As far as closing stores B&N will review options at lease end. Find out when your stores lease expires. Ask your landlord not your cluster manager or area manager.
Private equity companies will always close a store if not profitable or one with lower profit and a lease that’s not favorable.
Opening a new location will depend on market strength and obtaining a viable location with potential to grow sales and profit.
B&N can be successful with new smaller stores even if sales are less if the profitability of the new smaller location is higher. B&N will have less locations no doubt and can become more profitable over time.
Oh and yes the operating model will not be the same in other words everything changes to make the stores more profitable. In the case of private equity it’s profit first people and culture are not going to stand in the way.
Change is inevitable and they are counting on long term highly paid employees and managers to bail out due to all of the changes. They want new lower paid employees that don’t have the we did it this way before attitudes.
You can look to many other retailers before B&N that are going through this same scenario or went through it. Do your research if you are a long time retail manager at B&N this is nothing new. You may call yourselves booksellers but your no different than any other retail Manager. When private equity takes over everything changes.