From Quartz:
Americans are swapping bookstores.
Bookselling chain Barnes & Noble will lose a total of eight stores across the United States by the end of this fiscal year, but digital behemoth Amazon will fill the gap by December.
Last week, Amazon opened a store in Chicago, Illinois, its first physical bookstore not in a coastal city, and the second of the seven it plans to open this calendar year.
Meanwhile, Barnes & Noble plans to open four new stores and close 12 by April 30, according to David Deason, vice president of development. It already closed the only general-interest bookstore in the New York City borough of the Bronx. Last fiscal year the company closed eight locations.
Eight was good news for the bookstore chain: It was the fewest closings Barnes & Noble had seen since 2000, says Deason, and five fewer than originally planned.
Link to the rest at Quartz and thanks to Dave for the tip.
PG predicts Barnes & Noble will have net closures of more than eight stores during its next fiscal year, ending April 30, 2018.
According to Fortune, B&N has ranged between 8 and 16 net closures per year since 2010. Granted, they’ve been opening some new, smaller stores, which makes the loss look better than it is, but there hasn’t been a massive drop since 2009-2010 when they lost a net 58. B&N might surprise with a sudden jump in closures, but with the data available it isn’t too much of a stretch to say that Amazon will be adding stores at a similar rate to Barnes and Noble’s closing rate.
http://fortune.com/2016/03/03/barnes-noble-results/
Digging a little deeper it appears that only 4 new stores were planned for 2016. This suggests that at best 12 were closed in that 2016 figure. It isn’t clear how much prediction is involved in the 2016 figure, since it was reported in March 2016. In any case, the Quartz article was not claiming full replacement, so it is possible that they will be right.
https://consumerist.com/2016/03/03/barnes-noble-is-opening-4-new-prototype-stores-closing-fewer-than-expected/
“For nearly every bookstore Barnes & Noble loses this year, Amazon will open a new one”
Hmmm, either my calculator is broken, or I need that ‘whale-math’ option added to make this come out right …