Like Shooting Fish in a Barrel

"In 1998, at the height of the big chains’ dominance, You’ve Got Mail with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan was released – with Hanks playing the manager of the successful but soulless book behemoth, and Ryan the perky owner of a charming but doomed children’s bookstore.  It turns out that this very popular movie was channeling the infamous 1982 Business Week cover story “The Death of Equities” (which appeared a few months before the start of the largest bull market of the century).

 

At the same time the movie was portraying the big box bookstores as unstoppable predators, Jeff Bezos and his three year-old company Amazon.com looked out at the same world and saw Borders and Barnes & Noble swimming in a barrel.  So Bezos starts shooting.  It was an unfair fight from the outset.  Borders has disappeared and Barnes & Noble, while still viable, has struggled with profitability for years.  Amazon’s current market value is 260 times larger than Barnes & Noble’s."

Excerpted from my November article at ThinkAdvisor.