B&N to Use Online to Build Back Retail; Stock Up Despite Revenue Decline
There's “no shortage of people” applying for Barnes & Noble CEO after B&N fired Demos Parneros (see 1807050002), said Chairman Len Riggio on a Thursday earnings call. B&N's founder was candid about historical failures to compete in e-commerce. The emphasis…
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is on “healing, fixing, putting us in a position to be able to go out and get a CEO,” said Riggio. “We've got a lot of work to do right now. We're up for it.” The wrongful-termination complaint (in Pacer) Parneros filed Aug. 28 in U.S. District Court in Manhattan “is nothing but a smokescreen in an attempt to extort money,” said Riggio. The board voted unanimously to fire Parneros “based upon multiple events of significant misconduct, including sexual harassment, bullying behavior and other violations of company policies,” Riggio said. Lawyers for Parneros didn’t comment Friday. Meantime, the company is removing the Nook fixtures at the front of the store “that were once required to serve a larger business” in tablets, Riggio said. “For many, many years,” it had a problem “integrating” stores with a viable online business, he said. “We are not alone.” B&N “did not perform for many years up to expectations,” he said. The retailer thinks it has a team “that really knows how to work from the bottom up, customer to customer, book to book, transaction to transaction, to create a site that is viewed favorably by our customers and compares favorably to the best sites,” Riggio said. The goal is to “build our retail business with our site, which should have been the purpose of the site from day one,” he said. “We're pledged to do that, and we think that some of the customers that we've been bleeding over the past 15 years will begin to come back.” Also Thursday, the retailer reported sales fell 6.9 percent to $795 million in the quarter ended July 28 from the year-ago period. Comparable store sales declines improved each month of the quarter and last month. Friday, the stock closed Friday up 16 percent at $5.30.