From Shelf Awareness:
University Book Store, Inc.–the for-profit corporate trust that benefits University of Washington students, faculty and staff and has seven stores in the Seattle, Wash., area–is closing its 30-year-old store in downtown Bellevue on February 15.
University Book Store CEO Louise Little said that “while we have enjoyed success over those 30 years, the retail environment has changed significantly. We believe our business, and the Trust which governs our operations, will be better served by leasing the space that our store currently occupies to another retail tenant.”
The University Book Store owns the building its Bellevue store is located in; tenants include Y’ves Delorme, Zeeks Pizza, Nancy Wallace Pilates and Salon 990.
Little noted that Bellevue, an upscale city across Lake Washington from Seattle, is going through “a huge growth spurt,” with lots of development, making commercial properties more valuable. University Book Store looked at the economics of operating its own business in its 19,000-square-foot space, 1,000 of which is leased to a cafe, compared to leasing that space to another business, and found, Little said, that “it was far and away much more profitable to lease that space rather than operate our own store.”
Link to the rest at Shelf Awareness
James, I can’t hope this will morph into a University-based B&N. My daughter’s in her last semester at a midwestern university and B&N runs the campus bookstore. She receives lots of e-mails from B&N to order her books online, but each semester–every single time she tries–it refuses to recognize her passcode from the previous semester. She has to start from scratch every time.
She usually bails after a couple of tries; customer support is unresponsive–and gets all the books she can on Amazon.
Yo, Riggio, got a prime B&M bookstore location for B&N for ya. Better jump on it fast! 🙂
There is a B&N five blocks away located in a remodeled 1940s bowling alley. It has about 1/2 the books when it opened twenty years ago. The rest is pillows etc.
The land is permitted for a ~20 story building, but who knows when they will build. Probably not for several years considering all the current building going on.
When I moved to Bellevue in 1985 there were two buildings over ten stories. There are now 20+ over twenty stories with eight or nine in the thirty to forty story height.
I didn’t know they had a Bellevue store until they moved into the current space about 15 or 20 years ago. The new store is supposed to be smaller according to the article.
The main UW bookstore by the University of WA is bigger than a B&N and has a bookstore about the size of a B&N, textbooks in a similar sized space and “department” store of other student stuff. They have the best science fiction section in Seattle and actually stock books from publishers that don’t allow returns.
Their main UW store is amazing on the non-textbook side. Very diverse and deep.
For many years I read economics books, everything but the most technical. They had the best selection I knew of anywhere in the country. But there was depth all around me, fiction, non-fiction, and staff knew their inventory. Still do I would bet.
I am fascinated that by owning their own building, which usually insulates a bookstore from increasing rent demands, they realized that they could make far more as landlord than as booksellers. I think they would stay in the book biz near their campus locations, but where they’ve branched out into community retail locations, this could happen again.
Another ‘there’s no money in running a bookstore here’ …