Readmore No More After 30 Years

Last month, Jack and Fran Welsh, the owners of Mansfield, Ohio, independent Readmore Books, announced to their staff that the store will close at the end of July after 30 years in business. Readmore is one of the city's largest independent bookstores and had undergone two substantial expansions in the last seven years. The 8,000 square foot store has 16 employees.

"There are a lot of the usual factors in the store closing," Readmore general manager Terri Hudson told PW. "The bottom line is that despite all the wonderful things we did, we just couldn't get our figures to where they needed to be."

"People here—our employees as well as our customers—are understandably distraught," Hudson said. "We've been tremendously active in the community, and we've built wonderful relationships with so many of our customers over the years. We feel we've run a great bookstore, and we've done so many incredible store events, but there was finally no getting around the fact that traffic has decreased in recent years. The store has continued to do well with children's books and sidelines, but it just reached the point where we couldn't make up the difference."

A Barnes & Noble opened in Mansfield in 1996. "I feel like we rode that out just fine, but I think the online stuff has hurt us more than we ever imagined," Hudson said. "People can get books anywhere now; we had a nearby Kroger's that was selling Harry Potter at 30% off, and things like that certainly hurt us."