And somehow Daunt magically beat the ogre at its own game and apparently, they will all live happily ever after.

The Forbes headline ran “How an Englishman In New York Turned The Page On Barnes & Noble”. Unfortunately there’s not much “how” in this Forbes post.

Hedge-fund buys B&N, appoints British CEO. CEO fires lots of people, uses savings and hedge-fund money to open new stores. The end.

That said, I did appreciate this little gem that was new to me:

Barnes & Noble has two Boston-area locations that were formerly Amazon Books stores (oh the irony) slated among 30 new stores due to open in 2023.

It was worth reading the Forbes article just for that. But that’s one of only three mentions of Amazon, and the other two contribute nothing we didn’t already know.

For our plot we have a traditional retailer threatened by a huge, new-fangled corporate (that will be Amazon)”, and “Barnes & Noble, like other physical booksellers, struggled for about a decade as Amazon and other online book sellers ran roughshod through their market share.

And somehow Daunt magically beat the ogre at its own game and apparently, they will all live happily ever after.

Elliott Advisors is likely to exit its investment over the course of the next few years, which could see Waterstones and Barnes & Noble go public.

Well, yes, Elliott’s exit is a given, because that’s what hedge-funds do. Buy in, make a tidy profit, get out.

And exit becomes all the more likely given the supply chain crisis facing the entire industry amid a recession. That, by the way, will be the supply chain crisis the retail expert author seems not to have heard about, exacerbated by the warehouse disaster at Waterstones that the retail expert author again appears not to have heard about.

And it would seem the retail expert author also doesn’t know that the book boom of 2021 has faded away in 2022 and is pretty certain to fade even further in 2023-24, even as a certain CEO has been busy spending hedge-fund money on new stores.

As for Waterstones and Barnes & Noble going public… Do be serious.