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Do not shut the e-book on Barnes & Noble simply but. Opposite to fashionable perception, the chain of sprawling bookstores is not simply surviving within the age of Amazon — it is thriving, with 30 new shops deliberate for subsequent yr.

It isn’t the one one. A bevy of old-school, brick-and-mortar retailers have both grown their bodily footprints previously 12 months or plan to develop within the subsequent 12, as detailed in a Wall StreetJournal characteristic printed on Monday. The return of the massive field to the massive time is in flip making a post-pandemic boomlet for the business actual property market.

Get in Loser, We’re Going (In-Individual) Buying

The business actual property market has been a curler coaster experience, with high hats and dips that match virtually completely with broader financial circumstances. Footprint expansions peaked in 2007, when big-box retailers leased 130 million sq. ft of recent retailer house. Then, in fact, got here the 2008 monetary disaster. And within the following couple of years, any likelihood at a full retail rebound was stunted by Amazon lastly going thermonuclear and endlessly altering shopper habits. The dual harmful forces had been sufficient to squash mall staples like Sports activities Authority and Toys R Us kind of for good.

However restoration did occur. Whereas it by no means once more reached the peaks of 2007, huge field retailers steadily grew by means of a lot of the 2010s… earlier than, in fact, COVID-19 crashed the occasion and despatched the business into yet one more existential disaster. Now, huge field retailers are as soon as once more searching for house to unpack their huge containers, however this time they may attempt to “proper measurement” whereas using location monitoring knowledge to decide on the right spot:

• TJ Maxx and Marshall’s mother or father firm TJX added 104 new places this yr, with plans for 1,500 within the subsequent few years, a spokesman stated. Ross Costume For Much less opened 92 new places this yr. In the meantime, Burlington — of coat manufacturing unit fame — is about to open almost 90 new shops of their fiscal yr ending on January 28.
• Total, 60 million ft of large-format retail house (outlined as 20,000 sq. ft or extra) has been leased in 2022, Brandon Svec, nationwide director of US retail knowledge analytics agency CoStar, advised WSJ. That continues 2021’s rebound although is shy of 2019’s 77 million sq. foot enlargement.

Noble Endeavors: Whereas Barnes & Noble might by no means match its nationwide peak of 726 shops in 2008, the chain does nonetheless have round 600 places alive and kicking. It plans so as to add one other 30 shops in 2023, together with two Boston-area shops that beforehand housed the brick-and-mortar Amazon Books shops. Now that is an act of revenge worthy of The Rely of Monte Cristo.