YouSaid · the spoken record

James Daunt

lines on the record: 75
first: 2023-03-16
most recent: 2023-03-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Is very decentralized. We do most of our sort of heavy lifting from a merchant perspective out in the stores. We are continuing to necessarily invest in the things that support the stores. So we've probably got more infrastructure centrally to do that. The store development teams, the construction guys who do whatever the refurbishments and new store build-outs, many more of those. And a lot of investment in IT and logistics. But otherwise, we're very light touch. All of our book buying is done by essentially one person with two assistants. And that was a team probably of 40 or 50 before because that's all we need to do centrally. The rest is all done out in the stores.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very significant amount of what we used to do. And those of you who are in service to the stores, so IT people, the tech side and the rest, nothing changes in your world. In fact, we're probably going to invest in more of you. But those of you who are presently dictating to the stores the kind of things that we are giving to the stores to do, you no longer have a job. Nothing personal. And it was a good employment market then. So most of them went straight off to other jobs. And I think didn't feel that it was any personal judgment among themselves. And therefore, for everybody who was left, it felt probably a relatively positive as far as these sort of quite traumatic things can be.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And not unreasonably a lot of them, the intelligent ones, came back and said, that's really difficult. The less intelligent ones said, great, let's get on with it because it's really difficult. And from a head office perspective, there's nothing personal when you have one of these sort of great huge ruptions. It's not saying you're useless. Off you go. I think you're a bad bookseller, bad buyer, a bad merchant, bad whatever. We're saying, look, guys, we're simply stopping doing...”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we explained exactly what we were doing and the rationale for it. We're saying to the booksellers and the bookstore managers, look, you really have to take accountability and ownership of your stores. We are going to give you the tools to actually prove that you are good booksellers. We're not going to tell you anymore what books you're going to have. We're not going to tell you what books to reorder. You've got to make those decisions yourselves. You've got to decide how you display them. You're no longer going to have planograms telling you exactly where to put all of the books in the front. You've got to decide. Scratch your heads, think about it and put them as best you judge.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Would start running much, much better bookstores. Most of them it probably wouldn't make too much difference to, and then some would get worse. And then we could start on that exercise of going around the one sort of doing less well and partnering them up with the ones that were doing really good stuff, and that we would start a virtuous cycle in which we steadily improve the stores. And I got on with it straight away. And we had by the time I joined in September 2019, and by the end of the year we had halved our central workforce, exited our very, very expensive New York offices, two very large ones, moved into a couple of empty floors above one of our stores on Manhattan, and managed, thank goodness, to do that just before COVID came along, because otherwise our landlords would not have taken back those very, very expensive offices, and we'd have been much worse shape when obviously what was a brutal time erupted.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What I saw was this large central structure which is necessary if you want to run the stores in a very disciplined manner, which was also incidentally hugely expensive. And I also saw these great amazing bookstores with good people running them. Book sellers are the same tribe of people wherever you meet them. They're the same in the UK. The same in Japan, they're the same everywhere. You know when you're with booksellers, they all more introverted, more cerebral people. And I knew that if we could simply strip away that central instruction and that central machine, one we were going to save an awful lot of money because we wouldn't need those people and we wouldn't need the very expensive Manhattan offices in which they were residing. And secondly, that I thought that if we did appeal directly to the booksellers, that not all of them, but some of them,”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Four minute is the thing that would threaten local economies. And now you're saying, oh, this thing kind of is the local economy, but the changes you have made are to make it even more local, to make it smaller, to make it more representative and in service to the communities that these stores are located in. That's a lot of change. You come in, you're the new CEO, failing business. What did you see and what were the first set of changes that you made?”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One, I want to be very clear that I think Mollier plays in Middle America. I grew up in Middle America because Molly Ringwald, there's a name check in the movie The Breakfast Club. For decades since the 80s, I think that's where that comes from. I don't have data, but there's just a part of me that says that's why that's on the door there. So this is a long history. And as you went on to talk about this history, right? Barnes& Evil was 100 years old. Occupied a dominant place in American culture for a minute. It occupied a place.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was a time when Barnes& Noble actually celebrated Mollier as one of the great sort of literary names that it wanted to put before its customers. So there was also an aspiration to it, which is quite remarkable. And it's that aspirational side that I think is so valuable. And they're very, very inclusive spaces. There's nothing intimidating about them. They're very size welcomes everybody into them. And I think that part within a community which allows kids falling out of school at 3.34 p.m. just to pour into a Barnes& Noble no obligation to buy anything, chat away, look at books, have fun, maybe buy a cup of coffee, and then be off. It's that sort of the democratic side of Banza Nova, which is so powerful.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Going to a store there. I mean, you have to laugh as you approach it. I mean, this vast store. And it actually had writers names engraved or does have writers' names engraved across all around the store. And on the front, It had Throw and Walden, which made sense to me. Orwell, which was an interesting choice, and Mollier.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, then was when there were dramatically more independent bookstores and you were sitting in your 3,000 square foot indie bookstore and then a 35,000 monster opens up down the road from you. And this is in the preamazon times. And that just was an impossible thing to compete with. It had the cafe. It had all the music and movies and vinyl and CDs and everything. It was a much richer retail environment. So that killed off the indies. But also the less good indies were also killed off by the same thing that was ultimately to kill boarders and drive so much downward spiral at Banza Noble, which was Amazon. Now these same huge stores are really the only store across great swathes of the United States. And they are actually still magnificent. I mean, I was in Cleveland, I hired.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was a time when the big chains were somewhat homogenous, and that was the threat to the book industry, right? Barnes& Noble at its peak was a national monster. It could drive the cultural discourse in this country by dint of just putting a book at the front of the store, whether or not the book was good. The independent bookstallers hated Barnes& Noble for this reason. And like you said, the stores were getting bigger and bigger and bigger in a way that I think the last time I walked into one of the giant Barnes& Noble stores and sort of the early 2000s, I was shocked. I was like, I don't even think I can make it through the entire store. This is a warehouse. This is Costco for books. That was a very different moment, right? When Barnes& Noble was the behemoth. Now you're saying it's a necessary condition of having bookshops. How have you made it so that people don't think you're the behemoth?”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What you'd left and forgotten about is that people come to bookstores to enjoy themselves. They come to meet other people. They come for the social experience. They come to browse and look at books. that it's a very sort of richly textured, actually emotional engagement that customers have with bookstores. And independent booksellers do that brilliantly. They understand their customers. They curate for their customers. And the big chains had simply stopped doing that. Well, I don't think they'd ever done it in truth. And therefore, the business was failing.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You actually end up with a blended average of everything that satisfies no one. And there was also a misunderstanding that it was simply about racking up the books, as many titles as possible, so that if you woke up in the morning and you wondered a book, you drove to your bookstore, you walked in, you asked a bookseller, they took you to the book, you took, picked up the book and you bought it and you went away. Well, Amazon does all of that process dramatically better.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think put it another way they were hiring in various executives one after another from other retailers, each of them bringing a very rational chain retail philosophy, which is that you try and run a very consistent retail operation, that you use your scale and leverage both for operational efficiencies and purchasing efficiencies. And that works pretty much across the board, whether your Best Buy, Staples, Zara, H&M, whatever it is. Each of those seeks to put an identical store pretty much in front of its customers in a very coherent, very precise planogrammed retail offer. And that's what they wanted to do with the bookstores. The trouble with when you've got Amazon as a competitor, you have to give people a reason to come into your bookstore. It has to be interesting and engaging. And for books, that isn't a single defined proposition.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, when you took over in 2019, it wasn't a block. The company was in a tailspin 150 stores had closed since the peak in 2008. There was management turnover. Its competitors in the United States were failing. Borders had failed. It seems like what Barnes& Noble and borders before were trying to do were to compete head on with Amazon, right? To take in a bunch of centralized management functions to increase efficiency to use the stores as warehouses to distribute online, to effectively do it Walmart is trying to do with Amazon today in some much larger and disparate way. But as it relates to books, the strategy for Bronze and Oil seem to be will just be Amazon in a different way. And that had failed. Why do you think that had failed so badly?”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They bought Waterston's, so that was the first step. It was only once they bought Waterstones that the obvious fact of what seemed to be the impending fate of Barnzer Noble and then the very public one because Barnz and Noble was put on the block. It was put up for sale. And we were a very obvious purchaser.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Always worked for me that I've been sort of motivators, as I say, to run really good bookshops. And to the extent one has a partner alongside you to write the initial checks and obviously prosper from writing that check, that's a necessary part of it. And I originally actually had a Russian businessman who provided the backing for the acquisition of Waterstones. And then, as you say, Elliot, who are the private equity owner of Waterstons and Naubarnes& Noble. So, I mean, I think we have a common purpose, or at least we have a common goal to different motivations.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, no, obviously my pitch to them was you're going to make tons of money. That's the pitch that's going to work. But I was able to say, well, look, we've done it perfectly successfully in the United Kingdom. And if we did the same thing in the United States, it'll be a very good investment for you. So that was the pitch. Reality in terms of the motivation to do it is that one, you know, I'm a bookseller, I love bookstores, I think bookstores have a real importance within communities and a value in their own right.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That part of your pitch to Elliot, hey, I see this thing that's about to happen. Let me take over Barnes Noble and I will at least ameliorate the problem or hold it at bay as well as potentially succeed.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I think it's following the same sort of broad logic, which is that to survive as an independent bookseller in the United Kingdom, one needed autisticans to survive with a certain amount of arrogance believed that I had an answer as to how to do that, which incidentally is simply to stop managing it as a chain and let each of the stores behave like an independent bookseller. And then we got to the point where obviously Bonza Noble was also getting itself into significant trouble. And we look across from the very, very small United Kingdom to the US where the market has dramatically bigger, but where it's exactly the same publishers, all headquartered in New York City, by the way, publishing the same books as we are selling in the United Kingdom and seeing a structure of the trade, which is potentially going to fall to a simple single retail partner in Amazon, obviously an online.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It isn't like that. I mean, the Goliath is Amazon and the reality for booksellers is that you need all of the infrastructure, independent booksellers, that is, you need the infrastructure from publishers, all the distribution and the reps and focus on physical bookstores to survive. And that's really only there because this great huge chain, Walterston's in the UK, Barnes and Noble in the United States, without which probably that would fall away and it would just sort of end up being a few independents sort of trying to scrabble around and survive alongside a industry which sort of has publishers on one side and Amazon on the other. So no, as an independent, one looks at now, looks at these big chains as a friend, not an enemy.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was the last or is the last sort of large bookseller in the United States, frankly, with so few independent bookstores, if you want bookstores in the country, then Barnes& Noble needs to survive. And it would take a very, very, very long time for anybody to recreate it.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“James Dosh, you are the CEO of Barnes Noble and of Waterstens, UK. Welcome to Decod I'm very excited to talk to you. Barnes Noble is a legendary retailer in the United States. It has been around for over 100 years. Let me just start at the very beginning. You are somewhat a new CEO. You took over in 2019. Did it factor into your decision making to take this job that this was a hundred year old brand that you had to somehow chaperone into its next hundred years”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so here in this episode, he definitely still sees himself that way. He is an evangelist of reading who seems spiritually driven to encourage more people to engage with and buy books. At the same time, he's clear that his bosses at private equity company Elliot Advisors are assuming he'll make them a bunch of money. James also passionately believes that there's no better way to discover a new book than by going into a bookstore, and that that experience can't really be replicated online by Amazon or Booktalk or anyone else. We get into all of it. We get into the culture wars and J.K. Rowling, we get into book band bills in states across the country, and we talk about how Barnes& Noble went from being the bully on the block to competing with Amazon. This is a really fun episode. James Dawn, CEO of Barnes& Noble. Here we go.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT