If you’ve been to a Barnes & Noble recently, you’ve certainly noticed that it isn’t just a place to buy books anymore — nor has it been since 2019 when the company started focusing on curated experiences. There are Starbucks cafés mixed with reading lounges and themed gifts stashed in little pockets all over these stores now. The most relevant newer addition — and a sign that a Toys ‘R’ Us comeback makes sense — is the massive toys and games section in many locations.
While Barnes & Noble is still primarily a bookstore, it has become something more by focusing on elevating the retail experience to compete in a digital economy. “I think a proper bookstore has to be curated, and that is the essence of one of the core skills of what it is to be a bookseller,” said Barnes & Noble CEO James DGaunt in a 2024 interview with CNN. “You are trying to have the titles that you think will most interest your customers and display them. The sensible thing to do is just have fun in each individual store.”
This is a different way of saying that the demand for in-person browsing never went away, and that what killed so many category-killer chains was that they were basically just overpriced Walmart departments. But a well-run, well-stocked, and well-curated category killer was never obsolete.
The modern Toys ‘R’ Us stores are really not the same, but it’s possible if the comeback succeeds that the new owners will look at relaunching something like those old toy warehouse stores, with modern touches.
Kienlen also notes this:
According to recent Circana research, “The toy industry’s growth continues to be fueled increasingly by older consumers,” noting that adult-only households accounted for 55% of toy sales, making them the largest contributor to the industry overall.
That is pretty wild, although it’s by dollar, not volume. In a lot of ways, high-end Lego kits and other “adult toys” probably replace the niche that was once filled by kits and other hobby-shop staples. This does present a growing opportunity for a physical store that brings all of these things under one roof. We’ll see where that goes.
America Chose Cars Over Quality Of Life, How It Works (and Why It Doesn’t), Rocco Pendola, September 13, 2026
The tragedy isn’t as simple as The United States chose cars. Cars are useful. Even though I don’t have a driver’s license, I still use them several times a year.
What’s tragic is that America organized life around needing a car — and then spent generations mistaking the consequences for prosperity.
Eventually, a degraded quality of life stops feeling degraded when it’s the only one you know.
Yep. This point is obvious but also sometimes overlooked. Cars are cool and useful. Effective forced car ownership is not. It isn’t clear to me, exactly, what a world of car optionality would look like in the United States—most likely, most places in terms of raw geography would remain car dependent, while densification would occur in already fairly urbanized areas where it becomes possible to live with one car per family or even none. I don’t think most Americans would choose that, but I think a lot more would than currently do, if it seemed possible.
Of everything he lists here, this rings the truest for me, personally:
[Car dependence] taught older people that losing the ability to drive can mean losing access to a vibrant and fulfilling life. It taught us that streets can be hostile, neighborhoods can be dead, and seeing another person requires an appointment and complicated transportation.
The way that the car is both instant mobility and isolation—the way car dependence spreads things out physically in a way that generates traffic and negates the speed of the car itself—is really subtle but very real.
There are lots of modest but good proposals in here. This is good too, but it shows you how arbitrary and faux-scientific zoning really is. Just take a look at this:
When it comes to food trucks, the county is considering making changes to the amount of time they’re allowed to operate in specific districts. Currently, the trucks are capped at four hours a day and 32 days per year. Staff propose keeping the limit at four hours in residential areas, but expanding it to six hours in commercial and industrial districts and non-residential areas in large residential districts.
Who decided there are specific food-truck districts that can run for four hours a day and 32 days a year? Did they throw darts at a county map while blindfolded to draw the districts, and then pull numbers out of a hat for the hour and day limits?
I tend towards thinking that instead of layering liberalizing regulations on top of restrictive regulations, we should just scrap most of this stuff and either allow or not allow things plainly, and then strictly enforce things like noise and nuisance ordinances. Maybe if it were that simple, it might be more common, but I do really think it’s that simple.
Interesting little bit of behind-the-curtain stuff on manufacturing, and how and why elements of consumer products do or don’t persist. This isn’t as dramatic as the case with cassette players or tube televisions, which are widely considered impossible to produce today (except for very low-cost cassette players, which all use a single low-performance playback mechanism). But it’s a reminder that manufacturing is a whole world that the consumer never really sees or understands.
Related Reading:
I think the biggest failure of zoning is that it doesn't really factor in transportation context but instead just acts as a bulwark against the boogeyman of density.
My city has dozens of different designations for varying level of residential density (notably, the maximum highest residential density is a paltry 25 units per acre). But how this is applied is mostly just to lock existing neighborhoods into place, rather than to selectively choose where growth should happen. You know, like what you would assume actual planning is. It's a fear of growth, not a proactive plan.
In my mind, good zoning should factor in the surrounding infrastructure rather than the existing uses. Do you have a cul-de-sac-based post-60's style neighborhood? Maybe it makes sense to not allow too much density there because the road network is badly laid out to be able to handle it. Fine. But rarely is there a case where a sensible spot for density, like in the older gridded downtown, allows it either. It's still locked in. My old neighborhood is full of old duplexes, but it would be illegal to put a new one in today, let alone a small apartment building. Where's the planning?
Why do we treat auto-centric commercial the same as small scale urban commercial? They are entirely different contexts with entirely different modes of operation! If you're going to have a lot of zone types, make them actually address real differences!
This should go the other way, too. Do you want the city to lock in your pristine semi-rural massive lot based lifestyle? Fine, but you don't get any special infrastructure to match it. The city shouldn't be paving roads, laying out sewers, or doing anything extra to suit that lifestyle, often at significant expense to the rest of town. You've got the land, you've selfishly forced everyone else around you to not be able to use the land more effectively. Fine. But the city shouldn't subsidize that. You've got the land to do septic, density is sparse enough that you don't need nice roads, so that's what you get. Sensible and straightforward.
Anyway, that's my therapy for the day. Have a nice weekend!
Barnes and Nobel has had Starbucks and gifts and toys for over 20 years. Going to college in Amherst, the B&N in nearby Hadley had a Starbucks in it back in 2007. I remember drinking a latte and thinking the manager was very subversive. It was such a liberal place, but the walls were decorated with book cover posters, the most prominent of which was Atlas Shrugged.