GameStop, Which is Doing Fine, is Closing 300+ Stores This Year

GameStop is having a bit of a rough time of it. They were always struggling to stay open and, well, relevant in recent years, what with the rise of digital game sales. All of their problems were made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic, which not only revealed the horrible mismanagement of the company but also eventually forced them to close their doors and operate with a much more limited scope. This debacle almost certainly isn’t helping their bottom line.

Many people have anticipated the death of GameStop, but there’s never been a better reason to suspect they might not be long for this world than now.

Especially since they’re going to be closing over 300 stores soon.

“[We] anticipate store closures to be equal to or more than 320 net closures we saw in fiscal 2019 on a global basis. Importantly, we want to emphasize that these store closures are a very specific and proactive part of our de-densification plan and they are not related to recent business trends.”

Last year, they also closed around 300 stores,, and they even gave the same excuse for the closures: namely, that they wanted to avoid inter-store competition by reducing the ‘density’ of GameStop’s in certain areas. There might be a little business sense to doing something like that, but more realistically, this is just an excuse to save face and try to avoid investor panic.

But they’d have to be blind or stupid to not see the writing on the wall here.