The pandemic crushed sales in big cities, with revenue down 50% at major metropolitan stores, as well as the in-store cafe business.
bought Barnes & Noble in August 2019, has little margin for error.īarnes & Noble has suffered seven years of declining revenue in the face ofĭominance in online retail. Daunt, who took the reins after hedge fund Elliott Management Corp. It’s the most ambitious restructuring ever undertaken at the company, one that will help determine the future for traditional bookselling. He also runs Waterstones, the U.K.’s largest bookstore chain, where his attention to detail includes the types of tables he thinks are best for book display-small round ones, not large square ones. Daunt has made the most of pandemic-related closings in the spring to renovate and modernize stores. In the process, he has severed decadeslong relationships with publishers who paid to have their books placed in stores. Daunt has cut the ranks of once-powerful staffers who supervised large groups of stores and fired nearly half of the company’s New York-based book buyers, powerful tastemakers who decided which titles stores should carry. Instead, the company is empowering store managers to curate their shelves based on local tastes. is abandoning the strategy that made it a bookselling behemoth two decades ago-uniformity designed to create economies of scale and simplify the shopping experience.
Led by Chief Executive James Daunt, Barnes & Noble Inc. These days, he is the one calling the shots.