In Response To Falling Sales, GameStop Announces Plan To Close “A Larger Number Of Stores Than We Have Closed In The Past Few Years”
GameStop has announced that due to a company-wide drop in sales, they may soon be undertaking a mass closure of their brick-and-mortar stores.
The video-game-retailer-turned-Funko-Pop!-warehouse first revealed their current struggles by way of their Q2 2024 financials report, as released on September 12th.
Therein, GameStop revealed that compared to the same time last year, their net sales for the second quarter had fallen from $1.164 billion to $0.798 billion – a drop of approximately 30%.
In light of this result, the company then announced that they had “initiated a comprehensive store portfolio optimization review which involves identifying stores for closure based on many factors, including an evaluation of current market conditions and individual store performance.”
“While this review is ongoing and a specific set of stores has not been identified for closure, we anticipate that it may result in the closure of a larger number of stores than we have closed in the past few years,” they further detailed.
Sadly for the retail chain, this ‘closure consideration’ comes roughly four years after their previous announcement, as made by former CEO George Sherman during their Q4 2019 earnings, that they would be moving to “densify [a corporate term meaning ‘to consolidate’] our global store fleet and anticipate store closures to be equal to or more than 320 net closures we saw in fiscal 2019 on a global basis.”
Notably, as a result of this previous reduction, GameStop has shuttered the entirety of its physical stores in Ireland, Switzerland, and Australia.
Interestingly, this cancellation warnings come just days after the retailer announced their plans to launch a new ‘Retro Program’, which will see classic consoles and games being once again offered for sale at a number of select GameStop locations.
To this end, how – and ultimately if – these two plans will work together remains to be seen.
As of writing, GameStop has yet to publicly detail which areas or specific stores they are currently looking at for ‘densification’.
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