How America Learned to Love Barnes & Noble Again

Barnes & Noble was once the avatar for sinister big-box stores on the march against independent businesses. In 1998’s You’ve Got Mail, Tom Hanks plays an executive at Foxbooks, a thinly disguised bookstore chain, who puts out of business (and also, weirdly, seduces) an independent bookseller played by Meg Ryan. Local bookstores were, at the time, folding en masse, and people were mad about the growing predominance of chain retail.  

Then Barnes & Noble got its comeuppance. In the years after the 2008 financial crisis, it closed more than 150 stores. To some extent, the bookstore was experiencing the same predicament of chain retail generally, which, after robust expansion that put mom-and-pop shops out of business, 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 revival. It opened 60 new stores last year and plans to do the same this year. It is reportedly soliciting banks to handle an IPO—a sign that a turnaround effort by Elliott Investment Management, the hedge fund that took the company private in 2019, has reached its conclusion. Distinctions between chain and local have been superseded by the split between online and in-person shopping. Book-buying Americans, whose support for indie shops was one of the hallmarks of a progressive anti-chain movement that flourished in the 2000s, seem to be less discerning than they used to be. They’ll browse where they can.

[From the December 1957 issue: Alfred A. Knopf on the changes in book publishing]

Consumer politics may have mattered less than good business decisions, however. Barnes & Noble found its form in part by learning from its eternal rival, the local bookstore. The corporate stores, with their forest-green signs and scratchboard illustrations of famous authors, used to be cookie-cutter copies of one another. Now they come in all sizes, and the books inside vary from place to place according to the tastes of each store manager. What’s more, they sit in a commercial landscape that, though thoroughly suffused with national brands, has been losing exactly the type of middle-class, something-for-everyone store that Barnes & Noble tries to be.

James Daunt, who was brought in as CEO after Barnes & Noble was taken private in 2019, was evidently the right person to implement those lessons. He got his start in the industry by founding Daunt Books, a skylit London shop whose screen-printed tote bags are a fixture of that city’s sidewalks. It’s as if Walgreens was being run by a pharmacist, or Kroger by the owner of Russ & Daughters. Daunt had just helped turn around the U.K.’s Waterstones chain (also owned by Elliott Investment Management), and now he got to know its beleaguered American cousin. He encountered what he described to me recently as a “retailer’s mindset”: an obsession with standardization and consistency that, he said, had crushed the bookstore’s business and its soul. A fixation on big floor plans, in Daunt’s telling, was the reason Barnes & Noble shut down the last of the stores it had acquired from B. Dalton after the financial crisis.

Daunt has gotten attention for a strategy that delegates authority to local store managers, letting them choose what books to stock and to promote. No longer does the New York headquarters cut a check from a Big Five publisher to place the season’s hot new memoir on front tables nationwide. If you go to a Barnes & Noble in New England, you might find a section on shipwrecks right at the front of the store. A store in the Florida Panhandle will have shelf after shelf of Bibles. A store in Washington, D.C., has, well, a lot of books about Washington, D.C.

In one respect, there’s a Barnes & Noble playbook for national chains to follow: delegation and diversification, 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 thread counts match the intensity of a forum discussion on YA novels. “Yes, indie retailers have been hugely hurt by Amazon, but not as badly as some of the specialty chains,” Stacy Mitchell, a co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, told me. Those chains include names such as Circuit City, Modell’s, and Bed Bath & Beyond.

Indie bookstores have proven particularly resilient, growing their numbers in defiance of Amazon’s hegemony. Unlike Hanks’s on-screen bookstore tycoon, Daunt promises that Barnes & Noble’s expansion will not put it in conflict 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 repairing a past overcorrection that left many areas with no place to buy books at all. “We’re actually repopulating a devastated landscape that needs bookstores,” Daunt told me. Some independent bookstores say it is still too close for comfort.

All told, the good vibes of Barnes & Noble’s comeback show just how much American culture has changed since the days when the company was the big bad wolf blowing down the walls of indie bookstores. Anti-chain animus was once a popular strain of urban politics: In 2004, for example, San Francisco established an ordinance to ban chain stores; a Walmart expansion was overwhelmingly shut down by voters in Inglewood, California. Gradually, though, the anti-corporate spirit of the ’90s gave way to the monetized hustle culture of the 2010s. “Selling out was rapidly transforming from a defining generational concern into the parochial preoccupation of close-minded old heads,” the critic Willa Paskin concluded. Conscious consumers exercised their power in other ways, focusing more on corporate policy or supply chains than on ownership. More than the monotony, local revenue leaving the community was once the serious rationale for opposing chain stores. But no one I spoke with about Barnes & Noble even mentioned that the company is under the control of one of the richest men in America, the billionaire GOP megadonor Paul Singer.

[From the August 1919 issue: The welfare of the bookstore]

Neither shoppers nor city leaders can afford to be so picky these days. After revising design guidelines to encourage the development of more storefronts, some cities have found they cannot find enough businesses to fill them. Barnes & Noble’s purchase of distressed local shops in Denver and San Francisco has been bittersweet for book lovers in those cities, who may resent the chain but relish the preservation of their local institutions. “Like all big chains, when you shop there, more of your money leaves the community than when you shop at 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 from Amazon is positive.”

That broader post-Amazon retail crisis reveals another aspect of the Barnes & Noble story that is harder to emulate. Like local bookstores that picked up buyers when chain stores closed, the chain is now benefiting from its perseverance as other middle-class shopping destinations vanish. Analysts have dubbed this phenomenon the K-shaped economy, divided between an upper branch of high-end shoppers and a lower branch buying basics at chains such as Family Dollar and Walmart.

Daunt believes that Barnes & Noble makes room for a type of book buyer who might not feel at ease in independent bookstores, in which customers, he says, are met with a “sort of scrutiny, 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, to an indie-shop regular, was as maximalist as going from a city corner store to a suburban supermarket with its 45 types of peanut butter: shelves full of books of logic puzzles; a rack with magazines about baseball and model airplanes; volume after volume of mass-market fantasy, sci-fi, and romance in quantities that would swallow a small bookstore; not to mention lots of toys and games.

With their spacious aisles and laid-back atmosphere, Barnes & Noble stores have become a popular stage set for TikToks, matching indie bookstores’ quirky appeal on Instagram. Unaccompanied teens have lately been viewed as a problem for corporate retail, but Daunt said they are his company’s most important customers. “One of the great joys of chain bookstores is they have a certain anonymous and wholly democratic, with a small d, welcome to them,” he said. Daunt isn’t moving Barnes & Noble into just a devastated bookstore landscape, but one suddenly lacking in stores that feel like they are for everyone. The family-friendly, middlebrow chains of the previous century are a dying breed; Barnes & Noble endures as a place where just about anyone can be comfortably set loose for an hour or two.