Papillionbusinesses.com Interview with Jaimie Geoffroy
Jaime Geoffroy, Regional Cafe Operations Manager, sits at table in the cafe
Papillionbusinesses.com here with.
Jamie Geoffroy, Regional Cafe Operations Manager with Barnes & Noble.
We’re here at the new Papillion location and in the beautiful café. Tell us a little bit about your journey to your position now and then opening up here in Papillion.
Yes. So I’ve been with the company… it’s going on 20 years. Did everything from cafe manager, assistant manager, to store manager. Previous to Barnes and Noble, I ran Arby’s for 11 years and now I’ve been in the regional café operations manager position for over five years. Papillion’s one of our newest stores that will actually be open…70 in the year 2025. So yeah, we have quite a year ahead of us.
I couldn’t help but notice the huge, huge lines coming in, so I don’t have any doubt personally, and then seeing the line to confirm it that this is a fantastic location. We needed something like this here. Bookstores and the cafés are not just bookstores and cafés, they’re really community gatherings.
Yes, absolutely.
Please tell us a little bit more about the café.
Yes. Books and coffee go hand in hand. No matter where you find a bookstore, you’re going to find a coffee shop right near there. Barnes & Noble, back in I think it was the ’90s, created these cafés just to have the community come in and have a place where they could drink coffee, look at a book, and see if they want to purchase it. And like you said, it’s a great gathering place for our communities. And Papillion customers out there… there was over 100 out there. That’s the way the new stores have been opening—with hundreds of people standing in line outside because they’ve been looking for something like this: a community gathering place. And Barnes and Noble is just…we’re very unique now. We cater to the localization of the community rather than a big corporation.
That’s a really good strategy, I feel, because then you’re connected to the community and the community is connected to you.
Yes.
Any favorite items in the café?
Yes, I’m a huge fan of an iced caramel macchiato, vente size, with an extra shot of espresso to give me a real kick for the day. And then we have our brown sugar shaken espresso, which is actually a fan favorite. Starbucks created that about five or six years ago, and they kept it as a core item.
Anything you’d like people to know that maybe they don’t know about the café or Barnes & Noble or…
Yeah, you can use your Barnes & Noble membership over in the cafe. We have some of the best food. You know, a lot of people will compare us to Starbucks. We serve Starbucks product, but we have unbelievable cookies… the best cookies ever. We have great sandwiches. We have pretzels that are stuffed, and we just have a huge variety that pair well with different drinks that our baristas can suggest.
Why Barnes & Noble?
Right. So I love everything about Barnes & Noble. It’s the customers; it’s the booksellers. There’s nothing like it out there. There’s no retail place out there that can give you, where a customer could sit in our café all day and spend their entire breakfast, lunch, and dinner there. You can’t do that at any other retail store. We hear people’s lives, and we become family with them. So it’s just a wonderful place to be a part of.
Thank you.
Barnes & Noble
7949 Towne Center Pkwy,
Papillion, NE 68046
(Previously was Best Buy and is next to PetSmart)