A study by Chicago’s Grant Thornton warns that 10,000 retail stores across the US may close this year–twice the number of last year’s closings. Among the sectors they predict will be hardest hit are bookstores, with the firm saying that 400 bookstores could close in 2009, which they calculate as a 500 percent increase over 2008. (That would seem to undercount the 2008 closings given the reductions at Borders Group. And we could only find the prediction on bookstores in this Chicago Sun Times article, rather than the report itself.)
Sun Times
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