Barnes & Noble plans to open 30 stores in 2023 and over the past year opened more stores than it closed, according to the Wall Street Journal, which said the company has “experienced robust customer demand coming out of the pandemic as all booksellers benefited from people turning to books while stuck at home.”
The Journal noted that B&N has about 600 stores now, after peaking at 726 in 2008. As the company has emphasized, the new and renovated stores are usually smaller in size than their predecessors. Referring to a new B&N in Riverhead, N.Y., that has full-height bookshelves arranged in a layout that the Journal called “more analogous to an independent bookstore ‘maze’ than the supermarket-style layout of the chain’s standard big-box locations,” Daunt said, “It creates a completely different browsing experience.”
