Waldenbooks

History

On March 4, 1933, Lawrence Hoyt (1902–1982), a former sales manager for Simon & Schuster, opened a rental library within leased space inside a Bridgeport, Connecticut department store under the name Walden Book Company. Within fifteen years, it had grown to over 250 locations in leased locations within various department stores. With the increased availability of low cost paperbacks after the Second World War, rental library services were eventually replaced with retail book selling.

In 1962, he opened his first stand-alone bookstore in Pittsburgh; by 1981, it had become the first bookstore chain to have stores in every state. In 1969, it was purchased by the Broadway Hale Stores, a California-based department stores holding company that was later renamed Carter Hawley Hale in 1974. For the stand-alone bookstores, the company initially traded under the name Walden Books. During the 1970s, the company gradually changed their trade name to Waldenbooks.

In 1984, Waldenbooks acquired three stores that were located in upscale neighborhoods from the bankrupted Brentano's chain with the original intent of converting the stores to the Waldenbooks brand, However, Waldenbooks discovered that when they continued to operate the newly acquired stores as Brentano's that the new stores were generating more sales than equivalent Waldenbooks so Waldenbooks decided to continue and expand the Brentano's brand in selected upscale neighborhoods.

Later in 1984, Waldenbooks itself was acquired by Kmart after Carter Hawley Hales needed to get cash to defend itself from a hostile takeover attempt. At that time, Waldenbooks was the largest retail bookstore chain.

Under Kmart's ownership, Walden tried many things to expand and diversify its business. In 1985, it opened a discount book outlet chain called Reader's Market by converting five existing stand-alone Waldenbooks stores. A year later, Walden discontinued the discount bookstores after determining that sales figures were not as great as first projected. In its place, Walden decided to try this concept within selected Kmart stores.

After terminating the discount book strategy, Walden decided to experiment with larger stores by opening Waldenbooks & More stores that included merchandise beyond books, WaldenSoftware computer software stores, and WaldenKids educational toys stores. In 1987, Waldenbooks acquired the U.S. Stores of the Canadian bookstore chain Coles...the book people! and gradually converted the stores to Waldenbooks. By 1990, Waldenbooks began to convert Waldenbooks & More into even larger Waldenbooks & More Books stores with a greatly expanded book selection.

In 1992, Walden opened 9 book superstores under the Basset Book Shop name, ultimately these stores were converted to Borders after the merger.

Kmart expanded its bookstore holdings by acquiring Borders in 1992. At that time, Kmart kept Borders and Waldenbooks separate, but converted Waldenbook's Bassett stores to the Borders brand.

When Kmart decided to spin off its non-core subsidiaries in 1994, Kmart merged Waldenbooks, Brentano's and Borders to form the Borders-Walden Group. At that time, Waldenbooks had 1,216 stores in all 50 states. In 1995, the renamed Borders Group was able to buy back its stock and it was listed independently on the New York Stock Exchange.

Beginning in 2004, many Waldenbooks locations were re-branded as Borders Express stores. Borders Group, in an attempt to increase profits and lower the overall expense of their Waldenbooks brand, also announced that it was downsizing the Waldenbooks chain to respond to the current "competitive environment". In January 2010, 200 stores, almost two thirds of the total, were closed.

On July 18, 2011, Borders Group filed for liquidation to close all of its remaining Waldenbooks and other stores. Liquidation commenced on July 22, 2011.