Barnes & Noble was once the avatar of the bad big box stores in the protest against free enterprise. In the years 1998 You have a letterTom Hanks is an executive at Foxbooks, a thinly veiled bookstore chain, who goes out of business (and also, ironically, seduces) an independent bookseller played by Meg Ryan. Local bookstores were, at the time, collapsing in droves, and people resented the increased retail volume.
Then Barnes & Noble got his comeuppance. In the years after the financial crisis of 2008, it closed more than 150 stores. To some extent, the bookstore was facing the same situation as the retail chain as a whole, which, after a massive expansion that put mom and pop stores out of business, has declined faster than independent stores in the age of e-commerce. Amazon was doing to Barnes & Noble what Barnes & Noble had done to local bookstores.
But today, in a world more online than ever, Barnes & Noble is experiencing a renaissance. It opened 60 new stores last year and plans to do so this year. It is it is said to ask the bank to handle an IPO—a sign that the turnaround effort of Elliott Investment Management, the hedge fund that took the company private in 2019, has reached its conclusion. The distinction between chain and local has been eliminated and the division between online and in-person shopping. Book-buying Americans, whose support for indie stores was one of the hallmarks of the progressive anti-chain movement that flourished in the 2000s, seem less discerning than they used to be. They will browse where they can.
Consumer politics may be less important than good business decisions, however. Barnes & Noble got its shape in part by learning from its archrival, the local bookstore. The company’s stores, with their lime-green signs and chalkboard illustrations, were cookie-cutter copies of each other. Now they come in all sizes, and the books they contain vary from place to place according to the taste of each shopkeeper. Additionally, they sit in a commercial environment that, while full of national brands, has been losing the very middle-class, everyman type of store that Barnes & Noble strives to be.
James Daunt, who was brought in as CEO after Barnes & Noble was taken private in 2019, was clearly the right person to carry out those lessons. He got his start in the industry by founding Daunt Books, a London store whose screen-printed handbags are a staple of the city’s streets. It’s as if Walgreens was run by a pharmacist, or Kroger by the owner of Russ & Daughters. Daunt had just helped turn around the British Waterstones chain (also owned by Elliott Investment Management), and now he got to know his troublesome American cousin. He suffered from what he recently described to me as “retailer’s mentality”: a desire for standards and consistency that, he said, had crushed the bookstore’s business and its soul. Remodeling large floor plans, Daunt explains, is why Barnes & Noble closed the last store they bought from B. Dalton after the financial crisis.
Daunt is characterized by a strategy that delegates power to local store managers, allowing them to select books to stock and promote. The New York headquarters is no longer cutting a check from a Big Five publisher to put this season’s new record on front desks across the country. If you go to a Barnes & Noble in New England, you can find a shipwreck in the front of the store. A store in the Florida Panhandle will have shelf after shelf of Bibles. A store in Washington, DC, has many books about Washington, DC
On the one hand, there’s Barnes & Noble’s playbook for national chains to follow: representation and diversity, creating more interesting stores (and more interesting jobs) at the local level. Imagine a home goods store where the staff’s opinions and advice about yarn counts match the intensity of forum discussions about YA novels. “Yes, indie retailers have been hurt a lot by Amazon, but not as bad as some of the specialty chains,” Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the Independent Local Institute, told me. Those chains include names like Circuit City, Modell’s, and Bed Bath & Beyond.
Indie bookstores have proven particularly resilient, growing in numbers against Amazon’s dominance. Unlike Hanks’ on-screen bookstore experience, Daunt promises that Barnes & Noble’s expansion won’t put it at odds with its independent rivals; that the pie of book readers and book buyers can grow. For the most part, he argues that the chain is making up for a past restructuring that left many places without a place to buy books at all. “We’re really replenishing a devastated landscape that needs bookstores,” Daunt told me. Some independent bookstores say it is still too close for comfort.
All that said, the good vibes of Barnes & Noble’s arrival show just how much American culture has changed since the days when the company was a dire wolf stalking the walls of indie bookstores. Anti-chain animus was once a popular form of urban politics: In 2004, for example, San Francisco initiated the order ban chain stores; Walmart’s expansion was huge close and voters in Inglewood, California. Gradually, though, the anti-corporate spirit of the ’90s gave way to the monetization culture of the 2010s. “Outsourcing was rapidly changing from a generational concern to a close-minded old-timer,” critic Willa Paskin. he concluded. Conscious consumers used their power in other ways, focusing more on corporate policy or supply chains than ownership. Beyond wastefulness, local income leaving the community was previously a major reason for opposition to supermarkets. But no one I spoke to about Barnes & Noble even mentioned that the company is under the control of one of America’s richest men, billionaire GOP megadonor Paul Singer.
Neither buyers nor city leaders can afford to choose these days. After revising design guidelines to encourage more storefronts, some cities have caught on can’t get enough business fill them up. Barnes Noble’s purchase of troubled local stores there Denver and San Francisco it has been painful for book lovers in those cities, who may hate the chain but enjoy the preservation of their local institutions. “Like all the big chains, when you shop there, more of your money goes out into the community than when you buy something locally owned,” Josh Cook, a bookseller and co-owner of Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Massachusetts, told me. But, he added: “Anything that takes market share away from Amazon is positive.”
The broader post-Amazon retail crisis reveals another aspect of the Barnes & Noble story that is hard to replicate. Like the local bookstores that took in shoppers when department stores closed, the chain is now benefiting from its resilience as other mid-tier shopping destinations disappear. Analysts have called the situation a K-shaped economy, divided between an upper branch of high-end shoppers and a lower branch of basic shopping at chains such as Family Dollar and Walmart.
Daunt believes that Barnes & Noble offers a space for the type of book buyer who might not feel comfortable in independent bookstores, where customers, he says, are approached with “a kind of inquiry, and also a sense of intellectual expectation.” Recent trips to Barnes & Noble stores in three different parts of the country revealed a bookstore experience that, for a typical indie store, was as high as from a downtown corner store to an urban supermarket with its 45 varieties of peanut butter: shelves full of logic puzzle books; rack and magazines about baseball and model airplanes; volume after volume of mass-market fantasy, sci-fi, and romance galore that would engulf a small bookstore; not to mention many toys and games.
With their wide aisles and relaxed atmosphere, Barnes & Noble stores have become a popular platform for TikToks, matching the incredible appeal of indie bookstores on Instagram. Young people who have not marched have been recently seen as a problem to the retail business, but Daunt said they are his company’s most important customers. “One of the great joys of big bookshops is having an anonymous and completely democratic, small crowd. dcloser to them,” he said. Daunt isn’t moving Barnes & Noble into a rundown bookstore, but one store that’s suddenly missing something that feels like it’s for everyone. Family-owned and mid-century chains are a dying breed; Barnes & Noble endures as a place where almost anyone can comfortably pop in for an hour or two.
