A Different Perspective

Len Riggio didn’t exactly found Barnes & Noble, but he did shepherd the New York-based bookseller to national prominence and a period of dominance of the book market. Though he is often thought of as someone who led to the demise of many independent bookstores and the inspiration for the semi-villain Joe Fox in the movie You’ve Got Mail (though Nora Ephron denies this connection), Riggio played a different role in my life. I knew him as the guy who saved the first job I truly enjoyed.

I was working at a Babbage’s in a slow-traffic shopping mall in 1996. At the time I was taking a break from college and it was an ideal job. I got to try to convince potential customers to buy Baku Baku Animals for the Sega Saturn! The PlayStation was new and I could check out videogames such as Soul Caliber and the Naamco Museum titles that compiled old arcade hits, all for free. I could read magazines like Electronic Gaming Monthly (EGM) as on-the-job research. The only downside was that, not too long after taking the job, the parent company that owned our little slice of paradise and signed our paychecks, NeoStar, filed for bankruptcy. From our vantage point, it wasn’t hard to understand why.

The Babbage’s in which I worked was in a discreet little spot off a side-wing of the one-story mall. It wasn’t easily discoverable unless you were looking for it (location, location, location). We constantly had customers coming in telling us a given game was cheaper at the much more prominently placed Electronics Boutique (usually pronounced here in the South as Lectronics Bo-teek). The Nintendo 64 had just released to fanfare about what a breakthrough the new Super Mario game was and we weren’t getting many units.

Circumstances were grim. I wasn’t looking forward to trying to find another job which could hardly be as good as the one I had only recently landed and to which I had become pleasantly accustomed. There was a rumor that we were going to be bought by Electronics Boutique, but it wouldn’t make much sense for them to keep their rival store open in an unpopular mall. It didn’t take long before we were told to shutter the store. I remember boxing up the merchandise in the darkened store while all the other shops stood in contrast, brightly lit, vibrant, and bustling with shoppers.

It seemed like being saved by the skin of our teeth when we were told that Len Riggio had purchased the company (which also included Software Etc.) and turned it into Babbage’s Etc. I felt like my college weary self owed a huge debt to the man. I was shipped to another, more popular mall to carry on my duties with the higher-revenue Babbage’s there. Grateful as I was for the opportunity, I eventually transferred again to a sister-store Software Etc. in what was the lowest traffic indoor mall in the area. We had so few customers that my manager spent most of his time in the back room trying to drum up business for his new venture selling snow cones. The janitor used to smoke weed inside the entrance to the mall, which probably wouldn’t have gone over well with shoppers, but there were virtually none of those to complain.

Time, as they say, marches on. The two low-traffic malls I mentioned were torn down. The first is now the future HQ for Epic Games.¹ The second became a much more upscale shopping destination and is quite popular now. Babbage’s and Software Etc. became GameStop long ago. The company has seen its stock go through some crazy market dynamics in the last few years. The catalyst for this post, though, is that Len Riggio recently passed away. Vilified for many years as the destroyer of indie bookstores, Riggio was most recently thought of as someone who developed stores that currently stand as a bulwark against the ever-encroaching Amazon behemoth. With apologies to Harvey Dent, I guess you either die a villain or you live long enough to see yourself become the hero.

If it ever gets built, that is. ↩︎