By Brian Womack, The Dallas Morning News
GameStop has been racking up store closures for a while, but a new shuttering is coming in its own backyard.
The national retailer that’s been under pressure has shut down its store at Grapevine Mills, according to Simon, which counts the mall among its lineup of shopping centers. The shuttering was due to a natural lease expiration.
The shop also happens to be in the same city as the company’s headquarters: Grapevine.
With the shuttering, there are now no stores in Grapevine listed for customers on its website. The massive mall is about an 8-mile drive away from the GameStop headquarters.
The company — known in some circles more for its “meme stock” days and its push into Bitcoin — is a retailer that’s faced challenges as consumers access different platforms that don’t require physical video games to engage with their favorite titles. In its latest quarterly report, sales fell though net income rose as expenses declined.
GameStop started in Dallas 45 years ago as a shop called Babbage’s with the help of local businessman Ross Perot, an early investor in the retailer. The shop found success selling games, accessories and consoles for the Atari 2600. The release of the Nintendo Entertainment System later in the decade was a catalyst for a major video game sales boom. After Babbage’s was acquired a handful of times and became a subsidiary of Barnes and Noble Booksellers, it was renamed GameStop in 2000.
The company, which has thousands of sites, has been shuttering locations. During fiscal 2024, GameStop initiated a review identifying shops for closure — “based on many factors, including an evaluation of current market conditions and individual store performance,” the company said in a regulatory filing.
The review, among other things, brought on the closure of 590 stores in the U.S. in fiscal 2024.
“We anticipate closing a significant number of additional stores in fiscal 2025,” the company said in the filing.
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