The day before the Fourth of July, Barnes & Noble issued a vague press release announcing that the ailing company’s chief executive, Demos Parneros, had been fired, effective immediately and without severance pay, and removed from its board. Parneros, the company’s fourth CEO in five years, had been on the job for just over a year; two weeks earlier he had led its fourth quarter earnings call, in which it was announced that revenue had fallen again.

Parneros’s termination is the latest in a long line of setbacks for a retail giant trying to stay afloat in the e-commerce era. It’s also the latest reminder of the extent to which Barnes & Noble, once the most disruptive company in publishing, has lost its way. The last several years have been defined by store closings, the high-profile failure of the Nook e-reader, falling revenues, layoffs, turnover, malaise. Whatever reason Parneros was fired—and Barnes & Noble isn’t saying—it’s hard not to read it as symptomatic of larger turmoil. It’s unclear how many more upheavals Barnes & Noble can afford, even though it is considered one of the linchpins of the industry—almost too big to fail.



The circumstances behind Parneros’s departure are murky and Barnes & Noble has done everything it can to keep it that way. The press release went out when most of the media was on vacation, while its contents are confusing. In what appears to be an effort to reassure investors and regulators, Barnes & Noble said Parneros was not fired for “any disagreement with the company regarding its financial reporting, policies or practices, or any potential fraud relating thereto.” Because Parnerors was fired without severance pay, we can surmise that his alleged offenses must be serious, but there are few clues so far as to what they could be. Barnes & Noble responded to a number of requests for comment by pointing me to the July 3 release.



This has naturally led to a lot of negative speculation, but negative speculation has become the norm at Barnes & Noble. Over the past several years, the company has embraced a number of different strategies to regain stability. Like other struggling retail chains, it has tried “cost-cutting” and experimented with events, book clubs, and selling alcohol. The Nook e-reader was its great hope at taking a bite out of Amazon, but it has been a disaster, costing the company hundreds of millions of dollars. Barnes & Noble’s longtime leader and largest shareholder, Len Riggio, announced that he was stepping down as executive chairman in the spring of 2016 and the company has not found any semblance of stability since.



Its stock price has been hovering around $5 for much of the year and has not been in double-digits since February of 2017; it has not been above $20 since the 2008 recession. In a perverse sense, this chaotic history has turned out to be something of a boon. At practically any other large, publicly traded company, the mysterious termination of a CEO would provide front-page business news. At Barnes & Noble, it’s still odd, but hardly unexpected.

