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 bookstores 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,
invested 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 bookstore chains.