[eggestad]

the US is just ahead in the curve. The brittish are naturally so onservative, if not outright reactionary, that the new buisness models haven't had the same impact yet.

In Scandinavia online shopping has taken on almost as well as in the US, and bookstores there is suffering just as bad a B&N.

This is despite actually having done much of the advice offered in this thread. ARK in Norway have outlets in all the Malls (still the most popuar shopping places in Norway) adn outlet in walking market districts in the cities. They cut their inventory to high volume books only. Still struggeling....

[DanBC]

> The brittish are naturally so onservative, if not outright reactionary, that the new buisness models haven't had the same impact yet.

Wut?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesco#Internet_retailing

> In May 1984, in Gateshead, England, the world's first recorded online home shopper, Mrs Jane Snowball, purchased groceries from her local Tesco store in the world's first recorded online shopping transaction from the home.[50] Tesco has operated on the internet since 1994 and was the first retailer in the world to offer a robust home shopping service in 1996. Tesco.com was formally launched in 2000. Grocery sales are available within delivery range of selected stores, goods being hand-picked within each store, in contrast to the warehouse model followed by Ocado.

> As of November 2006, Tesco was the only food retailer to make online shopping profitable.

[toyg]

No need for stereotypes. As others mentioned, the UK is actually very much ahead of the curve in online and retail: big chains all but wiped out independents in the last 20 years, and with all the faffing about Waterstones, nobody said that they are the only bookstore chain left on the market (Blackwells is strictly limited to university areas, and WHSmith is a generic corner-shop business that sells books in some stores). Waterstones themselves went through painful restructuring, as the article said, built a half-decent online shop, and implemented an automated fidelity program that should give them invaluable insight in their core userbase.

Chances are that in Scandinavia, like in most continental countries, you actually have more than one national bookseller and a variety of independent local shops, which means consolidation hasn't actually happened yet on the scale we've seen in the UK.

[justincormack]

No the UK is one of the largest online shopping markets per capita in the world.

[ascorbic]

Not just one of the largest: it is the largest, and by a large margin too. http://www.cityam.com/205546/uk-has-most-valuable-online-sho...

[to3m]

Why can't it just be different outcomes for different markets?

Whatever happened to American exceptionalism? :)