PAGE
7
17
FORTUNE.COM // JULY 2019
BOOKSMART
Can Barnes & Noble
Turn the Page?
Why the soon-to-be private bookseller
could look more like the local bookstores it
nearly killed off. By Phil Wahba
the
numbers
of ’
$
FENDER
STRATOCASTER
The preferred
instrument of Jimi
Hendrix would
have set you back
the equivalent of
$2,200 in 2019
dollars but would
be worth upwards
of $9,000 today.
$
WOODSTOCK
TICKET PRICE
Advanced tickets
for the 1969
music festival cost
the equivalent
of $120 today
(though around
half the 400,
attendees did not
have a ticket). By
comparison, a
general admission
pass for Coachella
costs $429.
$2, 200
VOLKSWAGEN BUS
The official
transporter of
hippies, surfers,
and vacationing
Europeans
would cost a very
egalitarian $15,
in 2019 dollars.
Expect VW’s new
electric ID Buzz
camper to cost
significantly more
when it arrives
in 2022.
THE BARNES & NOBLE saga may yet
have a happy ending. The retailer,
still the largest U.S. bookstore chain despite years
of shriveling sales, was bought by hedge fund Elliott
Management along with newly revived British
bookseller Waterstones in a $683 million deal.
It’s easy for any retailer to blame Amazon for its
woes, but New York–based Barnes & Noble’s decline
has been largely self-inflicted. It racked up more
than $1 billion in losses trying to compete against
Amazon’s Kindle e-reader with its own Nook device.
It neglected its website (the chain gets only about 5%
of sales online, according to some estimates), and it
let too many of its big-
box stores languish
aesthetically in the
1990s, the retailer’s
heyday. Those loca-
tions stock too much
“long tail” merchan-
dise and serve as glo-
rified warehouses. The
result: Its last year
of comparable sales
growth was 2012, even
though it has shed its
weakest stores.
Fixing Barnes &
Noble, which will be
easier to do as a pri-
vate company, could
involve something
the chain has already
been testing: smaller,
more dynamic stores
with cafés and even
booze. (Downsizing to
create more profit-
able footprints is also
being tested by Kohl’s
and Nordstrom.) El-
liott has hinted that it
backs similar moves
to make each loca-
tion more like a local
independent book-
store. Many of those
are thriving (unlike
former megachain
Borders, which went
under in 2011) and
showing that retailers
can beat Amazon by
being, well, retailers.
GOLDMAN’S
NETFLIX FOR
STOCKS
A.I. BANKERS GOLDMartificial intelligence. Machine-learning experts hired away AN SACHS PLANS TO GET SMARTER and sleeker with
from the likes of Amazon, IBM, and Google have built a recom-
mendation system, not unlike the one powering Netflix, to suggest
relevant stocks to clients. Another product helps cut down on
execution risks, pulling in news and data to help determine the
best time to close a large position in a constantly moving market.
—LUCINDA SHEN
BARNES & NOBLE:
JEFFREY GREENBERG
—UNIVERSAL IM
AGES GROUP VIA GET T Y IM
AGES
