Waldens Books

Bay_Kat

Tropical
Not sure if the ones in Maryland are closing, but at my local mall this one will be gone in 9 days. Happened to walk by today and everything in the store was 65-80% off. I walked out with a ton of books for only 17 bucks. I'm not surprised they are closing just not sure if it has anything to do with the Kindles, etc.
 

obxtracey

Member
Waldenbooks

Not sure if the ones in Maryland are closing, but at my local mall this one will be gone in 9 days. Happened to walk by today and everything in the store was 65-80% off. I walked out with a ton of books for only 17 bucks. I'm not surprised they are closing just not sure if it has anything to do with the Kindles, etc.

Haven't been into the St. Charles Mall in Waldorf lately. I wouldn't be suprised if the Walden's in there closes. I'll have to check it out to see if I can get some good deals, too! Anyway, I found an article from Nov 2009 relating to this. Seems Borders, who owns Waldenbooks, is trying to streamline things due to financial loses, blah blah blah. Barnes and Noble is also closing all but 2 of it's mall stores called B. Dalton Books. Mall rent is very high.

I've always found the book stores in the malls to be too small anyway. I prefer to make the trip to the bigger stores (Borders and Barnes&Noble) where there is a much bigger selection.

Here's the article link: Borders will axe 200 Waldenbooks stores, 1,500 jobs - DailyFinance
 

twinoaks207

Having Fun!
Not surprised to hear this. I managed a couple of Walden's in the early 80's. the mark-up on books was about 50%. We purchased from jobbers at 40% discount & then sold books for full cover price, with a sale every now & then. When discount stores started adding books to their inventory, the slow slide started, becoming a steeper slide with the advent of Walmart, the big box super stores (Sam's, Costco), and most especially Amazon. With their ability to buy in bulk and discount deeply, stores couldn't get away with that kind of a mark-up any more. Unfortunately, this also pretty much exterminated the local private bookstores. Most of the ones now in existence serve a specialised niche market and that's how they stay viable but it's not a business that will make you a millionaire. The book industry has been lamenting the demise of the independent bookstores for years. Now it's come to the point that the sharks are eating each other. At some point, I expect to see only one or two whales...

The really sad thing is that when yo lose the smaller, independent stores, you also lose the incomparable service that you'd get from employees who care deeply about the product that they sell, know much about it, and love to share information about what's good and comparable.

"You've Got Mail" was really true, but without any kind of a happy ending in this instance.

So sad....
 
Top