November 11, 2003
Go B&N! It's your Bday!
Bookworm - Barnes & Noble knows how to buy and sell ⦠stocks. By Daniel Gross
This article is generally good. I, of course, couldn't be happier about the outcome: It means I don't have to take a pay cut. But the last paragraph is wrong.
In the past three months, Barnes & Noble has offered to pay about $280 million for assets for which, in 1998 and 1999, it convinced investors to pay more than $830 million. The story would make excellent fodder for a book on great corporate asset sales and buybacks. But you wouldn't find that book prominently displayed in the window of the nation's largest book retailer.
One of the secrets of our success is that we will sell any book, if we think it will make money. And if we don't have it in, we will be happy to order it for you....
Indeed, that may be the secret to any future success of our online component. What we've really done is taken our chief liability (the need to warehouse books between shipments) and turned it into an asset. Essentially, we allowed our warehouses to be open to the public. The shipping cost gets passes on, and there should be very little extra overhead. Hell, our database is already extant, so other than the bandwidth and a few more people in the warehouses, there should not be anything new that needs creating...
The only way we'd loose money on the deal is if Amazon sells at less than they buy for, causing us to have to match. That would be bad for Amazon really quickly; we have more money...
Posted by Andrew at November 11, 2003 09:00 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.punningpundit.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/222
Comments
Interesting way to completely change the subject. Of course, since I still have enough residual Republican left in me to feel that fools and their money ought to be separated by all the means at society's disposal, I don't really agree B & N's critic, but you could have addressed the main point.
Posted by: John Foelster at November 12, 2003 05:15 PM