I. Company Background In 1965, Leonard Riggio established the Student Book Exchange (SBX) in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. After adding six other college bookstores by the 1970s, Mr. Riggio's business acquired the flagship Barnes & Noble trade name and the declining flagship bookstore in Manhattan. In just a few years the Barnes & Noble bookstore became “The World's Largest Bookstore” with 150,000 textbook and trade titles. Along with opening smaller discount bookstores, the company added two local chains, BookMasters and Marboro Books, converting them to Barnes & Noble discount stores. Although successful in the beginning and growing to 50 locations, slowly the discount stores were weeded out in favor of Barnes & Noble's larger-format book superstores. During the 1980s, the company began trying to produce a suburban superstore version of the first Barnes & Noble bookstore. Buying B. Dalton Bookseller's 797 retail bookstores from Dayton Hudson in 1987 resulted in Barnes & Noble becoming a nationwide retailer and the second-largest bookseller in America. The company further expanded by purchasing …show more content…
The company made the choice to move ahead with the new age of eCommerce. Barnes & Noble came up with the idea to create a product of its own, the NOOK, to implement into the eReader market. Within the last couple years, Barnes & Noble has come up with several different types of NOOKs and the like to try to stay within the competition of the eMarket. Another strategy that was implemented was the installation of coffee shops and various items other than books, such as music and toys, to try and appeal to a wider variety of customers to come to the company’s brick and mortar stores so as to not solely focus on keeping up with the online competition. On the other side of that strategy they also negotiated shorter term leases on a lot of the physical buildings in case of the need to close the