The bottom line: Amazon is vastly popular, but its schoolyard bully behavior is starting to give shoppers pause, Cooper Smith, an analyst with Gartner L2 says. When I was there midday Tuesday, around 20 people were browsing the small selection of titles and another 20 or so were meeting for coffee in the adjoining cafe.
When Axios visited, former B&N locals were super excited about the new store, positioned just across the street from Apple. Then an Amazon Books - futuristic and powered by hyperlocal consumer data - opened down the street. In Bethesda, Maryland, the local B&N, a towering structure that once anchored the town center, closed last year.To rub salt in the wound, now Amazon is trying to beat B&N at its own game. That may be because B&N's problem was not only Amazon - it had gotten big, flabby and, finally, obsolete. Reality check: If Americans are sentimental about B&N, which itself once taunted and put small independents out of business, they are not showing it very much. They didn't hang out there on a date when they were 23." - Mike Shatzkin The Amazonian future We are upset about Barnes & Noble more than we are about Toys "R" Us. "We haven't mourned every casualty of the internet. Families hang out in bookstores, and culture, history and community are imbibed there. But there is something sentimental and very different in the elimination of bookstores versus department store chains. Penney and Sears.Īmazon declined to comment. It wiped out sporting goods giant Sports Authority and has delivered staggering blows to department stores like Macy's, J.C. Meanwhile, Amazon's reach has continued to be deadly.
But after closing 90 of its 720 locations in the past seven years, often leaving areas of hundreds of thousands of people without a single major bookstore, it appears prepared to call it quits. That was in 2004, and the losers were Borders, Crown Books, Book World and others.įor 14 years, B&N managed to hang on. The long view: Books were the first category to reach an e-commerce tipping point - a 20% market share, the point of no return at which, as industry after industry has discovered, Amazon's encroachment wipes out almost everyone.