The other day I woke up with the idea that Gamestop should get out of owning their own stores and franchise instead. The individual stores and locations are locally owned, but GameStop corporate is the first-look distributor and national marketer. This way stores become more locally flexible, get a chance to relax their policies and become more customer oriented, while corporate might force each store to guarantee some set amount of sales of certain titles. That is, Gamestop might bargain with EA to remain strategically chummy. Then they turn around to their franchisees and tell them that under the franchising contract they have a certain number of "picked" games they need to sell a year, and now 20 of those in store need to be Madden 202X. The franchisees are obviously not super excited about that, but this IS GameStop after all so no one should be surprised, yet they get flexibility in how to market and sell it. As long as they sell 20 full-priced copies of new Madden 202X, they can do it by running their own trade-in promotions, making their own sales incentives, etc.
In this way franchisees DO take individual location risk, and some amount of committed inventory movement risk, off of corporate, but they gain flexibility, name brand recognition, mass marketing, and buy-in-bulk discounts as a collective. Maybe it's likely that corporate would even handle real estate?
I swear about an hour after waking up with this idea I read an article online with similar tones comparing GameStop to independent comic book stores that had some similar difficulties with the digital transition, but I can't find that article anymore.