Guildford North Street Waterstones to Close this Week

As was expected Waterstones have announced a number of closures of their stores across the company including the branch at North Street in Guildford. In a previous statement at the beginning of the year the parent company HMV Group announced the poor trading results over the whole business at Christmas and with the continuing strong competition from online booksellers and from the supermarket chains, said that they expected 40 HMV stores and 20 Waterstones to close over the next year. This would seem to be the first wave of these closures and job losses will be inevitable despite the companies aims to redeploy as many as possible to it's other stores.

Slough, Maidenhead and Edinburgh East End had already been mark to close, added with today's 11 stores, that's 14 announced, but that still leaves no word on which other 6 stores might make up the expect 20 bookshops to face the chop.

Guildford is one of the towns that currently has two and the management did see these as easier options for closure, so Guildford will still have a Waterstones shop in the Town Centre but that is of course little comfort to those people about to lose their jobs.

What do you think about this? Do you buy your books on the High Street on online?

Photo: gwydionwilliams