When customers walk into a Barnes and Noble (or any bookstore) and browse books but don't buy (for example, because they found a cheaper price online), they are most likely to end up on Amazon to complete the purchase. B&N did the work but Amazon got the money.

Amazon doesn't have that problem. They don't need to sell books in the store to "pay the store's operating expense" - they just need people to come in and browse.

Currently, Amazon doesn't compete for a high percentage of books (50%) moved through physical stores [2]. They are in the enviable position of being able to create stores that don't leak sales to competitors. This is the final nail in B&N's coffin.

[1] http://www.thewire.com/business/2014/05/amazon-has-basically...

[2] http://www.dailydot.com/business/ebook-sales-2013-revenue/

I never bought books and B&N because I knew I could get the book cheaper at Amazon. The same with toys when I used to shop at ToysRUs. But those are both goods that I'd actually like to buy on the spot. If I know that the price in the store is the same as online, I'd probably do a lot of in store purchases.

And since I'm a Prime customer, they save 2-day shipping cost to me (I'll continue to be a Prime customer).

Ever since then, I usually try to buy the book in B&N or wherever, provided that's where I am at the time.

(Something like a campus book store and textbooks, however, is an entirely different case...)

For example, Best Buy, they knew people were coming in to sample goods and then buying it online. Their solution was simply to agree to price match Amazon, and that appears to have been quite successful, I know I have purchased things at physical BB instead of Amazon due to the policy.

They still make margins on their in-house warranties, and any goods sold not priced matched. I don't legitimately know if they lose money on some goods price matched on Amazon, or if they can pass some of it on to the manufacturer.

Just this week we were in Barnes and Noble, and we skipped buying things because they were cheaper on Amazon. It is sad but true.

PS - We did buy stuff on sale, and get coffee/cake at their little coffee shop, so we aren't complete monsters.

And even when people go into their store with the intent of buying, they don't, because of BB's poor customer service. My sister just did this - she wanted to buy an iPad, but couldn't find anyone to sell one to her (from the security-locked cabinet). So she did a search on her phone while standing in the store, and bought it from Walmart.com

I predict this Christmas will be BestBuy's last.

    > weh8ban
    > A hollow voice says, "Fool!'

Every time I go there, I wonder how they keep the lights on. I leave and look back thinking, "Will this be my last visit?"

I dont know what they can do in order to stay in business. I don't buy books there. I have a weird taste in books, and they just aren't at B & N. I mainly buy old books at used book stores. I do buy magazines there though, and food and coffee.

If by some miracle, I was made CEO. I would try a few things.

I would get rid of Starbucks. All the food and coffee would be in-house. I would basically copy what Starbucks does, but add more food items. I would also expand the eating area. I think Starbucks does a great job, but I'd rather all my money going to B & N. It probally wouldn't be feasible--I imagine Starbucks has some great leases, and agreements?

I would add more seating to the store. No sofas, but more wood seats, and benches.

I would have all security in plain clothes.

They would all be open until 11 p.m., except Sunday.

Their employees are great. I would leave them alone.

I would add a used, and rare book room to each store.

I know I'm rambling, about a business, I know nothing about. I just don't want them to close.

We're looking for our first non-founder engineer to join a small team backed by leading VCs and angels. We're working on something amazing and different from most software companies in a huge market. Our founding team of 4 is out of Nest Labs/Google. We're looking for a full stack engineer or front-end web engineer to lead our web team. Market compensation and huge equity stake for the right fit. We're a Ruby on Rails shop with single page apps built on Backbone and React. Please email me at vnorby at icloud dot com.

Imagine a neighborhood of 100 homes where you know all 100 people will return approximately at 6pm in the winter, and they all want 72 degrees. Taking into account the insulation of each home, if you could pre-heat the homes on a rolling schedule (say, heat 25 of them to 75 degrees at 3pm, accounting for 1 degree of heat dissipation per hour, heat another 25 to 74 degrees at 4pm, etc.), you will actually in aggregate save a lot of energy and cost because of inefficiencies in the way we deliver and generate energy during peak times.

(@yitchelle - central data center)

I work at Nest and it may be a little unclear at the moment (we're working on it), but The Nest API does not guarantee that if you send an ETA of 15 minutes (docs: https://developer.nest.com/documentation/eta-guide), the home will heat to the appropriate level in 15 minutes. It's actually filtered through our algorithms to determine the best course of action to not waste energy but also provide the appropriate level of comfort.

I have a modulating (i.e. change flame level) condensing boiler (the highest efficiency available). I programmed it to run as close to 24/7 as I could, because that way it uses the lowest flame, which is the most efficient flame.

When I tried a setback thermostat when the boiler attempted to rewarm the house it shifted to a higher and therefor less efficient flame. So I gave up on that and let it run on low all the time. So there would be no peak usage by me.

As people shift to more efficient ways to heating I suspect that this will happen to everyone. Not just modulating boilers, but also multi-stage heating with a heat pump. By trying to rapidly heat the home you can't use the heat pump.

It's also true with an A/C - the faster you are trying to cool the larger temperature gradient you need, and therefor you lose efficiency.

If I'm wrong here I would be happy to be corrected, but the US Government seems to agree with me: https://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=archives.thermostats_...

I'm not sure that's always correct. The Coefficient of Performance (heat moved/work done, higher COP is better) of an A/C is:

COP = T_hot / (T_hot - T_cold).

T_cold is the inside temp, T_hot is outside of the heat exchanger. The narrow the temperature range, the better the COP. Thus the A/C will actually be more efficient in terms of heat moved per watt while it's cooling a warm house down than when it's already cool.

There's one other factor that applies. The rate of heat transferring into the house is proportional to the temperature difference. Once the house has warmed up, you reach equilibrium. The net heat flow stops, so the total amount of energy you need to remove later stops rising. If you run the A/C all the time, heat is transferring in all the time. So the total amount of heat you need to move back outside in a day increases significantly if you leave the A/C on.

Without those assumptions your analysis is correct, and a setback thermostat seems to always be a win for A/C.

The energy loss from your home increases as the differential between inside and outside increases, right? So at night or when you're out, if your house were kept colder, then you'd lose less energy to the outside.

So by keeping your heating running 24/7, you're wasting some energy in the extra energy loss when you're out, right?

How does this compare to the efficiency gain by running your more efficient flame? Have you calculated or measured that you actually save energy overall?

Yes, but I can't let it cool very far, so it's only a small energy saving.

> How does this compare to the efficiency gain by running your more efficient flame?

The boiler can be up to 98.6% efficient at low flame, going down to 86% at full flame.

And after experimenting it always ended up at full flame when trying to rewarm a house.

> Have you calculated or measured that you actually save energy overall?

I tried, but I couldn't, winters are just so variable. I even emailed the EPA asking if they had research data, but they didn't.

So you're accepting the ETA request not as a demand to obtain a certain temperature, but as a request, and then still taking utility demand information into account. Excellent.

This is a nonsensical view of the concepts of value and money.

This is the important line in the article. Co-founder breakups probably happen more because the startup is not doing well, and not vice versa. I'm not sure if it makes sense to try and optimize for not running into co-founder problems as much as just optimizing for your company's success as normal.

If your company is killing it, and you're a co-founder and you've got 10% and you want to be the CEO and your grad school dropout grace period is ending and you'd rather be working on technical problems, you're most likely going to stick it out regardless.

In a VC startup? Sure. In a lifestyle business, I'd rather get a 99% chance of millions (and a fun place to work.)

Origami.com (formerly known as Everyme) is a YC-backed (S11) startup building an online home for families. We are 8 people (5 eng, 2 design, 1 biz) that are passionate about helping families and loved ones communicate and store memories for generations. We are a subscription-based service that is launching soon and already has a passionate base of beta users. We also operate Everyme, a private social network with over 300,000 downloads.

If you're interested, please email me with information about yourself to vibhu@origami.com and I'll get back to you right away.

Perhaps what you want to say is that you don't like the benefits packages that startups with young founders provide, because they don't understand what a more senior engineer expects on that side of the compensation equation. That might be more fair.

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