Thread regarding Barnes & Noble layoffs

ARTS
James Daunt: the British bookseller saving Barnes & Noble
The ex-banker who rescued Waterstones is now doing the same for the biggest book chain in the US. He tells Will Pavia his plans
James Daunt: “There is no difference to book-selling on either side of the Atlantic”
James Daunt: “There is no difference to book-selling on either side of the Atlantic”
MATTHEW STYLIANOU/CAMERA PRESS
Will Pavia
Monday December 14 2020, 12.01am GMT, The Times
Lately, the man hired to save America’s largest chain of bookstores has found himself trapped in a battle against a pitiless enemy, forsaken, surrounded and marvelling at the pointlessness of it all. He’s been reading Breakout at Stalingrad, Heinrich Gerlach’s autobiographical novel. “It has immersed me in the horror,” says James Daunt, speaking to me from his home in London. “I can’t think why I decided to read it.”
Then there is his day job, fighting to save Barnes & Noble, America’s last national chain of bookstores. It’s more of an afternoon and evening job really, since he can’t get to the United States because of the pandemic. He’s running the show from home. It’s an epic task. There’s a vast and pitiless enemy called Amazon, and there’s the time difference. “It’s upset my sleeping patterns and my eating patterns,” he says.
Daunt, known as the founder of a line of London shops called Daunt Books and widely acclaimed as the saviour of Waterstones, took over the effort to rescue Barnes & Noble last year. For the previous decade, the company had been run by a rotating cast of big-box retail and ecommerce executives who seemed to have only a passing interest in books. The last of these was defenestrated in 2018, after which the leaderless company, with its 600-odd giant, careworn stores, packed with toys, DVDs and stray items of clothing, seemed a spent force. If it wasn’t quite Stalingrad, it was pretty bleak. A hedge fund bought it last summer and brought over Daunt, fresh from his Waterstones success, to see if he could work the same miracle on a larger stage.
Staff at its headquarters were greeted by a tall, grey-haired Englishman, softly spoken and given to understatement, who was about to fire half of them. At such a time, “generally people get out the silver crucifixes and the garlic”, he says. “There was much less of that at Barnes & Noble and I think in truth the company has been going through a pretty tough time. Sales had been declining, it was not a happy place, self-evidently. It had not had a CEO for a year. It was in some trouble, so having someone turn up who had a track record of success I think was comforting.
“But it’s never fun when someone turns up and says, ‘Look, we are going to have to change the way you work. In consequence of that, and it’s no reflection of the calibre of the people, but we simply will not have the job you are doing here in a few months’ time . . . Those of you who stay will be doing a very different job. Many of you will have to leave.’ ” Daunt pauses for a beat. “That’s not what gets people skipping up and down with joy,” he says.
The plan was to give managers of book stores across the country more freedom to run them as they wanted. There would be less to do for the folks at head office in New York, so more than a hundred of them were let go, including nearly half of the company’s book buyers — powerful industry players who made buying decisions and maintained relationships with publishing houses.
“I had been through the same exercises at Waterstones,” Daunt says. “If you devolve responsibility to the stores to do their own replenishment and choose which books they have, you don’t need a whole lot of people doing it for them. Those jobs just drop away.” It must sound good unless you’re being dropped away. “In fact, the people who we parted ways with did so with extraordinary good grace,” Daunt says. “I think most of them will stay within in the industry and hopefully will remain friends with Barnes & Noble.”
Barnes & Noble in Washington
Barnes & Noble in Washington
ALAMY
When Daunt took on this job, he left his wife and one of his two daughters in London and took a flat in Manhattan. The other daughter was studying at Princeton, in New Jersey. “So half of us were here,” he says.
The business he took on felt intimately familiar, he says. “There is no difference to book-selling on one side of the Atlantic or the other.” In both places there has been “a god-awful shake out” that effectively left one lumbering giant of a chain and “some really, really good independent [book shops], but in truth not many of them”. During a meeting with Barnes & Noble bookshop managers at a convention centre in Orlando, his message was that “if you run good bookshops, people will come back . . . I will sort out your head office, but you are going to have to do the work. Are you capable of it?” He felt a kinship with them, he says. “They are the same tribe. It’s a singular vocation. I recognise them completely. Hopefully, they recognise me.”
Daunt is the son of a British diplomat, who grew up in Islington and various spots overseas. He went to Cambridge University and worked for the bank JP Morgan before his girlfriend, who is now his wife, persuaded him to do something else. So at the age of 26 he opened an independent bookshop called Daunt Books, which steadily grew into a chain of nine rather beautiful shops in well-heeled parts of London. When he was hired to head Waterstones, in 2011, many pegged him as a highbrow metropolitan who was good in his own small world, but would never make it on the high street. They were proved wrong.
When he arrived at Barnes & Noble late last year, the shops were already focused on Christmas and “the supertanker takes quite a lot of turning”, he says.
My nearest Barnes & Noble store actually looked rather like a supertanker. It was set in a prime piece of property on a busy cross street a few blocks over from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. On entering, you went down escalators into caverns measureless to man, or very big anyway, past the bestsellers into a gallery lined with toys, board games and DVDs and a café. You could find novels, though not very easily.
At the till you had to answer 20 questions: “How was your experience today? Are you a member? Would you like to become one? Would you like to donate to a charity? There’s a kitten in a bucket beneath my desk, should I save it or let it drown?” Well maybe not the last one. But everything else.
“It will be some ridiculous script, probably read with these dead eyes and a glazed expression, that some poor person was having to ask you,” Daunt says. “Hopefully, we have stamped that out.”
He shut that shop altogether. While others were closed temporarily because of the pandemic, he encouraged managers to rearrange them. Of the 620, “about 450 did”, he says. Daunt encourages a more homely feel: “I like a nice-looking table for a book.”
He’s still hoping to get back soon, to his flat in New York, to manage this revolution in person. “I left the milk in the fridge,” he says. “It will still be there.”