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Originally Posted by vaughnmr
How in the heck would you know that???? Please enlighten me, I guess I'm a dunce, what with profits and a known territory for your business, please tell me what I'm missing. There are 250,000 others waiting for the answer also.
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You're not a "dunce" at all. But basically, pretty much everything about that store is controlled by the subsidiary (B. Dalton). Employees, insurance, the lease, taxes paid, the inventory, contracts, all of it in Dalton's name. There's probably a ton of corporate accounting issues and legal obligations stemming from the liquidation as well.
Or to put it another way, no company likes to leave money on the table. If it were possible to just quickly rebrand the profitable stores and shut the non-performing ones, I'm sure they'd do it. Unfortunately, that store apparently wasn't profitable enough to justify a transition.
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Originally Posted by vaughnmr
Now that I've looked into it, B&N owned the stores for 23 years (since 1987). You would think, that in 23 years, you could come up with a way to make something like that to work!
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Laredo is a border town with a large immigrant population, a high povert rate and low literacy rates -- around 50% according to a Federal survey. Bookstores are closing left and right, including B&N -- whose holiday sales were down 5% over 2008, which was already a disastrous year.
B&N has a lot more to worry about than Laredo. And bookstore closures are going to become very common, as a) ebook sales increase, b) online sales increase, c) big box stores (e.g. Walmart) sales increase.