Barnes & Noble opened its doors in Jenkintown on September 16, 2026, in a 20,000-square-foot store carved out of a shopping center that used to house a Walgreens. It is the chain's first location in the borough in thirteen years, since it closed a store that had been open since the early 1990s. A mile away, on a pedestrian alley called Yorkway Place, Capricorn Books had already made its own move two months earlier, trading a smaller storefront on West Avenue for a bigger space with a basement, an office, and room for a children's section it never had before.
Two bookstores, roughly a mile apart, in a borough of about 4,500 residents. The obvious story is chain versus indie. The more useful one is that these two stores are not really fighting over the same customer at all.
The Chain Came Back Smaller Than It Left
The Barnes & Noble that closed in Jenkintown in 2013 had a cafe. The one that opened this September does not. Instead of a coffee counter and reading chairs, the new store carries toys, accessories, gifts, and vinyl records alongside its book inventory. It sits inside a retail redevelopment that split the old Walgreens footprint into four separate spaces, bringing in Shake Shack, Honeygrow, DIG, and Ulta Beauty as neighbors. That center was acquired by a joint venture of Paramount Realty and Edgewood Properties back in 2021, and the bookstore is the anchor tenant landing last, five years into that redevelopment.
This is a different kind of store than the one that left. The old Barnes & Noble asked you to park, come in, and stay a while with a latte. The new one is built into a strip of quick-turnover retail: a burger, a bubble tea, an eyebrow wax, a paperback. It is a store designed around the errand, not the browse.
Capricorn Moved First, and Moved Bigger
Capricorn Books didn't wait to see what Barnes & Noble would do. Owner Jackie Botto and her husband Chris closed their West Avenue location on June 27, spent a week moving, and reopened at 745 Yorkway Place right after the Fourth of July weekend. The new sign out front was hand-lettered by Greg Lytle, an Elkins Park native who runs Hand Over Fist Signs in Glenside, drawn to match the style of the building it now hangs on. By late July the shop had extended its Thursday through Saturday hours to 7 p.m., a schedule change that only makes sense if a shop expects more foot traffic in the evening, not less.
None of this was a reaction to Barnes & Noble's announcement. The relocation was already underway by the time the chain's return became public. Capricorn expanded on its own terms first and found out what it was up against second.
The shop has also been building ties with its immediate neighbors. It ran a "Find Waldo Local" scavenger hunt in July, a nationwide shop-local campaign co-sponsored by Candlewick Press and the American Booksellers Association, and has hosted a "Boo-zy Book Fair" with its Yorkway Place neighbor, Human Robot Brewery. Its Instagram introduces individual booksellers by name and recommends specific titles. That's a business built on repeat visits from people who already know the shop.
A Plaza and an Alley Are Not the Same Downtown
Jenkintown is a borough of roughly 4,500 residents, small enough that it's easy to assume every retail block is competing for the same slice of foot traffic. The geography says otherwise. Barnes & Noble sits in a car-access shopping center along the borough's commercial corridor, the kind of place you drive to, park at, and leave. Capricorn Books sits down a walkable alley reported to include a cafe, a gelato shop, a bar, and a cluster of independent businesses, the kind of stretch where one stop turns into three.
Those are two different trips. Someone headed to the plaza for Shake Shack might pick up a book on the way out. Someone wandering Yorkway Place for gelato is already in browsing mode. A borough this small can carry both models at once precisely because they're not drawing from the same errand.
Botto put the real competitive question plainly in a recent interview: "People are still coming in every day and saying they had no idea that we were here." That's not a complaint about Barnes & Noble. It's an admission that Capricorn's biggest obstacle has always been visibility, not competition, and a chain store opening a mile away doesn't change that math one way or the other. If anything, she said, "it's time we really need to put in a little more effort to let people know there's already an indie bookstore. We're already open. It's a good opportunity for us."
The Theater Down the Street Doesn't Care Which Bookstore Wins
A third institution sits in the middle of all this and answers to neither retail model. The Hiway Theater, a single-screen nonprofit cinema built in 1913 on Old York Road, runs on membership dues and ticket sales, not foot traffic from a shopping center or an alley. It's managed by Renew Theatres, the same nonprofit group that runs the Ambler Theater and Doylestown's County Theatre, and this weekend it's hosting its fourth annual Terror Thon, a three-day horror marathon running Friday through Sunday with a lineup that includes Poltergeist and Body Bags.
The Hiway's economics don't move when a Barnes & Noble opens or a bookstore relocates. Its audience shows up for the programming, full stop. That's worth noting only because it proves the point rather than complicating it: downtown Jenkintown isn't one retail ecosystem competing for one kind of customer. It's three separate businesses, three separate models, and three separate reasons to walk into the borough on any given weekend.
What the Bookstore Math Actually Adds Up To
None of this means the chain's return is irrelevant to Capricorn. Any new bookstore within a mile changes the calculation for a small independent shop, and Botto said as much herself: "it's hard not to be worried." But the timeline matters. Capricorn didn't shrink to brace for competition. It got bigger, added a kids' section, extended its hours, and deepened its ties to neighboring businesses months before Barnes & Noble had a lease signed. That's not the posture of a shop worried about disappearing. It's the posture of a shop that knows who its customers are and where they like to shop.
Jenkintown's downtown isn't choosing between a chain bookstore and an independent one. It's running both experiments at the same time, on two different streets, and neither owes the other an explanation.
If you're the kind of person who reads retail openings as a signal for what a neighborhood is actually doing rather than what a headline says, that instinct is worth applying to real estate too. Philly Home Advisors tracks these block-by-block shifts across Montgomery County as part of how we read a market. Schedule a consultation if you want that same read applied to a specific corner you're watching.
