I always had fun and let a few employees set them according to their favorite book sections. There were select number of end-caps that were able to be done by the individual store employees. The store layouts were all determined from New York as they wanted a similar look at each location, which was fine, but it meant that the majority of books that were highlighted were selected from New York. I used to work for Barnes & Noble a long time ago. Which you’d think would sound obvious, but apparently wasn’t. I think B&N’s smart to do things like not have one layout for all of its stores, and letting individual managers stock books based on what their customers want. I can absolutely see why it works for things like music concerts, where people are hyped up and excited to buy, but at the level I’m currently operating I don’t expect to see many people “in a condition of swoon” in response to my next book.Īnyway, good article. I’m also not convinced that merch sells books.

That’s one reason I don’t trust merch for my own stuff, much: it takes up space, and there’s no guarantee that it’ll sell. The result, he says, has been a “nice and healthy increase in overall sales, driven by a significant increase in book sales.” Daunt evicted “a ton of completely irrelevant products” that occupied the stores’ shelves - batteries, electronic chargers, water - “a ton of products you’d find in a CVS or Target where they perfectly sensibly sell you everything you need for everyday life, but which made absolutely no sense in a bookstore.” “Since then, we’ve changed the balance of product within our stores and focused dramatically more on books.”

“Barnes & Noble was suffering a remorseless erosion of book sales as they put more and more things that weren’t books into their stores, which weren’t selling,” Daunt told me by phone from Cary, N.C., a stop on an inspection tour of Barnes & Noble stores on the Eastern Seaboard. Short version: they decided to decentralize the book selection process and concentrate on selling, well, books.

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