The GameStop store at Fort Eddy Plaza will close this week as the struggling chain closes at least 80 of its stores across the country, including those in Claremont and West Lebanon.
The Concord store will be open Tuesday and Wednesday but will shut after that, the company said in an announcement.
Once the world’s largest retailer of video games with more than 3,200 stores around the world, including more than 2,000 in the United States, GameStop has seen sales fall for years as online gaming has grown. The chain closed some 400 stores last year.
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GameStop gained attention in 2021 for reasons not associated with its core business: It was targeted by short sellers and become one of several high-profile “meme stocks” whose price skyrocketed due to attention from a small number of social media influencers, sometimes through pictorial memes pushing for a “short squeeze” to generate large profits at the expense of short sellers and hedge funds.
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David Brooks can be reached at dbrooks@cmonitor.com. Sign up for his Granite Geek weekly email newsletter at granitegeek.org.
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1 of 6 | The New Hampshire State House, completed in 1866, is in the capital of Concord. On January 5, 1776, New Hampshire became the first American state to adopt its own constitution. File Photo by Carol Highsmith/Library of Congress
Jan. 5 (UPI) — On this date in history:
In 1776, New Hampshire became the first American state to adopt its own constitution. The document marked a shift toward representative government and away from top-down British royal rule. The Granite State later replaced the document with its current constitution in 1784.
In 1914, the Ford Motor Co. increased its pay from $2.34 for a 9-hour day to $5 for 8 hours of work. It was a radical move in an attempt to better retain employees after introducing the assembly line.
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In 1925, Nellie Tayloe Ross of Wyoming was sworn in as the first woman governor in the United States.
In 1933, construction began on the Golden Gate Bridge over San Francisco Bay.
File Photo by Terry Schmitt/UPI
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In 1933, former President Calvin Coolidge died of coronary thrombosis at his Northampton, Mass., home at the age of 60.
In 1948, the first color newsreel, filmed at the Tournament of Roses in Pasadena, Calif., was released by Warner Brothers-Pathe.
In 1982, a series of landslides killed up to 33 people after heavy rain in the San Francisco Bay area.
In 1993, the state of Washington hanged serial child-killer Westley Allan Dodd in the nation’s first gallows execution in 28 years.
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In 1996, a U.S. government shutdown ended after 21 days when Congress passed a stopgap spending measure that would allow federal employees to return to work. President Bill Clinton signed the bill the next day.
In 1998, U.S. Rep. Sonny Bono, R-Calif., of Sonny and Cher fame, was killed when he hit a tree while skiing at South Lake Tahoe, Calif.
In 2002, a 15-year-old student pilot, flying alone, was killed in the crash of his single-engine Cessna into the 28th floor of the Bank of America building in Tampa, Fla.
In 2005, Eris was discovered. It was considered the largest known dwarf planet in the solar system until a year later when Pluto was downgraded from being a planet.
In 2008, tribal violence following a disputed Kenya presidential election claimed almost 500 lives, officials said. Turmoil exploded after incumbent President Mwai Kibaki was declared the winner over opposition candidate Raila Odinga, who had a wide early lead.
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File Photo by Roger L. Wollenberg/UPI
In 2013, a cold wave that sent temperatures far below average in northern India was blamed for at least 129 deaths. Many of the victims were homeless.
In 2019, Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople granted independence to the Orthodox Church in Ukraine, formally separating it from Moscow for the first time since the 17th century.
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In 2025, New York City became the first U.S. city to introduce a congestion charge — $9 for Manhattan’s business district. President Donald Trump failed to kill the toll in a lawsuit.
With lots of legislators, New Hampshire gets lots of proposed laws.
As the New Year approached, the 400 members of the House and 24 senators proposed more than 1,140 potential bills in the form of Legislative Service Requests, or LSRs. Many deal with high-profile subjects like school funding, but a hunt through the list finds plenty of intriguing topics that don’t get as much attention.
You can search the list online at gc.nh.gov/lsr_search/.
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Here are a few. Many of these, perhaps most, will never even make it to a full legislative vote, so don’t expect them to become laws any time soon.
SB 519 titled “relative to the use of unmanned aerial systems.” (LSRs often have vague and unhelpful titles. The SB means Senate Bill and HB is a House Bill.) This would create civil penalties for using drones to “conduct surveillance over private property without written consent from the property owner, in any … location where an individual cannot be observed from a public ground-level position.”
HB 1457 allows for “the natural organic reduction of human remains” — in other words, composting dead people. This is an allowable alternative to burial or cremation in many states. You can get the compost from a loved one delivered to you for use in the yard.
HB 1149 takes up the perennial topic of clocks. It says, “New Hampshire shall abolish daylight savings time once Massachusetts, Vermont, Rhode Island, and Maine have all voted to do so.” However, this is the first year in a while in which no LSRs seek to move us to a different time zone.
SB 540 would allow people to have “balcony solar,” or individual solar panels that can be plugged straight into a socket without permits or electricians. They are very popular in Germany and several states are weighing their use, including Utah which has already gone ahead.
SB 628 lets highway authorities “license curbside electric vehicle charging devices in public rights-of-way.”
SB 455 requires health plans to cover GLP-1 medications — the miraculous new weight-loss drugs — under certain circumstances. This is a big fight in health care because of the cost involved which has led many insurers to not cover the medication.
HB 1128 and HR 35 both take aim at “weather modification technologies” such as seeding clouds to make it rain. This topic has long been entangled with the incorrect conspiracy theory known as chemtrails. HR 35, which is a non-binding resolution, also wants to ban “geoengineering activities” such as injecting aerosols into the atmosphere to deflect sunlight, touted by some as a last-ditch attempt to reduce the damage of climate change.
HB1013 “prohibits games in which the object is to capture a pig.”
HB 1283 “prohibits the use of face recognition technology subject to certain exceptions.”
HB 1589 “establishes the Digital Choice Act, which requires social media companies to provide users with access to their personal data and enable data sharing across platforms through open protocols and user-controlled interoperability interfaces.”
HB 1367 makes doxxing a crime. That’s the public release of personally identifiable information about an individual or organization without their consent, usually done online.
HB 1785 would renumber the exits on our interstates by mileage rather than sequentially, so you’d get off at Exit 39 in Concord (that’s how far it is from the border) rather than Exit 15. New Hampshire is one of the few states, all in the Northeast, that don’t use mileage on exits.
HB 1544 would prohibit “the use of scented products in public areas of state buildings.“
SB 632-FN “authorizes Concord-based nonprofit entities to install one advertising device near Exit 12 on Interstate 93 for the sole purpose of promoting nonprofit events and destinations in downtown Concord.” Nobody said laws always have to involve big, important stuff.
Several LSRs concern categorizing and buying wood for construction, a reflection of business interests in the second-most-forested state. Some are straightforward — SB 529 gives preference to lumber sourced in the United States on state-funded building projects — but others are less obvious. That includes SB 503, which has more sponsors than almost any LSR, “promotes the use of New Hampshire-grown spruce-pine-fir lumber by specifying that spruce-pine-fir (SPF) lumber shall include spruce-pine-fir-south (SPFS) lumber within the New Hampshire building code.”
HR 45 urges Congress “to find that the Piscataqua River and Portsmouth Harbor lie within the state of New Hampshire.” Take that, Maine!
David Brooks can be reached at dbrooks@cmonitor.com. Sign up for his Granite Geek weekly email newsletter at granitegeek.org.
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