The real reason Borders is closing:
They’ve been screwing themselves for years. This whole “Borders shutting down” thing and the store closures earlier this year that were supposedly a stop-gap? Yeah, it didn’t just pop up over night. Every article you read out there has someone at Borders talking about how ebook sales doomed them. How convenient. No, the real genesis of Borders’ complete implosion is due to an idiotic state of mind in upper-management.
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True story: When working at Waldens/Borders my two favorite authors were Steven Erikson and Brandon Sanderson (before he was big). At my store, Erikson’s novels out sold every other author. He was a moneymaker for my store. Soon my store was restricted from mass ordering his novels because we weren’t conforming to other stores in different states who would only sell a dozen of Erikson’s novels in a year (we sold hundreds of just his first book. Repeat customers baby!). With Brandon Sanderson? My store was essentially in his home-town of Provo, Utah. To all you authors out there, the average signing may net you 10 or so hardback sales if you’re lucky. My store? We sold 80 copies of Brandon’s first novel that had zero marketing push behind it. His second novel? Oh just 200. Borders’ response? “How dare you have all these extra copies of his books on hand. You’ll never sell that many books at a signing. in fact, maybe you should stop doing signings altogether.”
You see, Borders’ had the mentality of telling you what you were NOT allowed to do rather than giving bookstores the freedom to, oh I don’t know, make money. By breaking the rules we were raking in the cash. Unfortunately that wasn’t good enough. After all, the corporate goons OBVIOUSLY knew more about out local client base than the staff at my store did.
I have never been to a Borders but this makes perfect sense to me. Making all the stores in a chain exactly alike is typical modern management strategy. For some things (fast food) it works; for bookstores, not so much. People in different regions of the U.S. do have somewhat different tastes in reading and entertainment.
I first heard about Borders closing on the CBS evening news last week. They were, of course, singing the “e-books are killing bookstores” lamentations and, to be honest, I sort of bought it at the time but my first thought was, “This might be good for the independent book stores,” because a lot of people still do like real books.
Upon reading the linked article my already deep contempt for the mainstream media has deepened by several degrees. I feel that the bigger the idiot the more they need to be publicly shamed and held up as a bad example. But the media, instead of telling the truth tells us what so many want to hear: Borders good, e-books bad; world as we know it ending; trust your betters, and tune in tomorrow for the latest tragedy.
July 25th, 2011 - 4:25 pm
I’m not sure where you’re seeing a primary “E-books killed Borders” narrative, because everything I’ve read has made pretty clear that Borders was a terrifically-run company up until about 2000 or so, when they started making wrong decision after wrong decision, and doing things like what your quoted poster describes. Apparently they switched CEOs a whole bunch of times, none of whom had experience or savvy in the book market; they were, in fact, ridiculously slow to adapt to the explosion of digital media the last few years; they allowed themselves to be bought by K-Mart, of all companies (you couldn’t pick a more rickety wagon to hitch yourself to), and then assumed a whole lot of debt in order to buy themselves back again; they stuck to ridiculously labor-intensive inventory practices; they outsourced their online presence to — believe it or not — Amazon.com.
Borders has been the Buffalo Bills of bookstores: every decision they’ve made for a decade has been wrong. But unlike the Bills, who have their membership in the NFL to keep them from going under (or even losing money), there’s no National Bookstore League to keep the Borders of the world afloat. I love Borders and I hate to see it go and I especially hate that I’m reduced to pretty much a single outlet for books (save a few used bookstores), but I can’t see where their demise isn’t really their own damned fault. Now, maybe they do everything right and still go under, because hey, that happens. But every time they’ve loaded a bullet in their gun, they’ve promptly discharged said bullet into their own foot.
Oh well, I got some good stuff at a closing sale the other day.
July 25th, 2011 - 6:51 pm
Interesting, because between the Borders’ that used to be in my parents’ town, and the Barnes and Nobles, I’d pick the Borders’ every time…they seemed to have better selection and smarter, nicer staff.
It makes me sad to see them failing; I remember shopping at the old flagship Borders’ when I lived in Ann Arbor.
(And yet, Hastings still lives. Maybe there are some good Hastings outlets but I’ve not seen one. Or maybe they survive because books seem to be an afterthought, and music/dvds/computer software are their main moneymaker)