Maybe my reading of the article is colored by the fact that I have become a frequent shopper at B&N within the last two years, but no, I go to B&N to get books, and so do many others, as evidenced by the statement in the article that sales are rising.
I don't know that I really disagree with anything you're saying about discovery and so on, but you keep describing it as a key insight of the article which doesn't seem to talk about it even a little bit. It sounds like your key insight, maybe, although the article seems to offer counter-evidence to your claim.
> Amazon seems invincible. … If [Toys R Us] couldn’t compete with Amazon, how could B&N hope to do any better?
> Daunt started giving more power to the stores,”
for example by
> ask[ing] employees in the outlets to take every book off the shelf, and re-evaluate whether it should stay.
I suppose I drew from this that those local employees were producing a better atmosphere for book-browsers than publishers’ marketing budgets had, and took that as evidence of this “discovery” strategy. Does that strike you as a stretch?
The “get books” wording may have been more confusing than clever. For my part, I hoped to convey that I (maybe you too?) go to B&N to browse books even when I’m not looking for anything in particular, not that I go for things other than books.
I don't know that I really disagree with anything you're saying about discovery and so on, but you keep describing it as a key insight of the article which doesn't seem to talk about it even a little bit. It sounds like your key insight, maybe, although the article seems to offer counter-evidence to your claim.