valueyoda Posted June 26, 2014 Share Posted June 26, 2014 As much time as I have spent my entire life at Barnes & Noble, I think that both components will be terrible long term investments. The Nook has no viable chance of competing against the Kindle or Apple/Google devices and will need continous investment to cover the cash flow short falls. The regular bookstore business will remain stable for the next few years, primarily helped by the somewhat more stable college bookstore business, but will eventually lose out as well. Barnes and Noble is still gaining market share in a declining market, which helps stabilize revenues and EBITDA for now, but its structural disadvantage against Amazon will cause it to shrink rapidly in the next 5 years. The stock needs to be in the mid teens at least to be a reasonable shorter term investment. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PatientCheetah Posted June 26, 2014 Share Posted June 26, 2014 why don't they go into run off mode for nook? I do see a niche for the physical stores because it is a lot like Starbucks. It's a decent place to read and study or even socialize. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
valueyoda Posted June 26, 2014 Share Posted June 26, 2014 It is a great place to hang out and pre-read before ordering on Amazon. The price differential to Amazon is simply too large for most books to be attractive to customers. The highest turnover occurs with the new bestsellers that also have a large immediate price cut to be somewhat competitive to Amazon, while the lowest turnover occurs with older books that they can't get rid of. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
valueyoda Posted June 26, 2014 Share Posted June 26, 2014 That brings me to Books-A-Million, a much smaller regional listed book chain that is controlled by the Anderson family. That one most definitely is a melting ice cube. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
txvalue Posted March 18, 2019 Share Posted March 18, 2019 Anybody keeping an eye on this? We all know that large bookstores are now few and far between, but I have always felt with the proper product mix, staffing and management this could be a nice business for a private owner. The stores I visit continue to draw foot traffic and the cafe is always busy. As CorpRaider said years ago with the right owner this could generate a lot of cash. Cutting the dividend alone would save a material amount of cash. Mistakes have clearly been made over the past 10 - 15 years but it is a store I'd like to see survive. Over the past six months several stores I have visited have had the typical CD/DVD section replaced with toys, games and collectibles. There are still some DVD's but the mix has been greatly shifted towards toys and collectibles. They have done this or something along these lines at 91 of their 600 stores based on the last Q call. Probably not a game changer, but the selection is large enough that it seems to pull in families. It is doubtful Riggio ever punts, but there are several owners that could make sense here - even someone a bit out of left field like a Starbucks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Foreign Tuffett Posted March 18, 2019 Share Posted March 18, 2019 Anybody keeping an eye on this? We all know that large bookstores are now few and far between, but I have always felt with the proper product mix, staffing and management this could be a nice business for a private owner. The stores I visit continue to draw foot traffic and the cafe is always busy. As CorpRaider said years ago with the right owner this could generate a lot of cash. Cutting the dividend alone would save a material amount of cash. Mistakes have clearly been made over the past 10 - 15 years but it is a store I'd like to see survive. Over the past six months several stores I have visited have had the typical CD/DVD section replaced with toys, games and collectibles. There are still some DVD's but the mix has been greatly shifted towards toys and collectibles. They have done this or something along these lines at 91 of their 600 stores based on the last Q call. Probably not a game changer, but the selection is large enough that it seems to pull in families. It is doubtful Riggio ever punts, but there are several owners that could make sense here - even someone a bit out of left field like a Starbucks. The Barnes & Noble stores in my area also attract plenty of traffic. The issue is that retail booksellers have historically struggled to convert traffic to revenue. I believe that even pre-Amazon, mass market booksellers were doing low sales per square foot relative to other retailers. BKS' stores are overly large, which compounds this issue. My understanding is that the company has been for sale for some months....no clue if a deal will get done or not. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
txvalue Posted June 7, 2019 Share Posted June 7, 2019 Well this played out nicely, Elliot looking to take this out around 6.5 to 7 per the WSJ yesterday. Cashing this out and going to average down into AMC. Hope to see them change up management so the stores can become relevant for years to come. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-07/barnes-noble-to-be-bought-by-elliott-in-476-million-cash-deal?srnd=premium Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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