As the years passed, Curtis Walker quit the law firm and began concentrating fully on his bookstore. He hired more employees, more books were traded in, and sales increased annually, During the mid-1990s, however, Walker was faced with two problems: many large, upscale bookstore were being built in the area, and the use of the Internet for finding and ordering books was becoming cheaper and more popular for current customers. In 1995, Walker's sales started to decline. Deciding to take a risk because of the newfound competition, he closed his doors to the neighborhood, inbested more money to expand the current property, and transformed his company from simply selling used books to being a distributor of new books. His business model was to obtain books from publishers at a discount, store them in his warehouse, and resell them to large bookstroe chains.