Sniffing the breeze

[unixronin]

Just sniffing the breeze ... I've been getting one holy hell of a lot of special offer promotions from Barnes & Noble lately.  The latest one, in today's mail, is 50% off all after-holiday merchandise (understandable) and all DVDs and Blu-Ray discs 3-for-2.  It makes me wonder:  Is B&N in trouble that they're not talking about publicly, and trying to whip up revenue any way they can?  Did their Christmas season sales fall far short of expectations because hardly anybody has spending money to spare?

We have $125 in B&N gift cards sitting here.  If B&N might be on shaky ground, I'm wondering whether we should use them now while we know we still can.  Has anyone heard anything...?

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[fruitylips.livejournal.com]

Not to mention that post-christmas is traditionally a slow time for retail. One of the biggest issues retail companies have is trying to flatten out revenue over the course of the entire year. BN does run a lot of college bookstores, which should help level that out some, but the revenue from those is very much less than they're in-store and online sales ($65mil last quarter vs. total revenue of $1.2bil).

Given that they reported quarterly earnings at the end of Nov and while not great, weren't that bad either, they're not going anywhere. They likely are concerned about the projected same store sales numbers (projecting -1-3% for full fiscal 2010), but overall revenue is was up 4% over 09q2. They're still expecting 10q3 EPS to be between $1.30 and $1.50.

They have a minor issue with the Nook in that sales of it were way higher than expected. It's cost them quite a bit to deal shortfalls in shipped units. Given that, they're accelerating production schedules, so production costs will be higher than they originally forecast.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

They have a minor issue with the Nook in that sales of it were way higher than expected.

Everyone should have such problems. ;)