Barns And Noble - Ick!

[6chickens in St. Charles]

But the overhead is the fun part! My family uses Barnes n Noble in the town by our kids' hospital, once a month we had to go for appointments and really look forward to the rest of the day at the Barnes and Noble! It makes the hospital part actually kind of fun. If the appointments are later in the morning and there's long tests, we try to get new guitar mags and science nerd mags and maybe goofy things like MadMagazine first for the waiting rooms. Then its off to the Barnes and Noble coffee shop for excellent "Dr Lucy's" cookies and a mixed drink. Without that massive display of periodicals, I would never have known about Backyard Poultry magazine or Mary Jane's Farm magazine.

I grieve the loss of retail stores. They have been fun. I'm no millionaire, and I do budget carefully, but I always include fun money in the budget whenever possible. That's what the delightful overhead is, for me. It helps me feel reasonably civilized and normal to just plain shop, peruse shelves, discuss the books and mags with perfect strangers. Its nice in there. I think the designers of Barnes n Noble overhead did a nice job of attending to my comfort and enjoyment of shopping for "what to read next" with my family. Amazon is great for saving money, but Barnes and Noble makes a great day out.

 

[ccshambhala]

They HAVE to charge more IN the store - to pay for having a store!! It doesn't cost nearly as much to rent a warehouse and pay a few people to pull books and pack em to mail - as it does to rent a prime retail location, pay to have employees unpack the books and shelve them and keep them neatly shelved and clean up the trash customers leave - help customers find books and watch for shoplifters... don't forget the nice free things they do - storytimes and shopping nights (where a portion of the proceeds goes to different community events...) Not to mention you get to peruse books (which you really CAN"T do online) and hang out and drink coffee or visit with friends while you do. You do pay for the experience. And I happily do so from time to time because I APPRECIATE having a location like that where my kids and I can go and CELEBRATE books - even while socializing.

Maybe they weren't as nice as they should have been on the phone (I will give you that customer service is not what it used to be - altho it is usually better at b&n than a lot of other places....)but they also told you how to beat their system, not pay their salary, and you got to peruse the books for free - with no restocking fee.

I am thankful there are stores like b&n where people can go and hang out and socialize without HAVING to buy things - practically encouraged to loiter. Who know maybe kids or teens that wouldn't otherwise read - will because they met some buddies at b&n.

 

[SierraView]

I have a Kindle and love it. I resisted getting one for a long time thinking I would miss the real paper books. I found the Kindle so nice reading on and it's very nice to shop for books at Amazon. I like reading the review before I buy. Very hard to beat the prices Amazon has, the shipping is fast, I save time from drive to town and save on fuel. I find I'm buying more and more on Amazon each year and most like will do all my Christmas shopping online this year.

 

[Carols Clucks]

I will pay more and support local stores when I can, I have bought several cameras/lenses locally just because I want to have a big camera store locally.

On the other hand, I do not have time to hunt when I am looking for a specific topic book and will use Amazon for USED copies. They tend to come from people around the country who do have time to patrol the used/thrift/yard sales for these books. I figure I am helping a litter guy somewhere and just a smaller percentage back to amazon.

From owning a business, rent, utilities, local taxes, staff, training, store maint, etc make it hard to compete with a faceless internet company on price. Some one that does not understand this might and has already told you they will not be back is likely not to get the red carpet service for a return. Sorry, those people know their jobs depend on sales not returns.

 

[mom'sfolly]

I have a Kindle and I use it. That being said, I love bookstores. In bookstores I can browse, look at a variety of different genres, read sample pages, etc. I like being able to pick up a book and read bits before I buy. One of the things I hate about the Kindle in the linear nature of reading on the K, it is hard to go back and forth, skip sections, re-read without bookmarking everything. I tend to re-read, and it is difficult simple to pick up in a favorite part on a Kindle. I find browsing online annoying, it doesn't provide the kind of things I like to look for.

I buy books for my Kindle, and I buy real books. I try to support the stores that provide the service that I like. Unfortunately, the nearest independent bookstore isn't very close. I do shop at Barnes and Noble, and I preferred Borders; but they are big box stores.

Increasingly, online shopping is cheaper than store shopping. One of the big reasons for this is the failure of online stores to collect taxes. For most online shopping, you end up with an 8% discount simply by not having to pay taxes. They only have to pay warehouse and packing people, not customer service people.

I'm sorry you felt like the customer service was bad at Barnes and Noble but from my perspective you shouldn't expect a store to match online prices.

I shop at lots of local places rather than chains because I want to spend my money in my community. It comes back around to provide jobs for my community members. Online shopping does not do this. I do order online for things that are hard to find locally or are cost prohibitive. And I do buy books for my Kindle.

 

[lceh]

If you're looking for cheap, used (but often pristine) books, try Half.com. I use it and abebooks.com for almost everything I buy now. The used sellers at Amazon are good too. Why buy a book new, ever? Unless it's a gift I can't imagine buying new, since even a new book will look used as soon as I read it once or twice (and even more used once my kids read it!). It's kind of like buying a car -- not worth buying a new copy for twice the price of a used one with exactly the same words in it. I also used to use the interlibrary loan service at our public library ALL the time, until they started charging for the service

. For a while there I had big, expensive, hard-to-find gardening and decorating books checked out all the time, for free.

 

[turney31]

thriftbooks.com

 

[itsy]

I love our Barnes & Noble and the people there are quite nice.

Corporate retail can be difficult when dealing with customer issues and customer service. Just because you had a bad experience with one person at one store or a handful of people at one store certainly doesn't mean that they are like that across the board and that we should boycott B&N because of your one poor experience.

I understand that books cost more there - but like many have said - you can find almost ANYTHING you would purchase in a brick and mortar store CHEAPER ONLINE. B&N is not in the position to haggle with you over the price of your books or negotiate your purchase price down because you can find it cheaper elsewhere. They are not the flea market. They gave you the correct answer - go back and return them.

That being said - I'll continue to shop at our local B&N because we enjoy the experience, the atmosphere and the tangible books.

 

[Kaitie09]

I have a Kindle and love it, but I also love paper books. Barnes & Noble is the only store I buy from, and I have the membership there. The one thing I really love there is their Leather-bound Classic Series. I started collecting them and they look really nice. They combine all the books into one big one, and they range from $18 to $25. The look amazing on a bookshelf. I have 8 of them now, and am slowly building up to all of them. They are made really well and since they are classics, I would be able to pass them down though the generations (if paper books still exist by then).

 

[newchickgal]

BetterWorldBooks.com they have really great prices, but the bonus is that they save millions of books from landfill. We buy from them a lot. They have just about every category there is.