Oh OK so one of my roles now is to explain to you whippersnappers how we did things in the prehistoric days of the early 1990s
So before Amazon or even the Borders/Barnes&Noble boom we had to get books somewhere
Malls would usually have a Waldenbooks or something, but it would be a single or double standard storewidth on one floor, not the anchor or entrance spur jumbo. So it would have a pretty decent selection of recent stuff and classic staples (and, like, horse calendars) but not much depth.
We actually had 3 places to buy books in the downtown of our small town that grew into a center of development suburbia
There was also another used bookstore in the weird off-brand \u201870s shopping center a town or so over, and a Christian bookstore I had cause to go to once but can\u2019t for the life of me remember why. And I guess the porn store out by the mall, and the comic book shop that opened in town in the mid-90s.
BUT
The best one of all, pretty much the best one you could get if you didn\u2019t live in a city with The Strand or Powell\u2019s or something, was this one, the Atlantic Book Warehouse
Which spun off from actual warehouse ops of this regional chain, Atlantic Books, they\u2019d have just pallets or cardboard boxes of books hanging out on the floor at wholesale price, you could swoop in and collect a few months\u2019 reading at once
(I realize now that \u201cknowing the relative merits of retail outlets for any given type of goods in a 1-hour driving radius and efficiently scheduling their regular purchase\u201d was a real, impressive, cultivated edge of my homemaker mother that I was undervaluing)
Also by the checkout lines there were bins of like 25\u00a2 floppies, I def. remember seeing Wolfenstein 3D in there but by then like Doom II was out and you\u2019d get CDs full of shareware games with every computer magazine