<human>: Today my wife and I went to Barnes and Noble to buy a cover for a nook tablet with a Coupon that She had received in her email that promised (The coupons image is the one linked). We get to the store, pick out a screen protector/cover and proceed to check out where the cashier looks at the items we have and the printed coupon and says "no that doesn't work for those." My wife points out the fine print showing that it does in fact work the items and the cashier refuses to even try to ring up the item with the coupon. So we leave never purchasing anything.

We go home and she tries the coupon online and it works just fine, so she contacts B&N customer support, explains the whole thing and they say "well it shouldn't work that way, we'll talk to our technical side and ensure that no one can use that coupon on those products."

After a tiresome discussion about wasted time, poor service, and and false advertising my wife gets fed up with B&N and says "screw it I'll just buy from amazon" only to find a nearly identical product at half the price with free shipping.

I want to know though: Can a company still compete with service like that? Aren't people trending away from this kind of sub-par quality service? Is there some sort of trick that lets them compete?

Can you condense the text into three sentences or less?
<bot>: How can Barnes and Noble being a terrible company with a poor customer service model ever hope to stay in the ring with Amazon?