Wofano Wotanto
Hero
They are. The capture zones for my one surviving B&N might include a half a million people, total, where the city of LA alone has close to four million residents. Even allowing for the legendary LA traffic splitting that between locations (how many is several - three/ four? more?) your individual stores are serving a lot more people than ours does.
B&N went from four free-standing stores within plausible driving distances to one mall location around here, and that final survivor has less footage and massively reduced their hours since they moved in - which was well before COVID, but they contracted even further since. You're in a true metropolis, the second largest city in the US by a large margin. The market there is very different from the relatively sparse Albany area, and B&N treats smaller markets very differently to larger ones, even more so these days with them chasing secondary income from games and toys since Kids R Us collapsed. If I went down to NYC I'd probably find stores that look more like LA's do, but they don't appear upstate any more. Heck, the only two-story book store we ever had was a long-defunct Borders.
Be happy you've got better options for booksellers because of your higher population density. Around here the big box stores moved in, shut down the mid-sized mall shops their parent companies owned already (eg Waldenbooks, B Dalton's) and killed off almost all the indie stores. Now that B&N is fading and Borders is long gone we've been left with a bookseller void that drives people to Amazon - or to other media, all too often. Whole sector of local business practically vanished in the course of maybe twenty years of rapid change.
