Barnes & Noble

Fortune Editors

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 66th running of the list.

Fortune 500

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 65th running of the list.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 64th running of the list.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 63rd running of the list.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 62nd running of the list.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 61st running of the list. Wal-Mart claims the top spot again. See who made the list.

Wal-Mart stayed on top as its sales crept closer to half-a-trillion dollars. Apple moved into the top five. And UnitedHealth Group continued its steady climb. 

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Barnes & Noble Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings | Fortune

Sarah Glodek

Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt was a Carnival Cruise ship officer before building his bookstore empire

/2026/08/10/barnes-noble-ceo-james-daunt-carnival-cruise-ship-waterstones-turnaround/

Sasha Rogelberg

Barnes & Noble CEO clarifies the bookseller’s stance on AI-written books after refusing to ban them: ‘This is a straightforward rejection of AI books’

/2026/05/22/barnes-noble-ceo-stance-ai-generated-books-refusing-to-ban/

Nick Lichtenberg

Amazon’s humble history: Jeff Bezos used a rented garage as an office and held team meetings at a local Barnes & Noble

/article/how-did-jeff-bezos-found-amazon-office-garage-barnes-noble-meetings-fortune-500/

The Associated Press

Barnes & Noble founder Leonard Riggio dies at 83

/2024/08/28/barnes-noble-founder-leonard-riggio-dies-at-83/

Jeff Bezos’ rise to the top of the Fortune 500 and Global 500 list wasn't an accident. In our pilot episode, Kristin Stoller shares exclusive insights from her interview with Bezos, including his philosophy on “customer obsession” and why early failures like Amazon Prime were actually essential.

Plus, Phil Wahba joins to discuss how Barnes & Noble is pivoting by learning from independent bookstores and we talk about the big number on AI spending with Emily Forlini.

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Ellie Austin: https://fortune.com/author/ellie-austin/
Phil Wahba: https://fortune.com/author/phil-wahba/
Emily Forlini: https://fortune.com/author/emily-forlini/

The Secret to Amazon’s No. 1 Fortune 500 Spot | Fortune Daily

Features

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This man has gone through such a transformation physically, right? Like one of my best friends from home, she actually jammed me and was like, Who is that? And I was like, That's Jeff Bezos. She was like, What? That we're valuable. We condemnation OK. Hello from New York, and for the first time ever you're watching Fortune daily. Welcome to the show. So we know that this won't be the first time you've heard many of these stories. Our goal is to give you Fortune's take on them and a new level of insight as to why they matter. This will be our approach to everything we cover and we really want this show to be a dialogue with you, our audience, so please feel free to engage in the comments and send us messages on social media so that we know what you want us to cover. We can then make sure that we're being as valuable an addition to your lives and your. Careers as possible. Let's get into it. Day one. We're going to start with a really unusual move that tells you how nervous governments are getting about markets right now. Last week, the United States and Japan carried out a rare coordinated intervention in currency markets to prop up the yen. It was the first joint yen operation in about 15 years. Tokyo and Washington together stepped in to buy a yen after it slid to a 40-year low. Japan's finance minister said they did it to counter excessive volatility and disorderly movements. So this isn't just about Japan because a yen that week put stress on Japanese banks, of course, but also on their huge holdings of US Treasuries and on global bond markets. And sure, the US wants to support an important ally in Japan, but what it really wants is to prevent a currency crisis from turning into a debt crisis. Now from currencies to a Type of risk debt fueled bets on AI. The New York Times Magazine just published a long piece asking whether Larry Ellison could become the face of the AI bubble because at 81 years old, he's pivoting Oracle hard into AI infrastructure, and he's planning to invest up to $500 billion over 4 years in data centers built around partners like OpenAI. To do this, he's borrowed billions, stacking debt on top of an older tech business that isn't growing at the rate of some of the new giants. So what's the bigger takeaway here? Well, for the past two weeks, the headlines have focused on AI spending at companies like Alphabet, Tesla, Microsoft, and Nvidia. All of which are businesses with more diversified, more positive revenue streams. This situation with Oracle, however, is what it looks like when a legacy player goes all in on AI using borrowed money in the process. If it works, Allison could join the ranks of the new AI titans. If it doesn't, he might just end up as the poster child for what happens when the AI hype cycle ends. Watch this space, we certainly will be. And because we talk a lot about AI taking jobs, here's a story from Fortune's own Claire Zillman about a company that decided not to let that happen. So IKEA recently rolled out an AI chatbot called Billy, cute name, to handle thousands of customer service questions a day. Some context. A consulting survey earlier this year found that 40% of workers now fear AI will make their job obsolete. That figure is up from 28% just two years ago. IKEA's response was basically, we're not doing that, we're not going to let that happen to our people. So instead of laying off over 8000 call center employees, the company spent 2 years retraining them to handle more complex problems and to work. As design advisors and so far it's driving real revenue. This is a different kind of AI story because it's not about fewer humans. It's about humans being freed up to do more valuable work, and you can read the whole story on Fortune.com. Coming up, we are joined by Fortune reporter Kristen Stoller, who wrote our cover story on Jeff Bezos as Amazon tops the Fortune 500 and the Fortune Global 500 for the first time ever. Speaking of Amazon, Barnes and Noble was once thought to be a casualty. Of the tech juggernaut's takeover of the book market. But as Fortune senior reporter Phil Waber learned in our latest episode of Behind the Business in 2026, Barnes and Noble is staging a comeback. How's it doing this? It's taking lessons from independent bookstores. Many other independent bookstores have that cool factor. Does Barnes and Noble need to have some of that cool factor, or is it, is it a different animal, a different concept entirely? Barnes and Noble can be extremely cool, but it's definitely a different sort of cool, and the challenge for us is how do we do it appropriately in each place in which we are, and that I think we're able to do increasingly well at the moment. So Phil, there's been quite a lot of doomsday style hype recently about quote the end of reading. What did your reporting and your time with James Dorn teach you about that? Is it accurate? It's not. Americans are still reading. There might be a smaller number of Americans reading, but those who read are buying more books, and on, it's not a boom market, you know. The American Publishers Association said that last year book sales rose, uh, 1.5%, so it's not a boom, but it's not dying. But certainly, uh, the more avid readers that Barnes and Noble caters to, they're buying more. And what James Dorn is so good at is taking the independent bookstore model and applying it to mass chains like Barnes and Noble or Waterstones in my dear home country. What is the future of a successful retail bookstore going to look like? Well, I think we're, we see it with Barnes and Noble now. Um, what he's done, he founded a chain of 10 stores called Daunt Books in London, and in fact here. I can see a lot of people with the tote bags daunt books, so that has really traveled well. And what he's trying to do is take the best aspects of independent independent bookstores and apply that at scale. So what that concretely means is letting your big box bookstore neighborhood Barnes and Noble function much more autonomously than they used to. What else does it look like in Barnes and Noble right now? So essentially when you enter a Barnes and Noble store, you'll Tables that are where books are stacked by theme. The local employees are the ones who are deciding what that store, what that market wants to read, and so it used to be very much dictated by headquarters for Barnes and Noble, but there were also clear business reasons for doing that. And one of the first things Mr. Dott did when he became CEO is get rid of some of the business model. Components that were leading to that and I have to ask you, what are you reading right now? I'm reading right now, uh, coincidentally is the exact same book as James Dant is reading. Yeah, it's, it, it's, uh, it's a biography of Frederick Church, one of the Hudson River School painters. He was sort of the first American painter to really be taken seriously in Europe. Phil, thank you so much for joining us. Enjoy the book. Thank you, my pleasure. Amazon has claimed the number one spot on the Fortune Global 500, ending more than a decade of Walmart's dominance. Fortune editorial director Kristen Stoller takes us behind the scenes of her interview with Jeff Bezos, where he reflects on Amazon's reinvention and what comes next. Um, Kristen, thank you so much for coming in today to talk about your big cover story with Jeff Bezos. Now Bezos is a man who is very ubiquitous in the business landscape, also just in the culture more broadly, but we rarely hear from him directly. So first of all, how on earth did you get Jeff on the phone? That is a really good question, Ellie, because it is so hard to get Jeff to do anything. Um, it's a funny story though because, and, and you've kind of been with me on this journey, but 2 years ago I did a profile on this company Corning which makes the gorilla Glass for your phone, the old Pyrex, and the CEO of Corning is on the board at Amazon, really good friends with Jeff, and when I asked him. Like, who can speak to your character? He was like, Oh, you should call Jeff. And I was like, Who? And he was like, Oh, Jeff Bezos. And I was like, OK, sure, let's, let's, let's have Jeff give me a call. And we spoke two years ago. It went great. And then when the time came that I knew Amazon was going to be number one on our not only Fortune 500, but our global 500 list, uh, the editors here said, Kristen, why not give it a try, see if he'll talk to you. So. I shot my shots and he said yeah and he said yes. Um, what was he like? Why do I have the feeling he's probably a very charming person? Am I correct? He is, he is, he was so charming. So we, to set the scene a little bit, we, I didn't know, there was some ambiguity of whether, you know, I would go to meet him in person, if it would be on a Zoom. His schedule was very up in the air with the Blue Origin rocket launch. It ended up having to be a Zoom conversation. I think I had about 2 hours. Notice and less like I'm thinking because Kristen said people who don't know like we sit back to back in the office and I remember there was a period of weeks where you were chained to your desk. Like I don't think you were even going to the bathroom because you thought you might get the green light. So I remember it was actually less, far less than 2 hours. I'm thinking like 20 minutes, yeah, and I was racing around for a conference room. You were helping me. We were scrambling and we get the call, we do the Zoom. It ends up being 36 minutes. He's. Zooming from his original door desk, which is like when he created Amazon, they got these slabs and, and these 2x4s and made desks out of doors, and it's now in his study in DC and he was really charming. He was excited, he was glad to be there, um, definitely, you know, very careful in his wording. He's a very measured person, very thoughtful in how he speaks. He does repeat a lot of the same phrases that you've heard him say throughout the years. Like customer obsession, he said that 10 times in our conversation, he's very on brand and on message, but honestly it was lovely to talk with him, he was a delight. And what does customer obsession mean in 2026, because it's a great little turn of phrase. Yeah, but on a concrete level, what does that mean to him and how does that translate to how the company is run? So how he sees it, and now you know he's, he has the benefit of being a former CEO looking back, but he said, Building Amazon all these years, every other company was focused on the competitors, and we, we were not. We were only focused on the customers. And when you have that focus and you're not even worried about what the competition is doing, that's why we're succeeding here. We're always thinking about what can we do better for the people buying our products. Do you believe that Jeff Bezos never thinks about the competition? It's hard to believe that, right? Like there, there has, there has to be some feeling of like this is the first time that they've. Overtaken Walmart on our Global 500 for sure, because he said he was thrilled to be at the top of the list. Yeah, they've got to think he's been all these years thinking, when's our turn, when are we going to be number one, hopefully, um, but I, I think there has to be a little bit of that. There are two really striking images in the piece, so we have um a picture of Bezos when he was starting Amazon in '95, 96. He's unrecogn. Recognizable, he's this wiry computer guy and then contrast that with the image that's on the cover, the image that's on the main spread. I mean this is a man who is like pumped up on gym workouts and expensive living. He's got the tan of someone who spends 6 months of the year on a yacht, he's chiseled, almost a completely different person aesthetically. What do you make of that personal evolution that he's undertaken. Has gone through such a transformation physically, right? Like, and, and I, I posted to my story because I was, I was hoping I'd get a bunch of traction, and one of my best friends from home, she actually DM'ed me and was like, Who is that? And I was like, That's Jeff Bezos, and she was like, What? He looks so different. I would have never known. OK, so you mentioned the Blue Origin, um, rocket launch that happened in May. That did not go well. It, it sort of imploded, um, and I. And, you know, Bezos is a man who is used to big success. Did you get any sense in speaking to him about how he approaches setbacks and failure? Yes, and I actually found, he told me this fascinating story, which I, I think he's told once maybe before, but he is, he is so willing to talk about failure. He was telling me about Amazon Prime and how that was one of, or could have been one of his biggest failures. And when he proposed it, he was like, OK, free 2 day shipping. Basically how he described it to me is like, OK, it's like giving everyone an all you can eat buffet, and the heavy eaters show up first. And so for a year, the economics of it were terrible. They were losing money because all these people were buying so much and, and he was, you know, giving away all this free shipping. But then, and everyone told him like, Jeff, you need to, you need to stop. You need to end Prime. But then over time it proved to be this massive success and it's a huge pillar of the company's business today. So he was like, don't, he kind of told me, you know, don't be afraid to fail. Best ideas come from failures, just gotta let it ride. Um. Interesting lesson, Jeff. Um, so Walmart has held the top spot in the 14tune 500 for 10 years now, which is no mean feat. What changed this year that bumped Amazon to the top spot? I think the big thing that changed this year is really AI, you know, Jeff told me chips and AI. They're really the next pillar for Amazon. Walmart is definitely leaning into that, but they haven't diversified their businesses as much as Amazon had. I actually had one analyst told, she kind of called me up and was like, Who cares that Walmart beat Amazon or Amazon beat Walmart? That's totally irrelevant because it's no longer a retail game, it's now like an AI game, right? So they're playing in two different fields. And what's your response to people who say, who cares? Why does it matter in 2026? Who was top of the Fortune 500 list? Like, it doesn't affect my life. I know that's actually a really good point. The thing that I like about our list is that the Fortune 500, the Global 500, they're totally based on revenue. It's not like you and me sit here and debate like who should be number one this year. It's really numbers driven. So I think it's important, you know, that we as Americans are following this data, following the revenue, seeing which companies are succeeding truly based on where we are putting our own dollars. And um Amazon is forging a lot of partnerships when it comes to AI so it's got a partnership with Meta, it's got one with Anthropic. To what extent do you think these partnerships are going to dictate the size and scale of the company going forward? I think they're certainly helpful, but I don't know if we could measure Amazon's success based on the partnerships alone because there's so much that they're building. Um, on their own, and we could also look at their acquisitions like for example in the healthcare space they recently acquired, you know, um, one Medical, and there's a lot of different brands they're either partnering with or acquiring with which is helpful, but it's really like they're doing, they're doing a lot just on their own. They've got, you know, the Amazon Studios, they've got Prime, they've got Marketplace, they've got AWS now they have chips and AI, so yeah. I think the partnerships are helpful, but it's, it's more holistic. I mean, it does feel a bit like Amazon is taking over the world. It does. I mean, is that your sense? Why is Amazon not at this point? Yeah, and my question to everyone was, does this scare you? Does it scare you that Amazon's taking over the world? Some people are like, no, I, I love it. Some people are like, oh, we need to pump the brakes, this could be a monopoly. And these people that you're talking to are kind of analysts, thinkers outside of Amazon. In the company, absolutely, I talked to analysts. I also talked to a bunch of nonprofit leaders too, and there's one who's been really vocal, um, who said, you know, to save what we all love about Amazon, it needs to face competition because they are, you know, it's, it's kind of like the AI slop a mindset where if they have all these sponsorships and everyone is on AI and it's all looking the same or on Amazon it's all looking the same, how do we distinguish between products anymore if the sponsor products win. Yeah, we needed to face competition. Some people that you spoke to in the piece, and it was really interesting, kind of criticized Bezos for stepping down as CEO, um, in 2021. He's now chairman of the board, um, and they said that he took his foot off the pedal at the exact time that the AI boom was taking off. Yeah. What's your response to that from having reported around this? My thought is, I think that's an interesting critique, certainly. I don't know that it's entirely fair to Jeff, only because, yes, I think in terms of Amazon, right, Jeff, Jeff did leave. He might have taken his foot off the gas there. However, he's now building his own AI company, Prometheus, so I think it's not like he took his foot off the gas with AI. He just wanted to do his own projects. He wanted to do Blue Origin. This new Prometheus, um, which is still a little secretive, but so we don't know at the moment what Prometheus is doing that Amazon AI isn't. That's correct, we know Prometheus is providing creators and engineers with the tools they need to bring their ideas to scale faster, but it's very, we don't know. No specifics yet, yeah. There was a level of really interesting introspection in your piece, um, and a former VP at Amazon says Bezos himself acknowledges that the company will at some point cease to exist. Yeah. Do you, did you get that sense from him? He never said those words to me. Um, but I, I think he's always, he's very realistic, right? I mean, this is a company that's been around since the early 90s and yes, they're innovating, but he's always like, no one can be around forever. But I also spoke with the CEO of Amazon, Andy Jaffe, who I think is, is really doesn't have that same ethos and is more like how. How are we going to bring about the next wave of innovation to stay strong, maybe forever. Kristen, thank you. Please come back and talk to us next time that Jeff gives you a call. We're always say you're my first call, Ellie, you know that, and you may also help me find the conference room to book it. So thank you. That's it for Fortune Daily, our first ever show. Thank you so much for joining us. I'm Ellie Austin, and we'll see you next time.

Barnes & Noble was once seen as another casualty of Amazon. Today, it’s expanded to over 700 stores nationwide. In this episode, Fortune’s Phil Wahba explores CEO James Daunt’s plan to save America’s biggest book chain by making it cool again. 

Inside CEO James Daunt’s Plan To Save Barnes & Noble | Behind The Business

behindthebusiness

Remember how everyone thought Barnes and Noble was dying just a few years ago. America's largest book retailer was in rough shape. The Barnes and Noble store in Prudential Center will soon close for good. A major bookstore to close at an Omaha location this weekend. By 2020, Amazon captured over half of all. print book sales and 80% of the e-book market, decimating traditional brick and mortar bookstores. There was a decade of declining store numbers, lots and lots of closures, no openings. Today, the chain is pulling off one of the most unexpected turnarounds in retail history. What we're doing is opening up stores again in communities. Will their growth hit a wall? Barnes and Noble is expanding. As of July 2026, the book retailer had opened 20 new stores so far, with more planned this year. The footprint currently stands at 717 locations, 90 more than in 2019. We'll open up 35,000 square foot stores, we'll open up less large stores, we'll open an 8000 square foot store in a mall. We're doing that because we're putting bookstores back into place. And back into communities that will appreciate a bookstore. During the 2010s, Barnes and Noble saw massive sales declines, 100 store closures, six different CEOs, and a $1 billion loss on its Nook Reader, a device to compete with Amazon's Kindle. Then investment firm Elliott Advisors acquired the company for nearly $700 million in 2019, bringing in James Dant as CEO. There are books here that you know are really good and therefore you will read the others and is that a consistency ology. When you took the reins of this company, it was in rough shape. As you assessed the business, what were you thinking? It's relatively straightforward for me because I've been a bookseller for 30 years at that point, um. Uh, longer, so I simply wanted to make these stores really good again, and, and one sets on a series of very slow and incremental processes to do that. Dan started out as an investment banker in New York in the 1980s. He left banking to launch Dant Books in 1990, building it to a highly successful and beloved 10 location chain in the UK. Dan and many other independent bookstores have that cool factor. Does Barnes and Noble need to have some of that cool factor, or is it, is it a different animal, a different concept entirely? Barnes and Noble can be extremely cool, but it's definitely a different sort of cool. And the challenge for us is how do we do it appropriately in each place in which we are, and that I think we're able to do increasingly well at the moment. Every display in their Union Square store in Manhattan feels thought out to the smallest detail. These are a lot of like conversation starters, economics, politics. for this local section, there's a lot of cookbooks. There's cookbooks. I've bought that for somebody. It's so cute. Shops, yeah, yeah. The inventory is hyper curated for New York customers, reflecting social trends, local culture, and real-time demand. A lot of our tables are smaller. They're meant to kind of be little stops along your way to points of interest as you're kind of weaving your way through the store. Um, we love when people spend time in the stacks and pull things out and find something that may be really old but is new to them. A 2025 study showed foot traffic in brick and mortar bookstores climbed 12% year over year, while Studies showed independent bookstore accounts surged by nearly 90% that same year. So romance has been a booming category over the last few years. It really is landing on that escapism and happily ever after that's working across a lot of different genres. For Barnes and Noble, the wins have come from trying to feel like your neighborhood bookstore. What would you say is the biggest difference in how stores are run today versus When you were a rookie, we were more a traditional retailer. We were really operating at like a big box Target or a Walmart, and I was essentially told to kind of like turn my brain off when I came to work and put this book here on this date at this time and then replace it with this book, whereas now. We've really moved to this model of being a place that's bookseller led and being able to curate interesting tables and it takes a lot more brainpower in the best possible way that we can kind of create these different local tables and local approach but also have some interesting kind of deeper cuts. Don's strategy was simple build hyperlocalization into the chain's corporate playbook. He eliminated the pay for display model, empowering each store to curate based on local demand rather than publisher co op dollars. Stores now control the visual merchandizing, such as handwritten staff recommendations and their own social media accounts. How do you get the benefits of these economies of scale, but at the same time have this flexible size? Well, we used to have a model which involved from a Home Office dictating very precisely what every store did, attached to a lot of commercial arrangements with publishers. Just to have particular books in particular places and a very uniform presentation for which you needed a uniform size of store. We've abandoned that 100%. So now each store curates its own assortment, reorders its own books, does each to their own, um, and we encourage and develop and promote and train against how do you do that well. But that also means we don't really care what size it is, we don't care what shape it is, because each store is doing its own thing. And that's liberated us now to have different sized stores doing different things. We can see what they're trying to do here. Yeah, you then want to pick it up and then it's in your pile and off you go. Now he's applying the Daunt playbook to the US market on a much larger scale. So now you've, of course, experienced uh American consumers as well as British. How are they different? American consumers are wonderful because they buy enormous amounts of books. Individually they buy more than a UK customer does. The American consumer, of course, is world famous in all forms of retail, but it applies also to bookselling. And so the growth for you will come from what, from getting more people to just buy more books? Yeah, I mean the book market is not a finite one. There are retail sectors if one person sells plus one. Another person has to sell -1. It's a fixed market. That isn't the case with books at all, particularly the way in which people buy books in a bookstore. If you come into a bookstore, you're going to be inspired, you're going to come in for one book, you're going to walk out with 3. That's the way it works. The better our bookstores, the more books are sold, the larger the market expands, but it's not eating the share of somebody else. It's not a zero-sum game at all. And now Wall Street is taking notice. There have been media reports of a possible IPO. How do you think the company would be managed differently if it were public? We are trying to run really good bookstores, and most of that effort is being done at the local level. I think what goes on in New York, any which way doesn't make much difference. Uh, what matters to us is what's going on at the local level, how are we able to support them? How are they able to improve things, and that's a steady, incremental process. I'm a great believer in physical bookstores, um, and I have my own bookstores. I then the equivalent in the United Kingdom of Barnes and Noble, and we sorted that out very quickly and made those really nice bookstores. I think to the benefit of the whole book trade and bookselling as a whole. And then obviously with Barnes and Noble being the last man effectively standing here in in the United States, it was very, very important for bookselling as a whole, but that continued to be the case. Um, but we're just really just bringing these principles first, small bookstore to large chain to even larger chain, um, and, and it's all based and founded on the core principle of what makes a great bookstore.

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