GameStop has announced that they’ll be closing down more than 300 stores over the next year. The announcement comes as the fiscal year approaches an end, with the GameStop board releasing financial information to investors.
The fiscal year comes to a somewhat positive note, with GameStop reporting a net income of $21 million overall. This is a sizeable improvement over 2019’s fourth quarter, which brought them losses above the $180 million mark.
Despite this bullishness in the final quarter, the year was generally not a good one for GameStop, who have been seeing considerable losses for a while now. GameStop is reporting losses of $470.9 million, which is a moderate improvement over last year’s losses of $673 million.
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These losses may be part of why GameStop is intending to close down stores. Last year, they closed more than 300 stores worldwide, and have announced plans to at least meet the same tally of stores closed with hopes of exceeding the number.
Much of this is part of already-existing plans to “de-densify” the number of GameStop retail locations that are available. With so many stores, the cost of operation alone ends up astronomical and is one of the many reasons that GameStop has been operating at a loss.
Still, knowing that they’re closing more than 600 stores in the last two years is deceptive. As of now, the chain has close to 6,000 stores open in the United States alone, so it’ll be some time before they’ve done a large amount of “de-densifying.”
Of course, all of their stores across the United States and Canada are closed at the moment due to the COVID-19 pandemic – despite GameStop’s desperate attempts to keep them open. The retailers fought tooth and nail to keep stores open despite massive safety concerns as the virus continued to spread. They even went far enough as to lie to the public about the supplies they were giving their staff, saying that all stores would be heavily supplied with sanitization equipment and then refusing to actually send any supplies out.
Eventually, the company was forced to shut their retailers down. Even after telling their employees to refuse to close when law enforcement came to shut them down, GameStop was ultimately helpless when governments began to force them into closing as part of the preventative measures to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, which reaches greater proportions every day.
With so many stores closing, though, hundreds of employees will be losing their job. While no one is mourning the loss of one of the thousands of GameStops, it’s a shame that it has to come at the expense of hundreds of workers that will now have to find new employment as GameStop closes down stores en masse.
