It’s all irrelevant since Waterstones will cease to exist in 10 years anyway, having been beaten into submission by Amazon.
You think they’ve got as much as 10 years left? I’d give them 2 years max and thats optimistic, not least because all their work to break the Net Book Agreement back in the 90’s has come back to bite them as thats what now allows Amazon to effectively pay for their customers to buy books, which they can afford to keep doing until there are no other book sellers (and even publishers) left. But more ominously for them… after the riots last summer my friend got home from holiday to find every shop on her local high st smashed and looted – except Waterstone’s which was completely untouched, with even its apostrophe intact. That to me spells doom, not only because even in a complete mindless free-for-all nobody wanted their stuff for nowt when theres bottled water and value rice up for grabs, but because they were so irrelevant it wasn’t even fun to smash the windows.