Trying to put this site to some active use. Here’s a thread I’ve been following for a bit.

Barnes & Noble’s New Plan Is to Act Like an Indie Bookseller (2020.03/04)

Four CEOs have helmed Barnes & Noble in the past five years, two of them with mass-market retail experience—at Staples Inc. and Sears Holdings Corp. They sought to standardize Barnes & Noble’s network of shops into a single, transposable model—a national blueprint for how books should be sold everywhere. [James Daunt] aims to undo that work, spending three weeks per month in New York running Barnes & Noble. He wants to encourage booksellers to arrange their local window displays with titles that will be relevant to the shoppers passing by. “Anybody will know that people don’t read the same way in Birmingham, Alabama, as they do in New York City,” he says.

‘Barnes & Noble? It’s a big mess’: Waterstones boss James Daunt on bestsellers and plans in the US (2020.02/06)

This is going to mean a bit of short-term pain in terms of sales. “We had a pretty awful Christmas over here,” [Daunt] admits. “But that was because there are parts that I’ve abandoned.”
Ultimately he hopes the plan will work on both sides of the pond, noting that there are only minimal differences between American and British customers. “From what I’ve seen, we all read the same way.”

Can Britain’s Top Bookseller Save Barnes & Noble? (2019.08/08)

Barnes & Noble flailed, in part, because it contested Amazon’s turf, investing heavily in e-commerce and losing more than $1 billion on the Nook, a competitor to the Kindle. Waterstones has spruced up its website “on a shoestring,” Mr. Daunt said, and it now accounts for 5 percent of sales.
But the company has largely persisted by selling the pleasure of bookstores first and books second. Because if a store is charming and addictive enough, goes Mr. Daunt’s theory, buying a book there isn’t just more pleasant. The book itself is better than the same book bought online.

Balancing the books: how Waterstones came back from the dead (2017.02/03)

With a mixture of tough love and an unshakeable belief in the power of the physical book, which seemed quixotic in the era of e-readers and online discounting, Daunt began to turn things around. He closed underperforming stores and fired 200 booksellers, at the same time as declaring that his managers would be given back responsibility for their own stock, because what sold in Hampstead might not go down well in the Highlands. One of his boldest moves was to inform publishers that he would no longer do business through sales reps and they could no longer buy window space – which meant turning his back on £27m a year.
Inevitably, five years of such radical change has left some feeling disgruntled. “There’s been a massive restructuring of staff and the way stores are run so the wage bill has dropped drastically over the years,” said the bookseller. “Most of the managers I know have left, taking redundancy. When I left my old store, there were six full-timers; now there are three.”