The Brick-and-Mortar Comeback Story Your Local Retailers Need to Hear

Read Time: 8 minutes

For years, “the store is dying” has been one of those easy, lazy headlines that never seems to go out of style. It’s neat. It’s dramatic. It fits on a slide. And it flatters anyone who wants to believe the future is always the same thing: fewer places, more apps.

Then Barnes Noble walked back into the plot like a character everyone wrote off in Act Two.

The nation’s best-known big-box bookseller opened 60 new stores in 2025, and it’s planning another 60 new locations in 2026—a pace that would have sounded absurd during the long era of closures and consolidations. That alone is a headline. But the more useful story—especially for MarketingInsights.Info readers trying to reassure and energize local retailers—is why a legacy chain is expanding in the face of the most famous web-based competitor in modern commerce: Amazon.

Amazon, after all, didn’t begin as “everything.” It began as books—an online bookstore run out of a garage, built around endless selection, reviews, and the convenience of never leaving your house. If Barnes Noble can grow here, in that category, it’s a signal flare for every local retailer wondering whether customers still want a real place, real people, and a real experience.

They do. And the reasons are surprisingly transferable.

Barnes Noble’s message: “Local wins” even inside a national chain

Barnes Noble’s recent momentum isn’t just about opening stores. It’s about changing what a store is.

One of the most important shifts has been letting individual locations feel less like corporate clones and more like local bookstores—curated, responsive, and human. In multiple reports, the company’s turnaround is tied to giving store leaders more autonomy to reflect local tastes, local trends, and local reading communities.

In an earlier interview, CEO James Daunt put it plainly: “We trust booksellers to know what books will sell in their store…”

That’s not a merchandising detail. That’s a retail philosophy: the people closest to the customer should run the show.

And it’s the same lesson local retailers have always known in their bones.

When a business feels “local,” customers don’t experience it as “a point of distribution.” They experience it as a place. A relationship. A ritual.

Barnes Noble is essentially scaling a truth your best Main Street operators already practice:

• Curation beats inventory.
• Community beats convenience (more often than we admit).
• Experience beats efficiency when products are similar.

The big proof point: expansion after a decade of retreat

Barnes Noble itself has highlighted how sharp the reversal has been. The company has noted that 2024 was its biggest single year of new-store openings in a long time—more than it opened across the entire decade from 2009 to 2019.

That context matters. Because it tells retailers (and the media sellers who advise them) that this isn’t “one good quarter.” It’s a strategic shift backed by leases, staffing, buildouts, and long-term bets.

And in retail, you don’t sign dozens of leases because you feel nostalgic. You sign them because the math works.

Reports attribute the expansion to strong sales in existing stores and renewed momentum. CBS 8+1 In other words: the current stores are doing well enough to justify more stores.

That’s the part local retailers need to hear:

Brick mortar isn’t surviving on vibes. It’s growing on performance.

So why are physical stores getting stronger again?

There are at least five forces powering this comeback—forces your local retailers can use immediately in their own messaging, merchandising, and marketing plans.

1) The “endless scroll” hangover is real

Online shopping is efficient. It’s also exhausting.

“Choice” used to feel like freedom. Now it often feels like homework. When everything is available, nothing feels selected for you. A store, at its best, is a relief: someone has already made decisions. Someone has edited the chaos.

Bookstores are especially good at this because they turn selection into storytelling. Tables. Staff picks. “If you liked this, try that.” A human path through a crowded world.

Local retailers can do the same thing, whether they sell shoes, kitchenware, bikes, furniture, pet supplies, or specialty foods: reduce the cognitive load. Make the next decision easy—and enjoyable.

2) The store is back to being a “third place”

A strong retailer isn’t only selling products; they’re selling permission to linger.

Barnes Noble stores are built for browsing: aisles, displays, and that familiar “I’ll just look for five minutes” promise that turns into forty-five. Cafés help, but the deeper point is atmosphere—lighting, layout, discovery.

This “third place” role has been widely discussed in the context of bookstores’ renewed popularity. Fast Company

Local retailers don’t need a café to do this. They need welcome: a place that feels like it’s for you, not just your wallet.

3) Community-led retail outperforms algorithm-led retail in trust

Amazon is great at logistics. It is not designed to be a neighbor.

Barnes Noble’s local-control strategy is, in effect, a trust strategy. Customers trust environments that feel grounded in their community.

This matters even more now, when people are skeptical of reviews, wary of counterfeits, and tired of “sponsored” everything. A store where a real person looks you in the eye and says, “This one’s good,” is suddenly a competitive advantage again.

4) Local marketing works better when the business is physically present

Here’s where MarketingInsights.Info readers—especially local media sellers and agency folks—can lean in with confidence:

A physical store is a billboard you can walk into. It’s proof. It’s a landmark. It gives advertising something to point to.

When a retailer advertises on local radio, TV, print, outdoor, newsletters, or high-trust local digital, the ad doesn’t vanish into the ether—it lands on a real place people can visit today. That loop (message → visit → experience → repeat) is where brands get built.

5) Retailers are learning to fight e-commerce with omnichannel sanity

The winning model isn’t “offline vs. online.” It’s “online + offline,” done with discipline.

Stores can fulfill pickups, handle returns, host events, and create discovery that feeds online reorders later. The store becomes the brand’s stage; the website becomes the convenience layer.

Barnes Noble’s expansion is a reminder that the physical layer still matters—even when you can buy the same item online in ten seconds.

The Barnes Noble playbook local retailers can borrow

This is the “use it Monday morning” section you can share with local retailers as encouragement—and as a practical blueprint.

Make the store feel chosen, not stocked

• Fewer random displays, more themed collections
• “Staff favorites” that sound like people, not copywriters
• Seasonal discovery that rotates often (gives customers a reason to return)

Turn events into revenue, not just publicity

Author signings are the obvious bookstore version, but every category has an equivalent:

• Demos, tastings, lessons, “meet the maker,” mini-workshops
• Partner nights with local charities or schools
• Limited-run drops that create urgency

A store with a calendar becomes a community habit.

Put your “locals” in charge of local relevance

Barnes Noble’s recent strategy emphasizes local autonomy. Local retailers can go even further: empower staff to merchandise for your neighborhood’s tastes—because they live there.

Sell the sensory stuff the internet can’t deliver

If you’re advising a retailer, ask them:

• What can customers touch, try, taste, hear, smell, or experience here that they can’t online?
• What’s the moment of delight in your store?

Then build marketing around that.

A simple pitch you can use with local retailers

If you sell media, marketing, or agency services, you’re often walking into a retail owner’s office after they’ve heard this all before: “traffic is down,” “Amazon is killing us,” “ads don’t work like they used to.”

Here’s a grounded reframing—anchored in Barnes Noble’s real-world expansion:

“Barnes Noble opened 60 stores this year and planning about 60 more next year—after years of closures. That’s not nostalgia; that’s a profitable bet on in-person retail experience.”

Then add:

“They’re growing by making stores feel local—curated by people who know their community. That’s exactly the advantage you have, too.”

And close with:

“The goal isn’t to ‘beat Amazon at Amazon.’ The goal is to build the kind of place customers choose on purpose—and then advertise consistently enough that your store becomes the default.”

That’s the brick-and-mortar confidence retailers are hungry for: not denial, not doom—just a clear strategy built on what customers actually do.

The takeaway: physical retail is evolving, not disappearing

Barnes Noble’s expansion is a case study in something bigger than books:

• People still crave places.
• They still value human recommendations.
• They still want experiences that don’t feel like scrolling.
• And they still reward retailers who act like part of the community, not just a checkout flow.

Amazon will remain a titan. It will remain fast. It will remain everywhere.

But the Barnes Noble story—opening 60 stores in 2025 and planning 60 more in 2026—shows that “everywhere” isn’t the same as “somewhere.”

And “somewhere,” properly run and properly marketed, is still one of the strongest competitive advantages a local business can have.