Another book “superstore” closes

I was a little shocked to discover in the course of a walk further south than I’d been for two months that the Barnes & Noble at State and Elm Streets on the Near North Side of Chicago had closed permanently. I shouldn’t have been surprised. The owner of the land on which this Barnes & Noble sits had been trying for more than a year to get permission to erect a large apartment building on the site. The matter was on hold for the moment since the inhabitants of the tall apartment buildings across both State and Elm Streets were vehemently opposed, and the area’s alderman had rejected the owner’s application twice as a consequence. But these sorts of conflicts typically conclude with an agreement to put up a smaller building, and there was no reason to think that this one would end differently. The Barnes & Noble at State and Elm had been living on borrowed time for a year. Still, I was both disturbed and sad to see it vanish.

I know that large chain bookstores haven’t always been widely appreciated, and I certainly acknowledge that independent bookstores often make a more distinctive contribution to a city’s intellectual life. I’m much more likely to find something extraordinarily interesting in the main display area of certain independent bookstores than among the corporation-determined books put out in the front section of a Barnes & Noble.

But the size and impersonality of large chain bookstores provide some advantages too. These stores invariably have more items in stock than all but a few independent bookstores. And many people (including me) feel much less self-conscious spending a long time browsing and skimming at a big chain bookstore than in a small one where the owner is a few feet away. Big bookstores also usually provide bathrooms, which are a substantial asset to people (again like me) who enjoy urban walking. And many people also value these stores’ cafés, which are apparently a profit center for them. The disappearance of large chain bookstores from cities removes a welcoming Third Space from the urban landscape. It also makes it a lot harder actually to take a look at new books and magazines.

It needs to be said though that the era of the urban book “superstore” hasn’t been all that long. Barnes & Noble and Borders only started expanding wildly in the 1990s. Borders went bankrupt in 2011, and Barnes & Noble has been downsizing for at least a decade. It had already closed several stores in the Chicago area and even more elsewhere in the United States.¹  It apparently isn’t easy these days to earn enough money from sales to pay the rent required to keep a large bookstore open, especially in expensive parts of cities.² I’m sure there must be a substantial business literature questioning whether the book “superstore” was ever a good idea. Does a huge store that encourages browsing on a large scale make sense in a world in which businesses are expected to measure their profitability by the square foot? But it appears to be online selling that undermined the value of this model most thoroughly. Competition from Amazon (and from Barnes & Noble’s own online bookstore) made profitable retail operation increasingly difficult. In the case of the Barnes & Noble at State and Elm, local real estate ambitions and the Coronavirus Pandemic, which has now forced bookstores to keep their retail shops closed for ten weeks, were the immediate causes of its shutting down, but its closure is definitely part of a larger trend.

For people like me, who have always appreciated large urban chain bookstores, the end of the era when they were common seems quite unfortunate.

Note added 28 March 2023. I’ve just learned that the Clybourn Avenue Barnes & Noble closed permanently earlier this month. There are no longer any full-service Barnes & Noble stores in Chicago.

Note added 28 February 2024. Barnes & Noble has announced that it will be opening two new branches this spring or summer in what are perhaps the two most pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods in Chicago: at the Milwaukee/North/Damen intersection in Wicker Park and near Clark and Diversey on the Lincoln Park/Lake View border (right next to one of its old locations). This is wonderful news.