Does Barnes and Noble Price Match?
Price matching is a common practice in which retailers honor lower prices offered by competitors. It attracts customers, even if many of them never take advantage of it. Many mall-goers find Barnes and Noble an oasis to find something new to read while enjoying a caffeinated drink from an in-house Starbucks. But does Barnes and Noble price match competitors’ prices?
About Barnes and Noble
Barnes and Noble is a Fortune 1000 company and is the bookseller with the most retail outlets in the United States. Several different business arms exist under the Barnes and Noble umbrella including its online store, a publishing company which publishes and sells low-cost books, the online magazine, The Barnes And Noble Review, the Nook e-book reader, and Barnes and Noble college book stores which has actually been spun off into a completely separate company.
Major Retailers That Price Match
Many major retailers offer price matching of some kind. Here’s a list of just a few:
- Bed Bath & Beyond
- Best Buy
- Home Depot
- JCPenny
- Kohl’s
- Lowe’s
- The Office Depot
- Petco
- Target
- Walmart
Barnes and Noble does Not Price Match
Barnes and Noble will not match the price of any online or brick and mortar competitors. It offers competitive pricing for many of the products it sells and seems to believe it offers the best overall experience and pricing structure. From its perspective price matching is not a service it feels is necessary to get customers through the door.
Not Even For Its Own Online Store
The company website states sometimes it is able to fulfill customer orders with less expense online than through a brick and mortar store. For this reason, physical stores will not match the company’s online price. It attempts to justify this by also stating sometimes there are promotions offered in physical stores that are not valid online.
Barnes and Noble does not offer price matching as a service to its customers. Maybe it’s because it is the largest bookseller in the United States and does not feel much of a threat from its competitors. Maybe it feels it offers more than just products, but rather an entire experience with reading areas and in-house Starbucks coffee outlets such that it doesn’t need to alter its price structure. Whatever the reason, a shift in philosophy is nowhere to be seen.
How about you, Clever Friends, do you buy books from Barnes and Noble? If not, would you do if it offered price matching?
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Brock is a software engineer by day and personal finance blogger at night. He is a fitness junkie and enjoys grilling and smoking meat. Married with two children, Brock strives to improve his skills as a husband and father, and is always on the lookout to stretch his family’s budget as far as he can.
The closest B&N to me (<5 miles) closed its doors for good a couple months ago…and even then, they wouldn't discount their books and insisted on consolidating inventory at their remaining stores (at significant logistical cost I'm sure). Curious how that's going for them now…
Growing up with books and a prolific appetite for reading, I feel a profound nostalgia for the experience of walking into a bookstore, grabbing a coffee and perusing random books for hours. Unfortunately, with more cost-effective, convenient alternatives (Audiobooks, eBooks) and B&N's own unwillingness to acknowledge the changing landscape, this experience may very well become a thing of the past. That is, unless Amazon starts opening their own bookstores in my area.