The end of brick-and-mortar bookstores
In case anyone didn’t know. But even when you know something bad is going to happen, when it finally happens it’s still sad.
Not that I’ve ever heard of this bookstore chain. The store pictured in the article looks very prole.
I personally will never buy another paper book if I can help it, they take up too much space and are very heavy. Maybe if I had a permanent house with a lot of empty rooms with empty bookshelves to fill up… but I don’t have that.
Also I don’t read books as much as I used to because the internet has damaged my attention span. I still haven’t finished reading Stranger in a Strange Land.
Lion of the Blogosphere 
” I don’t read books as much as I used to because the internet has damaged my attention span.”
I feel the same way. This is an interesting phenomenon. Although it may simply be that the internet has rendered long-form books obsolete. Hard to know for sure.
Two in the Bush
December 30, 2017 at 9:59 AM
That has bugged me personally as well. As a kid and a young person, I was a voracious reader and would read several books a week. Now? Maybe one or two a year. That bothered me for a long time but in a discussion with a friend on that issue we figured that the internet has occupied much more of our reading time. And it’s true, I read several blogs like this one a day, so the time spent reading is probably equivalent.
Mike Street Station
December 31, 2017 at 11:25 AM
Interestingly, the article indicates that the market share of e-books more or less plateaued a few years back, but that paper book sales have been shifting rapidly to online.
Also, I don’t think that Stranger in a Strange Land is necessarily the best gauge of one’s attention span. I was 14 when I read it and found it pretty rambling. I may have even skipped ahead some myself.
Jokah Macpherson
December 30, 2017 at 10:14 AM
And unedited version is even twice as rambling as that! But it’s the rambling where Heinlein’s true essence shines.
Lion of the Blogosphere
December 30, 2017 at 10:18 AM
This bookstore is really ugly aesthetically and I think it closed its doors as a result. Furthermore, they had the same generic inventory found in Amazon, and customers were thinking subconsciously, why make a trip to a rather unremarkable bookstore, where I waste my gas and time, something that could be had in Amazon in second and minutes.
JS
December 30, 2017 at 11:48 AM
You’re obviously ignorant of the history of the Borders chain They had very attractive stores, lots of wood and good carpets, not to mention Peet’s coffee, but went belly up anyway.
Explainer 21
December 30, 2017 at 4:06 PM
Yeah, and they also sold the same books found in Barnes & Noble and Amazon.
JS
December 30, 2017 at 6:01 PM
I don’t think you finished UTOPIA either, did you?
I never finish online books (for example, UTOPIA, which I started reading online in order to read it along with you); I almost always finish physical books though. The reason that I don’t finish online books may be that I don’t see them when I’m not reading them, so they don’t figure in my mental map of important objects in my environment — also that the activity of reading them doesn’t register in my memory as a significant activity, so I don’t have it in mind as something to return to.
Garr
December 30, 2017 at 10:21 AM
In college, I had a one or two East Asian classmates who were repulsed by the idea of reading good books as part of the Western Canonical Tradition, and unsurprisingly they made this grievance to the professor, also citing it as Eurocentrism. One of them couldn’t wait to start his studies in Finance 101, where he would be reading textbooks. I call them instruction manuals.
JS
December 30, 2017 at 11:01 AM
Did JS’s gf was asian who left him or his white gf left him for some asian dude. JS’s asian obsession is right behind is prole obsession!!
mpt
December 30, 2017 at 12:04 PM
Last semester I read sections from Brave New World and 1984 out loud to my “students” (the “boss conversation sections” in which the Evil System is justified and explained by Mustapha Mond and O’Brien, respectively.) I read the chapter “The Scouring of the Shire” (from The Return of the King) out loud to a class during a previous semester, because it isn’t in the movie (most of them looked at their phones throughout). I read half of the Iliad to a class before that. I’m currently typing all of the J. R. Isidore chapters from PKDick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Blade Runner) in order to read this to “students” during the spring semester. I don’t find that East Asians object to being read to; they’re probably unaware that it’s happening.
Garr
December 30, 2017 at 12:15 PM
Assuming that your classmates were attending university in a Western country, I believe the professor’s proper response would have been to point out that if they wished to avoid exposure to the Western intellectual tradition, they probably shouldn’t have chosen a university in the West.
ice hole
December 30, 2017 at 12:17 PM
Reading JS’s comments is prole.
Panther of the Blogocube
December 30, 2017 at 4:02 PM
“Reading JS’s comments is prole.”
Thread win!
Mike Street Station
December 31, 2017 at 11:28 AM
I just bought a paper book on Amazon for $4 which turned out to be much bigger and heavier than I thought it would be. It’s a memoir by a NYC cop who worked the Bronx projects. Never would have been carried by a bookstore. I’m also finding my attention span diminished by web browsing, as I find myself skimming this book a lot.
mel belli
December 30, 2017 at 10:31 AM
What’s the book?
Russ
December 30, 2017 at 6:44 PM
Blue Blood, Edward Conlon. Just fair.
mel belli
January 3, 2018 at 1:09 PM
My physical book reading has gone way down as well. I am always getting books out of the library in the forlorn hope I will read them. Of course, in my case getting married and having a kid in the past 10 years has also affected it…
jimbo
December 30, 2017 at 10:35 AM
“Not that I’ve ever heard of this bookstore chain. The store pictured in the article looks very prole”
From the NYT article: Book World, founded in 1976, sold hardcovers, paperbacks and sometimes tobacco in malls, downtowns and vacation areas across the Upper Midwest.
The only place in NYC that really entices me to buy a new English language book without hesitation is the gift shop at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Of course, the interior design of the shop has a lot do with it.
JS
December 30, 2017 at 10:50 AM
do they use fleur de lis wallpaper?
gm
December 30, 2017 at 1:43 PM
I got a Kindle and that increased my reading as I can more easily read in a reclining position and don’t have to worry about the light. I downloaded Moldbug’s An Introduction to Unqualified Reservations and I’m re-reading that. Much easier on the Kindle and it only cost a couple of dollar.
Curle
December 30, 2017 at 11:07 AM
Going to bookstores and owning books is a good way of signalling that you are an intellectual so I think some traditional bookstores will last a long time in places like the Upper West Side.
But yeah, I stopped buying paper books a few months back. What triggered it was that I went on an international trip and wanted something to read on the plane while saving a little space and weight with my bag. I finished the book while overseas and was able to download the sequel in seconds while sitting in a foreign airport. Buying the physical version of the sequel would have been difficult or impossible. And certainly time-consuming.
As for Stranger in a Strange Land, it was never a very easy book to slog through. Have peoples’ attention spans diminished over the years? The other day I watched Planet of the Apes from 1968 and was a bit surprised how slow-moving it was. Were people more patient back then? Or has the quality of films improved in terms of editing and pacing?
fortaleza84
December 30, 2017 at 11:18 AM
“Were people more patient back then? Or has the quality of films improved in terms of editing and pacing?”
Both.
Lion of the Blogosphere
December 30, 2017 at 11:29 AM
…yet people binge-watch these multi-season every-darn-detail saga spectacles like Lost or Gilmore Girls that make Planet of the Apes 1968 look like a zippy commercial.
Robert
December 30, 2017 at 12:27 PM
I never watched Gilmore Girls but maybe I should.
Lion of the Blogosphere
December 30, 2017 at 1:19 PM
My girls love gilmore girls, I thought it was mind numbingly boring and saccharine. The dialogue has a bizarre, one uppy, peppy pacing- I’ve never heard people actually speak like that to each other in the real world.
toomanyspiders
December 30, 2017 at 3:51 PM
I wish science fiction / fantasy movies moved much more slowly — the pace of Space Odyssey 2001 seems ideal. That Star Wars movie in which Anakin turns into Darth Vader should have been a creeping-along psycho-drama with 5-minute-long shots of Anakin’s barely-moving face. For most of the movie he should have just been sitting in a darkened room, brooding. Now and then someone could have come into the room and exchanged enigmatic remarks with him. There would be close-up shots of one of his blinking eyes … closer, into the iris .. what’s that shadowy thing reflected there? He looks at his hand, turns his hand over as if thinking, “What is this strange instrument?” The camera zooms in on his rotating hand; rotation is in ultra-slow motion.
Garr
December 30, 2017 at 12:37 PM
The UWS doesn’t have many bookstores. There’s the Columbia University bookstore which serve mainly its students, and it’s a franchise of Barnes and Nobles. There are about one or two independents along the UWS that stretches from Lincoln Center to Morningside Heights.
JS
December 30, 2017 at 12:45 PM
Intellectual stuff like that is found more downtown.
Lion of the Blogosphere
December 30, 2017 at 1:23 PM
The irony — the UWS has the most residents with advanced degrees.
JS
December 30, 2017 at 1:25 PM
The UWS is not known for good shopping or good restaurants. It was a traditionally middle-class and prole neighborhood.
However there is Book Culture at 536 West 112th which is in the Columbia University neighborhood.
But because of rising NYC rents on account of rich value transferers making the city more unaffordable, and people buying books on the internet, there are definitely a lot fewer bookstores than there used to be.
Lion of the Blogosphere
December 30, 2017 at 1:27 PM
That’s not so, there is a big Barnes & Nobles at 83rd and Broadway. There are also numerous independent bookstores.
fortaleza84
December 30, 2017 at 4:36 PM
However, the big Barnes & Noble near Lincoln Center on Broadway closed several years ago.
Lion of the Blogosphere
December 30, 2017 at 5:46 PM
There was a double bookshop on Broadway in the West 90s — the mystery bookshop Murder Ink (which had previously been located elsewhere on the UWS) and its adjoining general-interest companion store, Ivy’s. I used to go to both and actually buy books I didn’t especially want, just to support them. (I don’t necessarily recommend this, but I’ll bet there are lots of other bookish types who do it as well.) One day, shortly before the 2004 election, I walked past Ivy’s window and found it filled with a display of anti-Bush books, with not a single pro-GOP title among them. The owner must have figured that on the Upper West Side, no one could possibly disagree with him; or else he was just a fervent Bush hater and didn’t care who knew it. In annoyance, I stopped patronizing both stores. They closed in, I believe, late 2006, though I’m sure my boycott had nothing to do with it. I actually wrote a nasty vindictive email to the departing owner, telling him why I’d stopped buying his books and saying essentially “Good riddance.” I have to add that he sort of shamed me by writing a fairly nice, sad, courteous but unpersuasive letter back, denying that he’d tried to make a political statement in his store window.
Simon
December 31, 2017 at 4:22 AM
I wouldn’t sell books on Dubya if I ran a right wing bookshop.
JS
December 31, 2017 at 9:43 AM
“Have peoples’ attention spans diminished over the years? The other day I watched Planet of the Apes from 1968 and was a bit surprised how slow-moving it was. Were people more patient back then? Or has the quality of films improved in terms of editing and pacing?”
I think I’ve posted about that very issue on this blog before. Watching hour long dramas from the 60’s and 70’s shows how TV production, and the way shows are written and shot have changed radically. Compare watching an original series Star Trek with today’s Discovery and it seems like Discovery action is rapid fire, compared to the old show showing long walks in the corridor having actual conversations. That’s why kids today can’t watch old TV shows. For them, it’s like watching TV in molasses.
Mike Street Station
December 31, 2017 at 11:34 AM
Sitcoms also had much fewer jokes in them in the 70’s. Compare Mary Tyler Moore to 30 Rock.
ScarletNumber
January 1, 2018 at 9:20 PM
As the article points out, B&N tried branching into other departments like toys and test prep. It hasn’t worked out so they’re going to focus back on books. About four years ago the B&N on staten island got rid of its big comfy chairs. Why?? People enjoy the experience of going to a bookstore, they should make it as welcoming and homey as possible. Has anyone been to one of the amazon stores? What are they like?
toomanyspiders
December 30, 2017 at 12:00 PM
The last time I was in the nearest B&N, maybe a year to 18 months ago, I was very very surprised at how few, you know, books it had. At least half of the floor space on the ground floor was taken up by assorted knickknacks and by the cafe. While the second floor was devoted to book selling, the shelves were so widely spaced that much of the floor was just empty space. Just a few years earlier the store probably had 3x as many actual books.
Peter
ironrailsironweights
December 30, 2017 at 7:02 PM
My local B&N in North Jersey has also gotten rid of its comfortable chairs. There are a few wooden chairs for those who simply have to sit, plus the ones in the cafe. I also noticed that a tremendous amount of floor space is taken up by non-book items, such as board games. If Dave is reading this, I’m not referring to either of the two B&N that you mentioned.
ScarletNumber
January 1, 2018 at 8:59 PM
What I find sadder is how books are disappearing from public libraries. The todt hill branch has 50% the books it held not 10 years ago, the children’s section is even worse, around 30%. It’s mostly floor space now.
toomanyspiders
December 30, 2017 at 12:15 PM
It’s great that obscure books that nobody in Bumville was ever checking out are being sold to vendors and winding up on the internet market. I’ve purchased ex-library books that hadn’t been checked out in 30 or 40 years.
Richard
December 30, 2017 at 1:22 PM
The libertarians are big on Great Books, and there is a narrative favoring Great Books of all cultures and interdisciplinary studies.
The big problem of B & M stores is the local tax bases haven’t adjusted to lower/no property taxes. Libertarians were correct in urging towns to move away from coerced taxation to endowment funding.
Robert
December 30, 2017 at 12:23 PM
Barnes and Noble has been switching from the big box model to running college bookstores. They’re probably making more money on sweatshirts than books now.
Aristippus
December 30, 2017 at 12:26 PM
How will movies handle the need for cute but smart girls to run into not so cute but funny guys if there are no bookstores? I’m thinking of When Harry Met Sally.
BTW – is the 80s movie device of sending buddies to the park to hit baseballs and talk about girls now officially ancient history?
Curle
December 30, 2017 at 12:40 PM
I would have to watch all the romcom movies of 2017 and see what the trend is.
Lion of the Blogosphere
December 30, 2017 at 1:22 PM
You should review When Harry Met Sally. Pretty unrealistic in hindsight, funny but average guy getting super hottie.
Curle
December 30, 2017 at 1:51 PM
Meg Ryan is so cute!!!!
Lion of the Blogosphere
December 30, 2017 at 2:21 PM
“Pretty unrealistic in hindsight, funny but average guy getting super hottie.”
Maybe Billy Crystal’s character had solid game (I don’t know for sure; it’s been years since I saw the movie myself).
Jokah Macpherson
December 30, 2017 at 3:24 PM
“Meg Ryan is so cute!!!!”
Not at 56.
Jokah Macpherson
December 30, 2017 at 3:24 PM
28-year-old Meg Ryan is so cute!!!!!!!!!!
Lion of the Blogosphere
December 30, 2017 at 3:33 PM
I don’t watch many romantic comedies (or romance movies in general) but my impression is that more and more of them are pandering to female moviegoers by having multiple men pursuing the female lead while the male lead has no love interest other than the female lead.
fortaleza84
December 30, 2017 at 4:40 PM
That’s how you know a woman wrote the script.
Mike Street Station
December 31, 2017 at 11:39 AM
Bookstores went out as a place to meet cute chicks as far back as 1998 when “You’ve got mail” came out – also starring Meg Ryan (still cute at 37 y/o) and ordinary-looking and kind of wimpy Tom Hanks.
Back over ten years ago, I met two attractive younger women at the public library. Both were job hunting using the public computers – a good indicator of proleness, unemployment, and lack of funds; not good features in a prospective dating partner. A few years ago, the computer section was slowly taking over space in public libraries (and being dominated by vagrants), but with the proliferation of smart phones, even for the underclass, I wonder if public libraries are slowly divesting of public-use computers.
E. Rekshun
December 31, 2017 at 5:53 AM
I couldn’t disagree more. A paper book is a different medium. I look at a screen all day and the act of switching to a paper book feels good. I even subscribe to a few outdoorsy magazines (the photography is beautiful even if the writing is kind of lame).
NYC is much less interesting ever since the record shops and book shops began to disappear. I walk around my old haunts in the East Village once a year and I see lots of chains, banks, Starbucks, and restaurants/bars. I used to love browsing in bookstores and record shops.
I think the paper book store will go the way of vinyl records (sort of a smaller, throw back specialty experience).
I always fantasized about opening a right wing book shop but I know that it would just get firebombed.
SWPL2
December 30, 2017 at 1:07 PM
I would be the curator of your right wing bookshop. I’ll stock up on titles about the Spanish Reconquista, Charlemagne, the Spanish Inquisition, the Protestant Reformation, the Spanish Civil War, the rise of Italian Fascism and German Nazism. Although any Alt-right material should be written off as too prole to sell.
I found the publisher Prometheus Books sort of leaning on the right. I know they publish books by writers who are explicit Islamophobes, and they end up on the shelves of Barnes and Nobles and the Strand. It’s quite shocking, but maybe not, because of their attractive book covers. Never judge a book by its covers, but I guess liberals do.
JS
December 30, 2017 at 1:57 PM
Lol’d on the right wing book shop. I’ve had similar thoughts cross my mind as well, but I just don’t think the customer base is large enough. The people I see in B&N don’t generally look like Trump voters and judging from shelf space allocation and bestseller lists, most of the money is in romance/mystery/spy novels, light fiction for women, children’s books, self-help slop, and whoever the latest person or place is that’s being killed by Bill O’Reilly.
Jokah Macpherson
December 30, 2017 at 3:30 PM
You’re absolutely right. It’s not about making money. It would literally be an act of trolling more than anything else. I used to fantasize about putting a sign above the doorway, “ALL ARE WELCOME”.
I could even imagine the local news coming to interview me. “Coming up next on Newschannel 4, the HATE STORE…next door!” and then having a mystery-meat Asian/black newsgal jam a microphone in face (“So, uh, would people like ME be welcome in your store?!?!?”). “Yes, of course,” I would say, under the glare of the most unflattering light they could set up. “All races and creeds are equally welcome to learn the truth.”
Then a hit piece in the New Yorker would follow where each and every childhood acquaintance would be interviewed for embarrassing anecdotes about how I was “a geek” in high school before I became a fringe racist. Then Chelsea Handler or some other gross fem-fameball would Tweet about me having a “small penis”. Then some Antifa hero would firebomb the store and the police would have zero clues and would let the case fade from memory.
Then I would end up in the mountains somewhere, eating beans on toast, and browsing /pol/ and drinking IPA’s until the day my estranged sons, having finally swallowed the red pill themselves, descended upon my remote cabin with a cache of rifles and army rations. “Papa, can the revolution begin now?”.
It’s good to dream.
SWPL2
December 30, 2017 at 4:22 PM
Low brow and it’s obvious that your idea of a right wing bookstore will be firebombed and this becomes its ultimate fate.
How about “Right Books”? Inventory includes rare, used and new books on right wing movements and events, and works written by intellectual racists and reactionaries.
Some European bookstores have recently stocked on recent edition of the Mein Kampf suited for researchers and scholars in the original German with commentary.
JS
December 30, 2017 at 6:19 PM
You could call it Kulturkampf Books & Pastries.
Mike Street Station
December 31, 2017 at 11:44 AM
From that NYT article again: I don’t like doing things online, so I won’t be buying books there,” said Susan Briggs, a former substitute teacher buying a collection of Emerson essays in Mequon. “Technology is going to be the downfall of civilization”
So Mrs. Briggs is a self confessed Luddite, who likes to deal with messy bureaucracy and unsavory people who are part of it. She used to be a substitute teacher which is very prole.
JS
December 30, 2017 at 1:10 PM
I haven’t been to a bookstore in more than 10 years. The books I want would never be found there, they’re either out of print or too unpopular to keep in stock. You can find everything cheaper on a website anyway.
Richard
December 30, 2017 at 1:17 PM
“However there is Book Culture at 536 West 112th which is in the Columbia University neighborhood.”
This is an excellent bookstore and worth checking out if you are in the area. The neighborhood has a large cathedral and university, both worth visiting. Sometimes this blog gives out useful information.
I agree that New York City, and life in general, is less interesting without the book and record stores.
Ed
December 30, 2017 at 2:05 PM
Don’t forget the St. John’s the Divine Cathedral which located on 112th and Amsterdam, which isn’t far off from Columbia University, and it has a gift shop that sells religious titles.
Many years ago, they gave a concert on Alfonso the Wise’s Cantigas, the songs of the medieval Spanish ruler who infused Christian and Islamic learning in his life, but was a devout Christian.
This is perhaps the only worthy concert that I’ve attended in NYC. Everything else is just circle jerk or too prole for my taste.
JS
December 30, 2017 at 3:26 PM
Note: I just stopped into St. John the Divine a month ago and was told that there’s no longer a gift shop. I have fond memories of the place.
Simon
December 31, 2017 at 4:27 AM
No no no.
I love bookstores. They will make a comeback. Perhaps Amazon will open up a a luxury bookstore with couches and hookah pipes and maybe even medical marijuana.
gothamette
December 30, 2017 at 2:57 PM
In the future, people will go to stores for the EXPERIENCE and not because they need to buy anything. The store will have to make money by making people feel guilty for not buying something, or encourage impulse purchases. Or maybe they will charge admission.
Lion of the Blogosphere
December 30, 2017 at 3:19 PM
There’s always real bookshops. Internationally that is.
Soon SWPLs will flock to Paris, because that’s where the unique books are found.
Most American independent bookstores aren’t very original in their offerings. If you run a bookshop that has a cookie cutter inventory of Amazon’s then why bother.
JS
December 30, 2017 at 3:48 PM
Successful independent bookstores just don’t sell whatever Barnes & Noble and Amazon sell, unless they curate books for a subject matter instead of coming across a general bookstore.
But still, someone can just visit the store and look for what is good and then go to their computer and order from Amazon, because the book is new and readily available in large quantities, and cheaper online.
The most successful of them sell a combination of rare/collectible (usually housed in a locked up bookcase), used and new books, to entice people to buy.
JS
December 31, 2017 at 11:33 AM
amazon should open cozy bookstores – slash – lounges accessible only to prime members.
toomanyspiders
December 30, 2017 at 3:57 PM
There are plenty of book cafes in America, if you talking about cozy and reading.
Do you think slapping an Amazon logo on them will become more profitable, because Americans like to patronize big plutocracies which bring us to mess that we have now?
JS
December 30, 2017 at 5:39 PM
Supposedly the reason b&n removed their comfy chairs (I googled after I asked) is because homeless people were falling asleep in them and teenagers were doing non-book reading activities upon them.
The prime membership would filter out both groups. Maybe costco could open book-lounges with the same result.
toomanyspiders
December 30, 2017 at 6:35 PM
B&N hire black thugs in uniform to keep them away in the 1st place.
I guess Amazon Prime members get to sip lattes with a peace of mind that unnerving darkies and the homeless are nowhere in sight.
JS
December 30, 2017 at 9:31 PM
Am I the only one whose attention span hasn’t gotten worse in the last decade???
Jokah Macpherson
December 30, 2017 at 3:39 PM
Mine has stayed the same but I’ve always found movies, old or new tedious. Documentaries are a lot more interesting.
toomanyspiders
December 30, 2017 at 4:00 PM
But have you noticed that a lot of docs run 90 min but run out of interesting material in 20 minutes?
Curle
December 30, 2017 at 5:04 PM
Not really. I could watch a documentary about dirt and be transfixed for 90 minutes.
toomanyspiders
December 30, 2017 at 6:36 PM
I have ADHD and that gets better with age, but my memory and ability to find my way in unfamiliar surroundings got worse. Used to not get lost, not anymore.
Yakov
December 30, 2017 at 8:06 PM
There are two Barnes & Noble locations near me (Hackensack and Paramus, NJ) and they’re both doing fine. Both have cafes and sell fancy chocolates, toys, etc. in addition to books.
Also, Amazon has its own bricks & mortar bookstore in the Garden State Plaza mall in Paramus.
Stranger in a Strange Land is okay, but not as good as Heinlein’s The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. There’s a lot better recent sci-fi, including Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves (which has an HBD component), and Liu Cixin’s Three Body trilogy. You’re missing out on some great stuff.
David Pinsen
December 30, 2017 at 4:05 PM
I read Orphans in the Sky recently and enjoyed it but became depressed later realizing that everyone I’m surrounded by is a lower level dweller and they have contempt for any suggestion that they might be moving in space.
Curle
December 30, 2017 at 5:07 PM
The B&N on staten island is always busy, parking lot packed by 10am. Obviously they’re doing something right in terms of attracting customers but failing somehow on revenue.
toomanyspiders
December 30, 2017 at 6:49 PM
Many people visit the B&Ns in Manhattan to use their public restrooms. They also offer free wifi and you can read their books while sipping a beverage. The place attracts proles and better behaved NAMs. It’s disgusting like many of the NY Public Libraries!
JS
December 30, 2017 at 9:37 PM
that book shop is decorated like a budget store.
james n .s.w
December 30, 2017 at 4:15 PM
That’s because it’s going out of business. Everything must go.
It’s high time for a walk on the real side
Let’s admit the bastards beat us
I move to dissolve the corporation
In a pool of margaritas
So let’s switch off all the lights
Light up all the Luckies
Crankin’ up the afterglow
Cause we’re goin’ out of business
Everything must go….
Oswald Spengler
December 30, 2017 at 5:46 PM
I highly recommend audiobooks, if you’d like to “read”
neverhere
December 30, 2017 at 9:19 PM
All Bricks-and-Mortar retail is going to have a hard time going forward. I wouldn’t touch a retail stock, better off speculating with Bitcoin.
Throughout the 90s and 00s Edward Lampert was hailed as the next investor genius. With his ESL hedge fund he was getting year over year, Warren Buffet like returns. His investments were concentrated in 5-10 retail holdings. He wasn’t so smart. He just happened to start his hedge fund when retail was hot and he rode a 20 year boom.
He sunk a huge amount of money into Sears, now he is stuck with that mortally wounded retailer. I went to Sears a few weeks ago (for all things, to get the plastic band on my $15 Casio watch repaired). No kidding, 5 cars in the parking lot. Except for the workers, the store was empty.
The Sears real estate is not that valuable either. What other retailer would buy or lease a big box store where one has already failed so miserably? And the architecture of big box buildings makes them difficult to be turned towards other uses like offices, warehousing or residential. Sears is worth more dead than alive at this point. So are many Brick-and-Mortar businesses. Stay away from retail.
Daniel
December 31, 2017 at 12:15 AM
“The Sears real estate is not that valuable either. What other retailer would buy or lease a big box store where one has already failed so miserably? ”
That’s pretty insightful.
Lion of the Blogosphere
December 31, 2017 at 1:03 AM
I was questioning Lampert on Sears 9 years ago, as I noted here: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4081682-time-get-mom-bruce-berkowitzs-fund
David Pinsen
December 31, 2017 at 1:10 AM
I had to kill an hour last December (2016) while having my car repaired at a Sears Auto Center outside Kingston, NY, so I wandered around the huge adjoining store. Even with Christmas coming, I swear that the place was entirely empty except for me, some guy looking at tools, and half a dozen desperate-looking white middle-aged salespeople. One by one, as I strolled around, they would approach and ask if they could help me with anything. It was really, really horribly sad and depressing. I felt sorry for all of them and sorry for Sears.
Simon
December 31, 2017 at 4:40 AM
A rightwing bookstore may be a better idea than you think, a brick and mortar store offers value to right wingers: anonymous cash purchases that aren’t tracked by big data.
anonymous 14
December 31, 2017 at 12:51 PM
As long as you sell books that are of historical value pertaining to racist and reactionary subject matter, a right wing bookshop of this nature will continue to exist without interference from the authorities.
Still, I would wear a vest and carry a gun, because there are crazies out who will harm you after seeing your inventory of books that are specific to these topics.
JS
December 31, 2017 at 1:50 PM
Call me a pretentious status-signaler, but I’ll never stop enjoying paper books in part because I like to read books about exotic languages, some of which are impractical to put into digital form. You *can* digitize cuneiform and hieroglyphics and Linear B, but it doesn’t look good.
I also have a much easier time remembering what I’ve read in a book if it was set in its own distinctive font and has its own page numbering and typesetting. I can almost visualize the words and what part of the page they are on, and whether they’re on an odd or even page. Can’t do any of that with a generic text file in the Kindle’s default generic (but nice-looking, I admit) font.
And then there’s the ability to sell books when I’m done with them. Maybe if digital books had prices that were around one-tenth of the paper price, I’d be interested.
Kyo
January 3, 2018 at 9:16 AM