GRAND RAPIDS, MI — A five-year experiment with a bookstore in downtown Grand Rapids is coming to a close for Schuler Books & Music.

Bill Fehsenfeld, owner of the West Michigan-based bookstore chain, said he's choosing not to renew the store's lease on the company's 7,000-square-foot storefront that opened in 2007 on the ground floor of the Steketee Building at 40 Fountain St. NW.

“We’ve been able to keep it going for five years, but it’s always been kind of marginal,” said Fehsenfeld, who owns the bookstore chain with his wife, Cecile. “It’s not something we want to make an additional investment in.”

On Monday, the store will begin reducing inventory with a discount sale. The store’s dozen employees will be absorbed by the company’s other West Michigan locations on 28th Street SE in Grand Rapids and Alpine Avenue NW in Walker.

Those two locations, each significantly larger than the one downtown, plus a pair of stores in the Lansing area, are “doing just fine,” he said. The downtown store carries 15 to 18 percent of the inventory of the company’s larger locations.

The downtown store, which moved in when River Bank Books closed in 2007 after only a year of operation, quickly tried to innovate amid a recession and a changing market for brick-and-mortar bookstores by extending evening hours and acquiring a special downtown liquor license for the location's Chapbook Café.

At the same time, Schuler began to stock more retail items and embrace eBooks. Adapting and diversifying the business was one strategy that helped the five-store chain stay healthy at a time when Ann Arbor-based Borders was going under and Barnes & Noble had been put up for sale.

The downtown location hasn’t been a huge strain on the business, in part because Schuler’s downtown store has a loyal customer base, Fehsenfeld said. The company was offered a “compelling investment opportunity” that allowed them to experiment with an urban format store by taking over the former River Bank Books’ space and inventory.

“You experiment and try to find ways to grow the sales,” he said, questioning whether things might have been different if not for a major recession right after opening.

“We just managed to hold steady over time, but haven’t grown the sales the way we need to make it worthwhile.”

Fehsenfeld said part the decision factors in his belief that the downtown Grand Rapids retail market is not at a place that can support a bookstore. He acknowledged the location of the store — fronting Fountain Street, not Monroe Center — was not ideal, calling Fountain “one of the least pedestrian-trafficked streets in the entire downtown.”

He said the location, while not ideal for retail, may work for some kind of service agency. Beyond that, there’s just not enough evening and weekend retail foot traffic to support a bookstore downtown, he said. Closing “makes good business sense.”

A long line of fans wrap around Ottawa Avenue as they wait to meet Food Network reality star Ace of Cakes' Duff Goldman at the downtown Schuler Bookstore in September 2010.

“I’m sure it would do better if it was on the Monroe Center side,” he said. “Whether that would make it complexly viable, I think is an open question.”

Kris Larson, the new director of the city’s Downtown Development Authority, called the decision to close Schuler’s downtown location unfortunate and said he sympathized with "what had to be a tough business decision.”

“While the DDA cannot change the impact of technological innovations such as eBooks, we certainly acknowledge the importance of a large residential base to which retailers can market,” he said.

Larson said the DDA is “committed” to helping grow the downtown “residential base to a level where retailing can become a more sustainable venture and amenity for the downtown neighborhood."

Fehsenfeld said "things are moving in the right direction in terms of retail development down there, generally, although there's much that could happen to strengthen it further."

Weekend traffic has always been an issue, he said. The decision to close the store has been in the back of his mind for a long time. Fehsenfeld had previously said 2011 might be the downtown store's final year.

"Our belief is that a bookstore needs to be a community gathering place," he told the Press about two years ago. "Our challenge is to pay the bills."

Inventory will go on sale at a 25 percent discount starting Monday. Store fixtures will also be up for sale. The location will close for good when everything has cleared out.