On the heels of Blockbuster's recent announcement of 300 more stores to close across the country, bookseller Barnes & Noble unveils its own plans to wind down up to 20 stores per year for the next decade.
TechCrunch is reporting that bookseller and NOOK maker Barnes & Noble will be shuttering nearly 20 brick-and-mortar retail stores per year over the next 10 years, a plan implemented after a 10.9 percent drop in sales during the holiday quarter.
According to The Wall Street Journal, B&N currently has somewhere in the neighborhood of 689 retail stores, which will drop to between 450 and 500 over the next decade.
Oddly, the company claims that less than three percent of the Barnes & Noble retail locations actually lose money, but the move is intended to firm up the NOOK maker's commitment to its e-reader hardware.
The real question is, why announce these plans right now? It might be better to publicly close 20 or so stores each year without any fanfare, but obviously Barnes & Noble executives know better than us -- we'd have predicted the whole chain would be defunct in a decade...
Follow this article’s author, J.R. Bookwalter on Twitter
