Barnes & Noble says its restaurants are failing – Quartz

In 2016, Barnes & Noble announced a plan to attract new customers with a menu of wines and beers and salmon at $ 24. The new seated restaurants sparked speculation that the struggling bookseller was trying to save himself with food.

Five restaurants and two years later, it seems that the results are resounding: No.

In a call for results, B & N President Len Riggio said he did not have much hope for Barnes & Noble Kitchen. "The best line in the restaurants is good; the result is terrible, "he said. "It's a very mixed bag," he said.

While the company will continue to improve its Starbucks in-store coffees, the restaurant concept seems to have been fairly predictable, with the "key problem that we do not have the culture of restaurant management", said Riggio. . "We have no experience in the hospitality industry. Things like controlling food costs or salary costs are not in our DNA. "

You can not really blame the company for trying, though. The health of Barnes & Noble is essential to the success of the great American book industry. Experimenting with new store layouts may indeed be crucial for the chain to survive in the Amazon era.

But for the moment, B & N is also struggling with a very public leadership crisis – and probably very distracting. In July, the company fired its CEO Demos Parneros without severance pay after 15 months of work, citing unspecified violations of company policy. Last week, Parneros filed a lawsuit for unfair dismissal and accused Riggio, who founded the book chain, of being a bully who directed his ouster. During today's appeal, Riggio again denied the charges and denounced Parneros. He also said that an active search for a new CEO has not started yet.