Quote:
Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan
Major retail bookstores, of course, have gotten used to big buildings and big displays over the years... but they haven't taken advantage of the digital market to do the one thing that would've kept them on-site: Downsizing. Fewer, more clever displays, combined with the sales of digital products that take up no space, would allow the stores to shrink with the financial times but not go away. A borders could fit into a small- to medium-sized storefront, not take up a block.
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If anything, the big chains have been moving in the wrong direction; they bought up the B.Dalton and Waldenbook mall store chains and shut them down to force traffic to their regional monsters. We've seen how that worked out.
Given the industry's love affair with NYT bestsellers what the chains needed to do was follow the Radio Shack/Gamestop model of small ubiquitous storefronts backed by regional warehouses and fast ship to store online ordering.
A moot point by now, though.