It actually costs them a ton of money to physically label the prices on each book. B&N adds their own sticker over the top of the MSRP when they receive the book. Changing the sticker every time the online price is changed would cost them a small fortune.
If you're ever wondering why the online price differs from the in-store price by a significant amount, usually it's not because the retailer is trying to gouge you. It's because they would have to pay to have the shelves re-tagged. Retailers don't use the regular store associates to re-tag shelves. Instead they usually have roving teams of contractors who go around retagging everything on the store shelves periodically.
The only way to really eliminate this is using electronic shelf labels, and that's quite impossible in a bookstore. Much of their inventory is thinner than the tags themselves.
He’s not complaining about the price tag not matching the online price. He’s complaining about the cashier applying the tag price and not the lower price advertised online. I also find it confusing when retailers apply different prices online and at physical stores, unless the fact that the online price is different is very clearly stated.
For some kinds of retail businesses I do expect one price independent of the location within the country. Not for groceries, of course, but I do expect consistent pricing in Zara or Ikea.
Few retailers selling sufficient quantities of high margin goods might do it, but most need to factor in local costs such as labor, property tax, and rent. Especially once the gap in costs diverge significantly between regions.
Half price books has solved this in a rather ingenious way: they just sell the book for half of what the MSRP is on the cover. No need to tag anything, decent markup, and the price data is already there/doesn’t need to be created. It’s little efficiencies like this that make HPB one of the most successful brick and mortar bookstores out there.
The longer you have to hold inventory, the more markup you should apply. Books probably have a fantastically long tail if you sort each one by rate of books sold per month or per year. Some books may sit on the shelves for several years before someone comes along and buys it.
B&N doesn’t put their own price stickers over the MSRP / barcode. In certain sections they would have an X% off on the top-right of the front cover like new and best seller hard-covers, and specific prices on the discounted/remaindered looking stuff, but that’s also on the front cover. The main sections divided by topic (which is all full price) don’t have any stickers. They just sell stuff at full price and then apply discounts if you’re a member (only 10%), coupons etc.
Borders did put a sticker on every book. 2nd & Charles does too.
Then at that point paying a couple of dollars for them to maintain inventory at a physical location in a strip mall is probably razor thin. Retail space typically costs significantly more than equivalently sized warehouse space.
Books all have barcode with entries in their POS linked database, why not just have the current price linked to it? When I used to work for BN during my college days, that's how it worked. When a book was on sale, there was no need to re-tag the books, it was just a database update.
If you're ever wondering why the online price differs from the in-store price by a significant amount, usually it's not because the retailer is trying to gouge you. It's because they would have to pay to have the shelves re-tagged. Retailers don't use the regular store associates to re-tag shelves. Instead they usually have roving teams of contractors who go around retagging everything on the store shelves periodically.
The only way to really eliminate this is using electronic shelf labels, and that's quite impossible in a bookstore. Much of their inventory is thinner than the tags themselves.