. I have always thought if I had any real money I would have a large library in my home. It has always, to me, signified thirst for knowledge, entertainment and the sublime feeling of what a good story can do for you. I still use the library often, because though I agree that books should not be under valued, I can't always afford them. I have been to B&N several times during the holidays and it does feel different there. My problem is I can find 20 books in 10 minutes I wish I could buy and take home to my little book shelf. Kudos to B&N and Mr. Daunt for their success.