Barnes and Noble is dying, Waterstones in the U.K. is thriving. Why?
TL;DR: Slash costs (i.e. fire tons of people, discontinue unprofitable stock) and target stores better for their demographics.<p>I&#x27;ve spent a lot of time in both B&amp;N and Waterstones. B&amp;N has a lot of problems Waterstones never had even ahead of bankruptcy:<p>- The stores are too big. 1&#x2F;2 of a B&amp;N store is tat, reference books, niche stock, a Nook display area, and other nonsense. You could cut almost all B&amp;N stores in half and not notice as a customer.<p>- They place them poorly. B&amp;N is perfect for foot traffic. But B&amp;Ns are typically located as drive-up &quot;out of town&quot; shopping. Somewhere you need to go to intentionally. They need to be in malls.<p>- No good Nook tie-in for the stores. My SO often goes into B&amp;N and looks at books, and then says &quot;I&#x27;ll buy it on my Nook later.&quot; They should have made an agreement with the publishers YEARS ago: When you buy a physical book, you get the Nook book included.<p>- The children&#x27;s area is really nice, but poorly leveraged. No classes, no reading groups, no reason to come in. Stay at home parents WANT a reason to get out of the house, you offer a free reading group for small kids, the parents will buy the books after the group.<p>- Atmosphere in the coffee shop is bad. Waterstones feels like a nice little swanky coffee shop, somewhere you&#x27;d go and work on your novel, B&amp;N&#x27;s coffee shop feels like a generic coffee shop at the airport.<p>- B&amp;Ns has no brand, and keeps making it worse. 3D printers, toys, Nooks, what is it that B&amp;Ns is? They&#x27;re all over the place, and now when you go into a B&amp;N store you&#x27;ll never know what they&#x27;ll be pushing this week.<p>I think B&amp;N will go under. I just don&#x27;t think the management is very good, and every attempt they make to right the ship makes it worse. The whole business needs to be restructured.