How America Learned to Love Barnes & Noble Again
Barnes & Noble was once the avatar for sinister big-box stores on the march against independent businesses. In 1998’s You’ve Got Mail, Tom Hanks plays an executive at Foxbooks, a thinly disguised bookstore chain, who puts out of business (and also, weirdly, seduces) an independent bookseller played by Meg Ryan. Local bookstores were, at the time, folding en masse, and people were mad about the growing predominance of chain retail.
