Barnes & Noble swapped big-box playbooks for bookseller freedom — and reopened (interview)
In a Fortune interview, CEO James Daunt explains how decentralizing 614 stores and cutting hierarchy took the chain from closing stores to opening 50.
What was changed
In an interview with Fortune published March 11, 2024, Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt described how the chain's turnaround works. When Elliott Management bought the company in 2019 and installed him — the bookseller who had already rescued Waterstones — he found a spiraling chain with poorly kept stores, wasted capital on fruitless tech products, and booksellers losing jobs just as Amazon made them the one reason to visit. His diagnosis: previous leaders applied big-box retail tenets — homogeneity and cost-cutting — to a business that lives or dies on bookselling.
The change was structural: Barnes & Noble now runs its 614 stores less like one national behemoth and more like a series of regional bookstores. Store managers decide what titles to carry, how to present them and how to motivate staff; the old hierarchy was dismantled, with stores grouped into clusters of four or five that share talent like visual merchandisers and event runners. Booksellers are trained to 'just say yes' to customer requests. Under Daunt the chain has also remodeled many stores with modular shelving and better lighting.
The results reverse a decade of contraction: after closing hundreds of stores in the 2010s, the chain plans to open about 50 stores in 2024, many smaller formats, and remains the last large bookstore chain standing in the US. Daunt flagged the weak spot — e-commerce is only 9% of sales on an outdated platform, to be fixed slowly, starting with the membership program.
Why it worked
Professional retailers, not booksellers, had been running the chain, applying big-box principles that prioritized uniformity over the customer's reason to visit.
Centralized decision-making had made stores identical and careers dead-ended, draining the talent that makes a bookstore work.
Daunt's model treats each store as responsive to local readers, on the theory that more bookstores grow the total market rather than divide it.
Turnarounds were deliberately slow: decentralization, cluster-level talent development and remodels compound over years rather than quarters.
What can be applied
In specialty retail, homogenized cost-cutting kills the thing customers came for: give local stores the freedom to stock and sell like locals, and growth follows slowly.
Aftermath
As of the March 2024 interview, Barnes & Noble was privately held under Elliott and did not disclose financials, but it was playing offense: about 50 new stores planned for 2024, many in smaller formats, remodels underway, and categories like vinyl, CDs, magazines, Lego and Pokémon carrying traffic — helped along by Taylor Swift's vinyl sales. The outstanding project Daunt named was e-commerce, stuck at 9% of sales on an aging platform, to be rebuilt on the back of a revitalized membership program.