Yeah, really it's amazing they lasted as long as they did. The one near me did pretty good business for a while after it opened, but it was always clear that they were terribly positioned if business slipped. Their square footage was way higher than it had any right being even when they were well-stocked. And filling that space with tons of marble decor immediately communicated that someone at corporate really, *really* loved making unnecessary money sinks.
Still, it's sad. The one here opened literally 2 blocks from my job at the time, and now they're right near my storage place, so I've popped in pretty consistently the whole time that location's been going. When they first opened here around the tail end of the PS2 era, their selection of movies, music, and games absolutely blew away any other physical stores. I even bought a few PSP imports there. They slipped a lot in the past few years, but they started so far beyond other stores that it still took a loooong slide until they weren't the best physical store to browse and find all kinds of semi-obscure media in stock. And even with the slip in media, up until recently they still at least filled those shelves with tangentially interesting tchotchkes and whatnot. Not everyone's cup of tea, but clearly someone was making some sort of effort to fill the space, and I almost always found some cool random crap to walk out with.
I last went in a month ago and yeah, shit was super dire. It was a really weird feeling to walk around knowing it's probably the last time I'll see it, after a decade+ of fairly frequent stops in.
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