A few weeks ago I accused book­seller McNally Robin­son of miss­ing the plot twist fol­low­ing their entry into bank­ruptcy pro­tec­tion. What I said was (1) that they had expanded at the wrong time, in the wrong way and (2) that they didn’t have an effec­tive strat­egy for com­pet­ing with online book sales.

Well, last week McNally emerged from bank­ruptcy pro­tec­tion and Paul McNally made some pub­lic com­ment on what went wrong, as he saw it. The biggest sin­gle fac­tor he cites was the fail­ure of their Don Mills store to meet the sales tar­gets for which they had hoped. He spec­u­lated that their strat­egy of com­mu­nity involve­ment maybe didn’t play as well in T-Dot, but it has also been noted that the Don Mills mall in which they were located has been a dis­ap­point­ment to many of its retail tenants.