‘Do You Think It’s Serious?’
—Rodolfo, La Bohème
Rodolfo fears for Mimi, of course, as she dies (and dies) in La Bohème. But Puccini’s heroine doesn’t do herself in. Consumption gets her. Many of opera’s longest expirations are suicides.
Some say that Massenet’s 1892 Werther has the longest death scene. It takes the entire fourth act for the titular character to leave this Earth (and the stage). He has shot himself.
And then there’s Meyerbeer’s 1865 L’Africaine, much of the fifth act of which is Sélika’s tragic death. “Every time I thought ‘This is it!'” writes one opera wag, “she popped up again.” Sélika precipitates her own slowly sung departure by inhaling the poisonous perfume of the manchineel blossoms.
But no one takes the vapors like Barnes & Noble.
Now, in what may well be the final act of its agonies, the hulking bookstore chain sprawls on the divan of America’s Bayreuth, rising from the silks to sing another negative earnings report, recently with grace notes about restaurants being added to some locations—and stylish firepits! Hopeful flutes chatter in the orchestra, never mind how urgently Bradbury tried to tell us that books and flames are bad together.
Like those operatic slow deaths, this show, too, is about self-harm.
In “As Feared, Barnes & Noble Reports Poor Quarter, Reduces Sales Guidance,” Michael Cader quotes B&N chairman Len Riggio singing, “We did shoot ourselves in the foot somewhat by making unprecedented inventory reductions…which were ill advised, and by cutting in the worst area—retail floor personnel. These are being remedied as we speak.”
“Being remedied as we speak.” Opera code translation: Look out, she’s going to sing again.
At This Point in the Libretto
What has occasioned the latest Chorale of Concern, of course, came near the end of August, the scene in which CEO Ron Boire was hurled overboard after less than a year in the job. At The Hot Sheet, my colleague Jane Friedman and I wrote of the position as “perhaps the fastest revolving door in publishing industry. Ron Boire—whose background lies in general retail at stores such as Sears, Toys“R”Us, and Best Buy—was given the boot by B&N’s board of directors, who cited a poor fit.”
And it would fall to Mike Shatzkin, consultant and Cader-confidant to sing the set piece of the dilemma, “Barnes and Noble Faces a Challenge That Has Not Been Clearly Spelled Out.” He then clearly spelled it out.
“The big bookstore model is an anachronism. Just making it big doesn’t pull in the customers anymore. So a new strategy is definitely called for. B&N is going part of the way to one by recognizing that they need to do more to bring in customers and, at the same time, they can’t profitably shelve 100,000 titles across hundreds of stores. Taking their capabilities to where the customers already are would seem like an idea worth exploring.”
Before the violin section gets going again, let me bullet it out for you:
- Where once B&N was assailed as the Bookstore Killer by moms and pops for rolling over their independent shops, it’s now clung to by those who fear we’re about to see the demise of the last major US chain-kasbah for books.
- The change? It’s the Bezosian Beelzebub, of course, the Northwestern Nightmare, which is both blamed and begrudgingly praised for creating history’s greatest (commercial) library and for selling more books than any entity before it. What Shatzkin is saying is that B&N can in no way provide the range and reach of the Amazonian cloud store.
- What’s more, as Hugh Howey notes in his own catamaran-aria, “Rocks, Paper, Scissors,” Amazon has become even smarter than before (yes, again) in rolling out its “new small footprint” Amazon Books shops. They give the retailer, as Howey rightly says, “the presence they’ve never had” in communities. Just like independent bookshops that capitalize on “presence and community,” he tells us, Amazon is getting down with small stores that draw on the mothership cloud store for inventory. “B&N will never be able to compete with Amazon on price or selection,” writes Howey.
- Thus Barnes & Noble has been stranded, no Einstein on this beach, with bloated physical retail sites it can’t sustain and which can never match the spectacular selection and delivery options of Amazon.
Mind you, Len Riggio, chairman of Barnes & Noble, has issued a stirring challenge, captured by Jim Milliot at Publishers Weekly as “Len Riggio Promises To Fix Barnes & Noble.” It includes Riggio’s defiant earnings-report lyrics:
“I’ll not rush headlong this time because I am more than willing to put the time and effort into all the tasks at hand. We are not just going to close stores and go home. We are committed to this business.”
Riggio got through to our good friend and colleague Laura Dawson, who—a former Barnes & Noble employee—rushes in with “Rumors Greatly Exaggerated,” experienced support for Riggio:
“As long as Len Riggio is still with us, Barnes & Noble will be too. It began as a college store and it may well end as one. But it will persist as long as Len wills it to. Do not expect him to turn off the lights and lock the doors.”
But, then arrives that quiet messenger who always turns the tide in the plot. In a private publishing listserv, he stage-whispers to Dawson:
“As long as Len Riggio is still with us, Barnes & Noble will be too? Len is 75.”
And the stage lights go out on the realization that not even the determined Lord Riggio may save this story.
Intermission. You see the problem. You hope no one caught you drying your eyes. And my provocation for you, here in the lobby (thank God for the bar), is this: If we’re now watching The Twilight of the Superstores, how bad is that, really?