February Bookstore Sales Dropped 22.3% (publishersweekly.com)

J. C. Penney Company, Inc. announced that it has entered into an asset purchase agreement with Brookfield Asset Management, Inc, Simon Property Group and a majority of the Company’s DIP and First Lien Lenders. Key terms of the APA are as follows: *Brookfield and Simon will acquire substantially all of JCPenney’s retail and operating assets (“OpCo”) through a combination of cash and new term loan debt. *The formation of separate property holding companies (“PropCos”), comprising 160 of the Company’s real estate assets and all of its owned distribution centers, which will be owned by the Company’s DIP and First Lien Lenders. *The OpCo and PropCos will enter into master leases with respect to the properties and distribution centers moved into the PropCos (the “Master Lease Agreement”). JCPenney, Simon and Brookfield, and the Majority Lender Group have reached agreement on all outstanding business points in the Master Lease Agreement.

The Postal Service announced it will implement upgraded service standards for its USPS Retail Ground (RG) and Parcel Select Ground (PSG) products effective Aug. 1, 2022. Within the contiguous United States, service standards for these products will be accelerated from two- to eight-days to two- to five-days for the same affordable price. Items containing hazardous materials or live animals are not eligible for the upgraded service standards. RG is a ground shipping product for packages, thick envelopes and tubes (with a maximum weight of 70 pounds) that are not required to be mailed via First-Class Mail service and are available only through retail channels. PSG is an economical ground delivery service similar to RG for commercial shippers. The Postal Service is aligning the RG and PSG service standards with the current First-Class Package Service (FCPS) standards within the contiguous US. Processing this mail with FCPS packages will enhance customer service and better optimize the Postal Service’s package processing and surface transportation networks.

Unit sales of print books dropped 3% in the week ended Jan. 15, 2022, from the comparable week last year, at outlets that report to NPD BookScan. Nonfiction sales remained soft, and adult nonfiction sales fell 7.8% from the week ended Jan. 16, 2021. Once again, it was softness throughout the category rather than the lack of a big bestseller that fueled the decline. Indeed, the two top titles in the category—Baby Steps Millionaires by Dave Ramsey and Glenn Beck’s The Great Reset—sold about 65,000 copies and 58,000 copies, respectively, easily beating the top title at this time last year: Barack Obama’s A Promised Land, which sold about 33,000 copies in the similar week. Juvenile nonfiction sales fell 11.6% in the week, as all of the category’s largest subcategories had double-digit declines. My Little Golden Book of Betty White by Deborah Hopkinson remained the #1 title, selling almost 12,000 copies. Juvenile fiction sales also fell, dropping 2.9%.