the bespectacled man on the left is Scott Pack, Waterstone’s somewhat infamous head buyer who recently announced his departure from the chain in a few months’ time. But was he simply too powerful? The Telegraph reports that Gerry Johnson, who arrived as Waterstone’s new managing director four months ago, regards the attention paid to Mr Pack’s influence as highly embarrassing and has pledged to give power back to local managers — even though the chain claims that “of 67,500 titles stocked last year, only 5,610 were selected by Mr Pack’s buying team.”
Whether or not Pack was some sort of bogeyman, the fact remains that W will be making some changes, as the Times’ Nicholas Clee points out in a lengthy treatise on the old ways versus the new. What those changes will be remains to be seen, but considering Johnson’s background — first at Tesco, then at the food distributor Booker — his argument that “there is a massive misunderstanding of the way Waterstone’s works . . . [and] one of my most important jobs in the coming months is to rectify that” may not convince everybody…
As for HMV (which owns Waterstone’s) they’ve been passed over by one potential buyer: Sterling Publishing, the house owned by Barnes and Noble, have expressed their disinterest. Though Sterling was evaluating whether to open a chain of combined book and music stores, it could not see a way to make it work in the UK.