Barnes and Noble still doesn’t get it…
While footnoted.org is focused on the things that companies bury in their routine SEC filings, every now and then it seems worth taking a short detour to talk about a personal experience with one of the companies that happens to file and my experience on Saturday night at a local Barnes & Noble (BKS) seems worth sharing.
Yesterday, I flew to San Francisco and in preparation for the trip, I went looking for a good book to read during the flight. On Friday, I had read two book reviews — one in the Times and the other in the WSJ about the new Charles Schulz biography. So on Saturday night, I went to my local Barnes & Noble to buy the book.
When I didn’t see it on the shelves, I went to the customer service kiosk to ask for help. I couldn’t remember the author’s name or the exact title, but I knew enough to find it on Google (GOOG) or Amazon (AMZN). And there was the fact that there had been two reviews in two major newspapers just the day before. But after searching for 15 minutes, the woman declared that the book was not findable and that I should just go home, look in the WSJ or NY Times, write down the information and then come back to the store, which seemed like a giant waste of time. Didn’t she have access to the Internet, I asked? No, because otherwise store employees might abuse it. And while it’s true that many employees probably waste time online, it seems strange that some techy at Barnes & Noble wouldn’t be able to figure out a way to limit access to certain relevant sites, like book reviews in the Times and WSJ and limit the access to PerezHilton, among others.
So I left the store and ordered it on Amazon. And while I didn’t have the book for the plane ride, there was a less than zero chance that I was going to dig up the information online and then trudge back to the store to make the purchase.
RSS
October 16th, 2007 at 1:07 pm
Another option would have been your local public library. The librarians DO have access to the Internet to search for titles; if the library didn’t have it on shelf, they could have ordered it for you and received in a reasonable amount of time. Additionally, the librarian probably would have offered you some additional reading recommendations, which neither Barnes and Noble nor Amazon do well (the sole purpose of recommendations on either site is to get you to buy more books, not to enhance your reading pleasure).
October 16th, 2007 at 2:09 pm
See, you should have persevered with the Iphone, problem solved!
October 16th, 2007 at 4:41 pm
Well, I didn’t need the Iphone. I could have looked it up on my Treo, but because it was a Saturday night, I left the Treo at home.
October 16th, 2007 at 4:49 pm
I read your blog but have never posted…I just had to chime in after hearing your experience. I’m aghast that a for-profit company, with an e-commerce presence, seems to be in the dark ages. Of course, who knows what fun IT conversations we’ve been fortunate to miss out on, but that just means you, the customer, suffers, and heads right on over to a more welcoming competitor.
October 16th, 2007 at 7:35 pm
B&N is sort of a dinosaur but Borders is slightly better.Tough business,books. I shop at AMZN but usualy buy elsewhere. Try ABE (Advanced Book Exchange),the original used book seller. I think B&N links to their database as does Alibris. Not sure though.
Like everything on the web,it is getting tougher and tougher to do business. I predict the return of small book stores with smart workers.Who knows? If real estate gets really cheap perhaps I will open a store! Small,yes. Smart?Perhaps not.
October 16th, 2007 at 10:03 pm
At the B&N near me there are internet kiosks for you to look up the books at their website. of course I’m in NY and this is Union Square so it might be a prototype of some sort. But normally the person at the desk is very helpful.
I did find out something though. BN.com and BN the brick and mortar store do not have the same prices. And one will not honor the other’s prices. I actually asked them to match price and was told no.
In addition, in one store, a book may be a bargain book and in another it’s regular price. I asked an associate once and was told it was overstocked in one store and rather than ship it around, they just took the price down in the one store that was overstocked. It’s a waste of profits if you asked me.
Buyer beware.
October 23rd, 2007 at 12:20 pm
Do you have an indy bookseller in the area? Frankly, dropping ABE after two years, I found excellent customer service via Amazon (AMZN), and booksellers are rated quite accurately there. No sorry grapes, though…Yours, The Bruised Apple (Books and Music)
October 23rd, 2007 at 4:44 pm
I do have a great indy bookseller in my area: Bruised Apple. And I even have an in with one of the owners
Or, at least her dog!
November 1st, 2007 at 10:19 pm
I take it that this is a bit of viral marketing on behalf of Amazon
November 2nd, 2007 at 10:27 am
Nope — not viral marketing. Just a simple statement of facts. Footnoted.org has never been part of that pay-for-post BS that some bloggers and a growing number of companies engage in. If I mention something on the site, it’s based on something in a filing, or, in a few rare instances, a personal experience. But thanks for the question — it reminds me that I may need to make this clearer to new readers.
November 12th, 2007 at 12:46 am
Ok, B&N should have internet access for its employees. But as an employee who has worked at the help desk - we are not miracle workers! You don’t know the title, you don’t know the author - and then are upset when we can’t find the book???? Give me a break.
November 12th, 2007 at 9:33 am
My point was that this wasn’t some obscure book, but a major new title that had been featured just the day before on the front of the NY Times Book Review. The person at the kiosk should have had a way to access that information. And if B&N is worried about employees wasting time online, they can limit access to a defined set of sites. But telling me to go home, look it up online and then drive back to the store to placed my order seemed pretty unreasonable and I doubt that anyone would be willing to do that.
November 19th, 2007 at 9:42 pm
As a BN employee my initial reaction was the same as “mary”. (I am sure you can understand how frustrating it can be to find a needle in a haystack…thousands of times per day….because customers can’t be bothered to bring in a title or author). However, the title you mentioned should have been rather easy to find with a simple keyword search. I guess we do struggle in our large bookstores to keep everyone informed, a result of our vast selection of titles. The customers benefit because we will likely be “in stock”….we just need them to take on the responsibility of knowing exactly what they need. As your comments illustrated, many customers don’t “get it” either. I just wanted to share another perspective.
December 2nd, 2007 at 10:16 am
As an employee, yes, we are in the dark ages when it comes to internet access, however… I can honestly say that as an employee it’s difficult to keep tabs on all the titles. I can check books that have RECENTLY been on some TV shows, etc (Oprah, Today Show, etc)… but we can’t please everyone.
However, I have heard rumours of BN putting in a kiosk for customers to look up their own books. Man that’ll be nice…
December 31st, 2007 at 1:12 am
As a Barnes & Noble employee, I can give some insight on this. The only website we have access to on our computers is our own BN.com. And although I agree we should have more access to sites like google or the NY times, we do have access to all the bestseller lists, certain TV shows and other lists that show the most popular books that week.
Also, We deal with customers every day asking us for books when they have no information on the title or the author and theres only so much we can do with vague information about any random subject. Instead of complaining about it, maybe you should remember the book you’re looking for and not expect us to read your mind. I had a customer yesterday who was looking for a book and the only information she had was that the book was a mystery and had a rope on the cover… and the authors name may have been Linda something. Why don’t you stop being a selfish prick and take a look around the store yourself. IF YOU’RE LOOKING FOR A BIOGRAPHY ON CHARLES SCHULZ TRY LOOKING IN BIOGRAPHY UNDER “S”.
Either go f–k yourself or go to Borders where you can deal with people on your own minuscule intellectual level.
December 31st, 2007 at 12:17 pm
Wow, someone seems like they’ve had to deal with one too many surly customers during the holiday season. I’ve taken the liberty of editing the expletive and can only hope that this anger doesn’t carry over to whatever customers are unfortunate enough to ask you a question at your kiosk.
My point remains the same: expecting me to go home, look up the book online, and then drive back to the store is unrealistic, when I could simply go home and order it online, which is exactly what I did. Most of us live over-scheduled lives and anything that allows us to cut out a step and save some time is a good thing. Furthermore, stores (or their personnel) who insult customers because they’re convinced they’re intellectually superior or those that are unwilling to invest in technology to make their customer’s experience easier will be the losers in this game.
January 1st, 2008 at 11:44 am
Hello again,
Okay J from BN, the book ‘Destructive Emotions’ by Daniel Goleman is an excellent read or Audiobook. We all go nuts during peak traffic and this is a book of helpful neuro-science in layman’s terms to help us not kill off our own brain cells and calm abiding with rage and cortesol floods. Plus, we’ve all been a jerk at some time, so these “minuscule intellectual” clients are ourselves just at a different time.
Now, more to the point, no I am not plugging Amazon: I have no shares and as a seller of about 1800 books on their site, I hardly expect my sales to surge as a result of posting here.
Factually, I am just tipping you all to their excellent service. I continue to work with Biblio because they treat indy booksellers very fairly per commissions, but AMZN is great across the board (although ABE, Alibris, AntiqBook, and our excellent friends at Antipodean (class of their own), can be more efficient for finding specific editions of hard-to-find books and maps) I order books for our customers via AMZN Prime Service and I have that book within two days in mint condition.
The AMZN rating system is quite accurate and so I can order from other indy sellers with a great sense of confidence based on their volume and their ratings.
Questions for the BNrs: Does BN structure show professional care for its employees and develop their understanding of the knowledge/ reading entertainment retail industry or is BN like Wal-mart just moving objects through maximally insectified humans?
katy
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:53 pm
I, too, work for B&N.
The employee who started all this ruckus was probably spelling the name Schulz with a “t” in it: Schultz. Our computers will do phonetic spelling searches for authors but not in the keyword search. There has never been a corporate explanation as to why we don’t have broader internet access at our search terminals, but, yeah, it’s probably because the employees would waste a lot of time. Being around 200,000 books is distracting enough.
I think J has had a rough holiday season, but his, and Mary’s, point that we are consistently asked to read minds and pull book titles out of thin air for people who give us information like, “It’s blue,” or “It was written by a woman,” is valid. And if you think better technology is the answer, search Google or Amazon using either of those descriptions and see what you get. Or try looking up what one customer insisted was called “My Cough” (Mein Kampf).
B&N is testing/troubleshooting the self-service kiosks, which should roll out to all stores “eventually.”
If a book has been marked down in one store and not another, it’s probably damaged in some way. Otherwise we all get the same memos to clear out the same over-ordered books.
Finally: katy s.: “Does BN structure show professional care for its employees and develop their understanding of the knowledge/ reading entertainment retail industry . . .?”
Contrary to popular indie belief and awww-Meg-Ryan-is-sooo-cute movies, most bookstore chain employees work in their respective stores because they love–passionately– books. That doesn’t mean they may have read anything you’d be interested in: I like history, biography, religion, and cultural studies, but you really couldn’t pay me to read most of Oprah’s recommendations, so I might not know much about some book you think is the end-all of books. We read book reviews and all that but not everybody is going to pick up on every title. That said, the men at the very top, Len and Steve Riggio, and the people at the bottom (like me) are dedicated to our industry; the people in the middle (DMs, RMs, etc.) are retail people who call what we sell “product” and probably don’t know enough about it to develop anybody’s understanding.
I cannot begin to imagine what “maximally insectified humans” might be.