Short version: they decided to decentralize the book selection process and concentrate on selling, well, books.
Continue reading Why Barnes and Noble still lives.“Barnes & Noble was suffering a remorseless erosion of book sales as they put more and more things that weren’t books into their stores, which weren’t selling,” Daunt told me by phone from Cary, N.C., a stop on an inspection tour of Barnes & Noble stores on the Eastern Seaboard. “Since then, we’ve changed the balance of product within our stores and focused dramatically more on books.”
The result, he says, has been a “nice and healthy increase in overall sales, driven by a significant increase in book sales.” Daunt evicted “a ton of completely irrelevant products” that occupied the stores’ shelves — batteries, electronic chargers, water — “a ton of products you’d find in a CVS or Target where they perfectly sensibly sell you everything you need for everyday life, but which made absolutely no sense in a bookstore.”