Barnes & Noble Regroups and Looks Ahead (publishersweekly.com)

Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt began his tenure with a baptism by fire. He took over the role in September and made some tweaks to B&N’s holiday merchandising and a few personnel changes. He was expecting to make more extensive changes early this year. But then Covid-19 forced B&N to close all but 24 stores to in-person shopping.

By early July, all but one store had been reopened, Daunt told PW. The company is following all local mandates, including limiting the number of customers in each store at a given time, establishing social distancing protocols, and creating designated areas where customers can leave books they have touched but decided not to buy (those books are then sanitized before being returned to shelves).

It is Daunt’s belief that bookstores are fairly well constructed to operate in a coronavirus environment, since many, especially B&N outlets, are relatively large and can accommodate social distancing. He added, however, that B&N is being cautious and has adopted a go-slow approach to opening its cafés. “We are doing what we are told,” he said.

After Daunt was forced to close the majority of B&N’s stores, he decided to redesign 350 of them—a process that he had thought would take up to two years but that took about seven weeks with no foot traffic. He gave great credit to the booksellers who handled the shifts. “Every piece of furniture had to be moved,” he said. “All the shelves were moved.” The new look, he added, “is a substantial and dramatic change” that involved not only making the stores brighter but also reorganizing their book categories and improving the selection.
more at source: https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bookselling/article/83893-barnes-noble-regroups-and-looks-ahead.html