Has Barnes & Noble Signed Its Own Death Note?Why do you go to a store?

Yes, yes, I know to buy stuff, smart aleck, but why go to the store instead of shopping online? For a large number of products, it’s cheaper to buy them online… if you can even find them at your local store at all. For those items that are as or more expensive than brick-and-mortar retailers, you have to factor the cost-savings analysis. Is it worth getting dressed, driving (or paying) to get to the store, and coming home just to save a few dollars off the price tag? And for those impulse buyers, stores from Amazon to Target to Kroger are pushing delivery services that can have your item to you within an hour or two.

So, why do you go to a store? For a lot of people, it’s the experience. Being surrounded by the latest scents, sampling the newest foods, or testing out the latest gizmos is something online retailers can never fully replace. You can’t go to cosplay events at Amazon bookstores.

Barnes & Noble Star Wars event
Family members take photos with a Storm Trooper from the 501st Legion, Vader’s Fist, at Barnes & Noble during Star Wars Reads Day Oct. 5. Members of the legion attended the second annual Star Wars Reads Day to encourage kids and adults to read. (U.S. Air Force photo/Staff Sgt. Zachary Wolf)

It’s this “shopping as an experience” angle that many traditional stores see as their best bet to surviving and thriving. And if customer experience is key, then you need trained employees who know their stuff, right? And the more knowledge and experience, the better they can tailor their stores, right?

Well, not according to Barnes & Noble. They’ve just laid off a large number of full-time employees.

Barnes & Noble’s “Bloody Monday”

On Monday, February 12th, workers showed up for shift as usual. But they were soon shown the door. Reports from around the Internet mention employees were blindsided by the news and told they could reapply for part-time work in a couple of weeks.

So, what are these positions being minimized or eliminated? According to this fascinating post (which I recommend reading) by an alleged former employee:

“On Monday morning, every single Barnes & Noble location – that’s 781 stores – told their full-time employees to pack up and leave. The eliminated positions were as follows: the head cashiers (those are the people responsible for handling the money), the receiving managers (the people responsible for bringing in product and making sure it goes where it should), the digital leads (the people responsible for solving Nook problems), the newsstand leads (the people responsible for distributing the magazines), and the bargain leads (the people responsible for keeping up the massive discount sections). A few of the larger stores were able to spare their head cashiers and their receiving managers, but not many.

Just about everyone lost between 3 and 7 employees. The unofficial numbers put the total around 1,800 people.”

Okay, then. Nobody important unless you like to keep the store organized and money safe. Good to know. (That’s sarcasm.) That explains why the Valentine’s stuffed animal I was looking for — along with its sibling and another Valentine’s plush — in the 75% off clearance bin on February 15th only to be told, no, it was only 50% off. I hadn’t heard about the news then, but now it all makes sense.

Heck, even during the holidays, I noticed boxes of clearance sitting on the floor. And in December, there was no copy of Dreamin’ Sun Volume 2 on the floor even though the employee said the computer had it in stock. The employee looked in the back, but couldn’t find it. It’s possible it was an error or it got stolen, but, does this sound familiar? As she continues:

“In particular, hours in receiving were carved to the bone. You know what that means? It means that product – product that could be selling – sat unopened in boxes. In many cases, those boxes had already been logged into the system. The computers showed we had them. Customers came in, expecting to purchase things, knowing they were in the store! But what they wanted was buried under 100, 200 boxes. And there were no employees to find them. There were barely any employees available at all.
Customers went away annoyed. And they shopped on Amazon instead.
Because, well, why not?”

I could (and did) get a copy sent to my home for free, but as the blogger continued, lots of these shipments are sent from the bookstores themselves and not a warehouse. So while Barnes & Noble, the company, gets credit for the sale, the physical store from which the book ship does not. So the stores lose an item from inventory, force their workers to act as warehouse shippers, and get nothing out of it.

So next time you can’t find the next volume of a manga at your local Barnes & Noble, wonder if it’s secretly in the back or if the copies they’ve ordered have been sent to people who ordered online. Makes you wonder why you go out to the store, doesn’t it?

The Implications

Let’s just first talk about this from a PR perspective. It’s a bad move. There is usually a high layoff period in the January to March period as stores let go of their extra help hired for the holidays. But the fired employees weren’t short-term temps but dedicated workers who had spent much of their working careers at the company.

This is exactly the kind of attitude that perpetuates the hatred between workers and management, executives and floor employees, Wall Street and Main Street. “You are not a living, breathing human but a cog: a piece of machinery that can be thrown out and replaced.” Especially when as thousands of employees are left wondering how they are paying the rent, Barnes & Noble decides to remind the world that it’s important to replace executives when a spot opens up.

But Barnes & Noble isn’t just throwing out current talent but are limiting future talent as well. Do you really think the best and brightest job seekers are going to be fighting to be hired in a company where full-time positions are limited or almost non-existent? Even the ones who accept positions at this new Barnes & Noble are probably going to always keep their eyes and ears open for other opportunities. This means higher turnover which means more money spent on hiring workers.

No doubt Barnes & Noble is saving a lot of money with this money, $40 million according to some estimates. But in a time where companies are under increasing pressure to be ethical to their workers, this $40 million means they’re going to be carrying this negative PR for years.

But, okay, let’s just look at the financial aspect. Just a little over a month ago, I talked about bookstores trying to reinvent themselves. Well, for Barnes & Noble, it’s less reading the tea leaves and more placing bets on when the next round of closures are going to be. Since the last time I wrote about them, Barnes & Noble’s stock has dropped from around the $5.50 mark — which was at or near record-breaking lows — to around the $4.50 point. If this move was supposed to quell fears about their viability, they failed. Nothing like telling investors and publishers that the answer to your problems is an inexperienced staff. And hey, who needs a bookstore full of books and magazines when you can get alcohol instead, am I right?

Yes, sales have dropped, so some people argue the workers shouldn’t have been surprised to be let go. But whether some of these positions should have been trimmed is one thing; eliminating them and replacing with part-time employees is another. In various articles, commenters and writers point out that Circuit City once made a similar move, and they went under shortly thereafter. As TechCrunch says:

“Streamlining a bookstore may work in theory but in practice a bookstore is far more than a depot for printed matter. It is a play place, a cafe, and a browsing spot. Small booksellers know this and they make their spaces interesting and welcoming.

A Barnes & Noble without a guy in a pirate suit reading stories is a Wal-Mart without the added benefit of selling more than just media. We assume that the people who dedicated their lives to selling books at B&N weren’t there for they [sic] money but instead worked there for the love of books. Now they’ve lost those people forever.”

I’m not saying Barnes & Noble is going bankrupt in the next few months. Even Amazon has laid off workers recently, and no one accuses them of being in financial straits. It’s also possible this controversy blows over in a couple of weeks and the company returns to profitability. It’s possible, but it’s not probable in my opinion. A store is only as good as its worst employee: a customer who had a good time may tell a friend or two, but someone who felt they were treated poorly will tell 100.

Final Thoughts

Again, most of you probably order manga online. With even the cheapest volumes starting at $9.99 and some series going 10, 20, 30 volumes long, it’s an expensive hobby. You almost need to save money if you’re a manga fan. However, Barnes & Noble is an important venue for the manga publishers. Graphic novels have been one of the growth categories for books, and that includes manga. Sure, you can buy them at Amazon, Right Stuf, or other stores, but that also means they won’t get impulsive buyers, people who buy at full price at the store, or manga-holics who stock up during buy two, get three free sales.

Right now, Barnes & Noble is one of those cartoon characters saying everything’s fine as others notice smoke in the background. Announcements may come next week, next month, six months, or a year from now, and they may start small: five or six stores here, a dozen there. They may start with stores that have the lowest revenue or ones where there’s another branch a short distance away. But it’s likely that February 12th will be as fateful as the day Light found Ryuk’s Death Note… and it will probably also be one that leads to its own self-destruction.