How America Learned to Love Barnes & Noble Again

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Barnes & Noble was once the avatar for sinister big-box stores on the march against independent businesses. In 1998’s You’ve Got Mail, Tom Hanks plays an executive at Foxbooks, a thinly disguised bookstore chain, who puts out of business (and also, weirdly, seduces) an independent bookseller played by Meg Ryan. Local bookstores were, at the time, folding en masse, and people were mad about the growing predominance of chain retail.

Then Barnes & Noble got its comeuppance. In the years after the 2008 financial crisis, it closed more than 150 stores. To some extent, the bookstore was experiencing the same predicament of chain retail generally, which, after robust expansion that put mom-and-pop shops out of business, declined faster than independent stores in the age of e-commerce. Amazon was doing to Barnes & Noble what Barnes & Noble had done to local bookstores.

But today, in a world more online than ever, Barnes & Noble is experiencing a revival. It opened 60 new stores last year and plans to do the same this year. It is reportedly soliciting banks to handle an IPO—a sign that a turnaround effort by Elliott Investment Management, the hedge fund that took the company private in 2019, has reached its conclusion. Distinctions between chain and local have been superseded by the split between online and in-person shopping. Book-buying Americans, whose support for indie shops was one of the hallmarks of a progressive anti-chain movement that flourished in the 2000s, seem to be less discerning than they used to be. They’ll browse where they can.

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Daunt has gotten attention for a strategy that delegates authority to local store managers, letting them choose what books to stock and to promote. No longer does the New York headquarters cut a check from a Big Five publisher to place the season’s hot new memoir on front tables nationwide. If you go to a Barnes & Noble in New England, you might find a section on shipwrecks right at the front of the store. A store in the Florida Panhandle will have shelf after shelf of Bibles. A store in Washington, D.C., has, well, a lot of books about Washington, D.C.

In one respect, there’s a Barnes & Noble playbook for national chains to follow: delegation and diversification, creating more interesting stores (and more interesting jobs) at the local level.

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