The Corporate Showroom

Some of the predator-prey tales from bibliographic oceans are well known. Like the one about how the big bookstores ate the little bookstores. Corporate chains such as Borders and Barnes & Noble with their fancy furniture and coffee bars drove many of the independent bookstores to ruin.

But then came along an even bigger fish called Amazon.

This bigger fish accounts for about 40 percent of the book market and has an insatiable appetite for its competition. First it ate through the large corporate chains and is now working its way through the smaller ones.

Borders is long gone—and Barnes & Noble is as good as gone.

In the first quarter of 2016, Barnes & Noble, the largest bookstore chain in the country, reported net losses of almost 35 million dollars from its website and retail stores. The same quarter a year earlier it reported losses of almost 29 million dollars. While a number of things are eating away at its revenue including store closings and losses from its Nook digital unit, the competition from online retailer Amazon is relentless and will not stop until Barnes & Noble folds.

So what does Barnes & Noble plan to do to slow down Amazon’s appetite for bricks-and-mortar bookstore destruction? Work on its book inventory? Increase customer service? Not even close.

According to its new chief executive, Ronald Boire, in order to stop the bleeding of revenue loses, Barnes & Noble needs to make its stores more attractive and focus more attention on toys, games, and other non-book merchandise as a key part of its business plan.

Toys? Really? That’s the plan?

The chances that Amazon will choke on one of Barnes & Noble’s toys and leave it alone are about as likely as Border’s reopening its doors. Not only does Amazon also sell toys and games, but for that matter, it sells just about anything else that can be put in a box and delivered to your doorstep.

Not to mention that another bookstore chain recently failed using the same strategy.

Two years ago, Hastings Entertainment supposedly received a second lease on life when it was sold to Draw Another Circle. The company, which currently has nearly 4,000 employees and a debt of about 139 million dollars, will permanently close all of its stores by Halloween.

Though Hastings Entertainment stores did not do a lot of beautification after their acquisition by Draw Another Circle, they did increase their stock of toys, games, collectibles, and other merchandise. As a result, the amount of retail space in the stores dedicated to books reached an all time low over the past two years. It was replaced by a wide assortment of merchandise including hobby items such as model airplanes and cars and sports paraphernalia such as Peyton Manning bobble-heads and Chicago Cubs shot glasses.

With stock like Metallica t-shirts and lava lamps, Hastings came to look more like Spencer Gifts than a bookstore. The books that they did stock were a limited assortment of new titles overpowered by a motley and random assortment of used and sale books. Their policy was to buy back any book with an ISBN—and their stock reflected it. Given the sad state of their inventory, it would not be surprising to learn that books were the least sold items in the store’s final years.

And even the folks who did go to Hastings for its books sometimes ended up purchasing them elsewhere.

“We don’t buy a lot here,” said one Hastings customer, “but it’s nice to browse.” “A lot of people know that there are better deals on the internet so they buy on Amazon instead of in the store,” added the customer. “And I do that too,” she said. “I see a book that’s $14 and I know I can get it used on Amazon for like a penny.”

So if people don’t go to chain bookstores to buy books anymore, what then is the future of big bookstore chains such as Barnes & Noble? While toys and games might sell better than books these days, it is...