I agree . Well said . Finally, someone with some common sense . Absolutely...the company should have kept the store structure just the way it was , and stayed a public company , not selling it. The morale in the stores would have been good , the way it always was . Everything would have remained the way it was , running smooth . I understand the pandemic cuts store traffic way down , and then there is the shift to buying from on line booksellers like Amazon. Sales would drop dramatically, but we could give great service to the remaining customers . And everybody would be fine. I guess there would be a point , in a company that makes a small profit , where the cost of running the company would begin to exceed the profit margins on the books and toys and coffee .
That’s ok . When the stock price dropped to almost zero , it would still be okay , because we would all be giving great service and feeling better . Who needs stock anyway ? Most of the booksellers weren’t stock holders. Anyway , when we start to run out of profit to pay the bills , we could just take out a loan , or get some kind of grant or something from the government . That would work , right ?
Lot’s of organizations run a negative profit , like the Post Office . Everybody loves books and everybody loves Barnes and Noble , so it would have been fine. Right ? When we couldn’t pay the publishers we could ask them to loan us the books , and if we sell them, we’d give them some money for them . That’s fair . And when we ran out of inventory , and coffee, and hand sanitizer , we could all be together in the store , and everything would be great . See , there was no need to adjust the store structure , or the store size, or the inventory , or the pricing , or the website, or anything . Am I missing something ?
Kids, most of you don’t understand business...at all. It was the lack of an innovative owner, and a Board of Directors that were asleep , or thinking of something else , while they took a lot of money for living in the past , that ruined the company. That and the completely unlevel playing field where Amazon chews up the market. ( keep clicking away ....) Some brands , not many , were able to survive the retail shift , a lot still struggling . Some brands go away . It doesn’t mean they were bad in the their successful days.
Accept that the company made changes to survive or go do something else . But stop complaining about the same stuff all the time . If you were a good employee that worked for a once good company ....great . Take that with you when you go to your next job . Whining about the layoffs do zero . Wishing this pitiful company destruction means little . The customers will take care of that themselves .