Books Without Borders
My Life at the World's Dumbest Bookstore Chain
Kelly O
NEARLY 11,000 The number of booksellers losing their jobs.
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It's embarrassing now, but on the day that I was hired to work at Boston's flagship Borders store in 1996, I was so happy that I danced around my apartment. After dropping out of college, I had worked a succession of crappy jobs: mall Easter Bunny, stock boy at Sears and Kmart and Walmart, a brief and nearly fatal stint as a landscaper. A job at Borders seemed to be a step, at long last, toward my ultimate goal of writing for a living. At least I would be working with books. And the scruffy Borders employees, in their jeans and band T-shirts, felt a lot closer to my ideal urban intellectuals than the stuffy Barnes & Noble employees with their oppressive dress code and lame vests.
The fact that Borders offered me a full-time job, which allowed me to quit two part-time jobs (at a Staples and a Stop & Shop) and offered health insurance (that promised to help pay for my impending wisdom tooth extraction), was a pretty big deal, too.
Stranger Personals
For better and for worse, Borders was my college experience. I behaved badly—fucked, drank, and did drugs with everyone I could. My fellow employees snuck me into bars when I was underage, and then cheered when, during my 21st birthday party, I wound up facedown in the gutter sobbing about how my heart had been ripped in two by an ex-fiancée. I was not alone in my bad behavior: Every week, different employees were hooking up, having affairs, breaking up, recoupling, playing drinking games that involved comically large hunting knives, getting in fights, getting pregnant, and showing up drunk for work.
In the beginning, the store felt like a tight-knit family. As time went on, we became a confederation of hedonists with little regard for one another's feelings. At one Christmas party that I didn't attend, a new female employee reportedly gave blowjobs to anybody who wanted one. (Later, at least a couple of men who stood in line for the newbie's ministrations complained about picking up an STD.) Suddenly, the parties weren't as fun anymore. One employee hanged himself. Another dropped dead of a heart attack on the sales floor; the story I heard is that he slumped over in the DVD section on the overnight replenishment shift and wasn't discovered until the store opened for business the next morning. (Turns out, that story was exaggerated—his body was actually found about five minutes after he died.)
But it wasn't all an endless cycle of party and hangover. The 20 percent discount—plus an employee credit account that went up to $300, with the store paying off $20 of that debt a month—allowed me to explore books I'd never heard of. It's hard to remember now, but when Borders began proliferating in suburban parking lots around the country, they had a truly excellent selection curated, at least in part, by each store's employees. I bought my first title from countercultural Washington press Feral House—Apocalypse Culture—at the brand-new Borders at the Maine Mall when I was a teenager, and it still ranks as one of my most mind-blowing reading experiences. I read my first David Foster Wallace and Matt Ruff books while working at Borders; I explored the lesser-known works of Twain and Melville and Dickens and St. Vincent Millay. I learned who Edward Abbey and Noam Chomsky and Kathy Acker were. I discovered young writers like Banana Yoshimoto and Colson Whitehead and Chuck Palahniuk and Haruki Murakami. Thanks to my coworkers in the music department, which was just as far-reaching as the book department, I learned to love Miles Davis and Glenn Gould and an obscure punk band from way out west called Sleater-Kinney.
At the time, independent bookstores were blaming Borders for a spate of mom-and-pop bookstore closures around the country. I'll never forget the employee at Bookland in Maine who coldly accused me of single-handedly destroying her small chain when I admitted who my employer was, even as I was buying $50 worth of books from her. Of course, the accusations had truth to them—small bookstores simply couldn't compete with the deep discounts the chains offered—but for what it's worth, every employee who worked at Borders, at least when I first joined the company, adored literature. We were not automatons out to assassinate local business. We wanted to work with the cultural artifacts that were the most important things in our lives, the things that made us who we were. Not all of us could find work at independent bookstores, so we did the next best thing: We went to work for a company that seemingly cared about quality literature and regional reading tastes, and gave its employees a small-but-fair wage for full-time bookselling careers, with excellent benefits. It sure didn't feel like selling out.
Until suddenly, one day, it did feel like selling out. Because it was. Our displays were bought and paid for by publishers; where we used to present books that we loved and wanted to champion, now mediocre crap was piled on every flat surface. The front of the store, with all the kitchen magnets and board games and junk you don't need took over large chunks of the expansive magazine and local-interest sections. Orders came from the corporate headquarters in Ann Arbor every Sunday to change out the displays. One time I had to take down some of the store's most exciting up-and-coming fiction titles (including a newly published book that was gathering word-of-mouth buzz, thanks to our booksellers, called Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone) to put up a wall of Clash CDs. One month, for some reason, the cafe sold Ernest Hemingway–branded chai.
A tiny, mean ferret of a man became our store manager, and he hired a murderer's row of cronies from the long line of troubled Borders stores he had tamed into conformity in the past. (He was quickly promoted to district manager and clearly had ambitions to become a mover and shaker in the corporation; I just Googled him to discover he's now a corporate executive at a small dollar-store chain.) It became a battle between the management (who would push Ann Arbor's increasingly insulting edicts on us, like employees having their bags checked at the end of shifts by supervisors as though we were all thieves) and the increasingly bitter ground-level employees, who would grumble and moan but go along with their demands every time.
Idiots spread throughout the company, taking control of stores, recruiting from non-book retail backgrounds, doing everything they legally could to stunt attempts at unionization, and encouraging efficiency above all else. The diversity of the titles in stock dwindled as ever-larger shipments of diet books and lawyer thrillers arrived on Ann Arbor's orders. New employees didn't care about books and weren't particularly curious. The store didn't resemble the interests of our staff or customers anymore; our shelves represented the money that publishers were willing to shell out for real estate. Book lovers stopped buying from us; slithering, pre-offended armies of bargain hunters became our clientele.
Finally, I decided to leave Boston for Seattle, and to extinguish any possibility of applying for a transfer to the Seattle Borders branch, I disseminated among staff and customers a zine I wrote claiming that Borders was a husk of what it had been, that greed had destroyed what was a profitable and culturally useful business. I predicted that Borders wouldn't exist in 10 years.
I was wrong. It would take 11 years for Borders to go bankrupt and liquidate.
Turns out, at the same time ground-level booksellers like me were railing against Ann Arbor's dumb decisions, employees at the corporate offices in Ann Arbor were railing against dumb decisions, too. Susan—she requested I not use her real name to preserve her relationships with former coworkers—was an executive at the Ann Arbor headquarters at the same time that I was selling books in Boston.
It came as a relief, even after more than a decade, to hear that her disappointment in the company mirrored my own. Susan started with Borders as a bookseller and quickly rose through the ranks of the company, which was expanding at a frantic pace. The pay was bad—"working really hard for not a lot of money was the thing I liked the least" about the job, she says, flatly—but she loved working with books and the sort of people who love books.
Ann Arbor put a lot of time and money into thwarting attempts to unionize stores. Susan helped with that cause, too, though now she isn't quite sure why. "I'm very pro-union," she says. Nevertheless, she stayed, despite her family making fun of her for working in direct opposition to her morals.
For Susan, the problem really started near the end of Robert DiRomualdo's tenure. The Borders Chairman and temporary CEO, a former president of Hickory Farms, drove Borders to tremendous profits for a chain of bookstores. The industry has always been a small-margin business on the retail end, but at the height of DiRomualdo's leadership, Borders stock ran as high as $44.88 a share; in 1999, the company earned $100 million.
But DiRomualdo was uninterested in building a web presence for Borders, Susan says: "I think there were many, many people who had serious concerns about Borders leaders' decision around the internet." Executives in charge "didn't want to put the money into Borders.com. Bob DiRomualdo believed that there was not a way to make money on the internet at that time. I remember at the time thinking that it was a mistake."
In 2001, Borders would go on to partner with Amazon.com, allowing the online book retailer to handle their internet sales for them, if you can believe it. There's a photo of Jeff Bezos and then-Borders president and CEO Greg Josefowicz shaking hands to celebrate the partnership. Josefowicz has weatherman hair and a broad smile, and he's beaming past the camera with the cocksure giddiness of a guy who thinks he just got rid of all his problems because he sold his dumb old cow for a handful of really cool magic beans. But when you pull your eyes away from Josefowicz's superheroic chin, you notice that Jeff Bezos is smiling directly into the camera with keen shark eyes. His smile is more relaxed, a little more candid than Josefowicz's photo-op-ready grin. It's the face of someone who's thinking, I finally got you, you son of a bitch.
It's a photograph of the exact second that Borders died.
While Borders was trying to avoid paying any attention to their website, they were expanding internationally—a series of ill-fitting launches in the UK, Australia, and Singapore. According to Susan, a lot of employees at Ann Arbor were against the international expansion, instead wanting to shore up the company's internet presence and prepare for the future. This is the crossroads moment, she says, and the ensuing decline of the company has caused her to reflect on what she could have done differently. "I think the writing was on the wall by then. I went back to a lot of those conversations, thinking about how I used to leave those meetings thinking that this is not the smartest thing to do. And I was never the smartest person in the room," she says. Then she pauses and laughs. "Or maybe I was."
Wall Street loved the flash and glitz of Borders' international expansion, and it paid out well in the short term. Mark Veverka of the San Francisco Chronicle noted in July 1998 that DiRomualdo, who opted to be paid solely in stock, sold 288,850 shares just as Borders unveiled its first failure of a website. That year, Veverka writes, DiRomualdo and five other executives cashed out "1.1 million shares between April 3 to June 1 at prices as high as $34." DiRomualdo finally left Borders in 2002. He made millions by selling Borders stock that would be worthless in less than a decade. He sits on the World Retail Congress's World Retail Hall of Fame.
And now nearly 11,000 booksellers are losing their jobs. The last Borders is expected to close in September.
On Friday, July 22, the day Borders stores nationwide entered the liquidation process, I met with Amanda, a Seattle-area Borders employee who similarly requested her real name not be used for fear that she would be fired and lose access to unemployment benefits. (Liquidators told the booksellers not to talk to the media.) Amanda has been with the company for about a year, and the first day of liquidation was an exhausting experience for her. She says her store topped $50,000 in sales—an average day at the store had been somewhere in the neighborhood of $7,000 to $12,000. As many as 50 customers—none of whom she had ever seen before—were lined up outside before the store opened for the privilege of trashing the place.
Up until a week before the announcement that Borders was closing, Amanda says management was "telling us to push the Borders Plus cards," an extension of the Borders Rewards loyalty program that charged customers $20 a year for a promise of 10 percent off most everything in the store. (Over the last decade, Borders employees were held to strict quotas regarding Borders Rewards and Borders Rewards Plus cards; if a bookseller was heard not offering a Borders Rewards card to a customer at the register, that would be grounds for a warning or even termination.) Amanda says booksellers were told to tell wary customers that Borders would at least be around through Christmas, so they would be able to make that initial Plus charge back in savings before then. She feels guilty for getting those extra $20 out of customers in what amounts to a nonrefundable junk-bond scam. She says she wants Borders Plus buyers to know that booksellers weren't trying to rip them off and that representatives from Ann Arbor "kept telling us that we were definitely good for another year."
When I ask Amanda when her coworkers think the company started really going downhill, she says they generally agree that things got really bad two years ago. That was the point when "they didn't care about hand-selling books anymore," she says. For the last few months, morale has been terrible. Ann Arbor wasn't telling anyone what was going on, so employees would just read news reports and try to figure out what it all meant. Once they heard on July 18 that closures were definite, the mood moved from solemn to "manic." She says, "We just started playing games and having fun. We stopped obeying the dress code and started doing whatever."
On the day that the liquidation started, "everyone was a little stressed-out and frustrated by the very rude customers." The liquidators shut off the inventory systems, so booksellers can't tell for sure what books are in stock, and closed the public bathrooms and removed all the chairs, because the stores are no longer a place for customers to browse and linger. (The good news is now they'll no longer have homeless people drinking Robitussin and stashing their empty bottles around the stores, Amanda says, and booksellers no longer have to worry about walking in on naked men bathing themselves in the bathroom sink.) Almost as bad as the people who are outraged that the Borders has no more public bathrooms and that they can't order new titles anymore are the customers who are overly concerned for the employees. Amanda says people furrow their brows and ask, "So, what are you doing now?" She understands that they mean well, but "person after person asking about your future gets a little annoying."
So, uh, what is she doing now? "I definitely wouldn't go work for Barnes & Noble. I just don't want to work for a big corporate chain. Basically, I don't want to work retail." She'd like to do something with a small publisher or an art gallery. She says most of her coworkers don't want to go to Barnes & Noble, either, even though most of them want to stay involved in books somehow. Lots of employees are going to use the unemployment benefits to fund more schooling or a move to a new city. She's sad to see the regular customers go. "We have people who come in every day. Some of them swear they won't ever give Barnes & Noble their business. I'm telling everybody that they should go to Elliott Bay to spend their money." She plans to keep in touch with her coworkers, who have become "a tight-knit family." She's made friends at Borders who she thinks she'll have for her entire life.
The fact that Borders is closing isn't heartbreaking—it's been coming for a long time. Amanda thinks customers who prefer Borders to Barnes & Noble like it because it's "kind of an underdog," which is maybe a polite way of saying that losing has always been part of the Borders DNA. The heartbreaking thing is that this fall, over 10,000 bookstore employees across America will be out of work. The way the publishing industry is going, many of those people won't be able to find jobs that are even tangentially related to books anymore; they'll go on to work in movie theaters and grocery stores and as secretaries and child-care providers. They probably won't be able to spend their days being obsessed with books, and that's a bad thing for books, which have a hard enough time battling for attention in popular media.
There will always be booksellers, online and in physical stores. But there will probably be far fewer booksellers than there are now. The physical bookstores of the future may not look anything like Borders, which already feel like an exercise in nostalgia with their wasteful, sprawling layouts and quaint maroon-and-tan palette. Barnes & Noble feels like part of the past now, too. You can tell that even Barnes & Noble executives know it because just about every Barnes & Noble now features a huge display of the various iterations of their Nook e-readers, virtually blocking your entry in the front of the store. A helpful, flesh-and-blood bookseller always mans those displays, ready to explain all the nifty things that a Nook can do that physical books can't. When you think about it, that's really the most humiliating part of all this; even John Henry wasn't forced to smile and praise the steam drill that replaced him. John Henry took the dignified way out when he saw the way things were going: His heart exploded, and he lay down and died. 
This story has been corrected since its original publication to clarify the circumstances of the Borders employee who died of a heart attack.
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Just read an essay yesterday by George Orwell, "Bookshop Memories." Takes a different turn from yours about how working at a bookstore changes the relationship with books. He loses his love for books.
http://books.google.com/books?id=WREtVBB…
Just now, my Schnapple bottle cap educated me:
"Ferret comes from the Latin word for 'little thief'."
How serendipitous...
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I started in remainders at a store in Jersey, which are basically the hardcover books publishers want to get rid of after the paperbacks are out, or just plain badly selling books (like Dan Quayle's political ouevre). Then after moving to Boston and selling piles and piles of remainders, I moved onto music books, then new books and inventory management for the store. These roles (well, maybe not music books) all showed me the general life of a book, and particularly, how they move through a mainstream store like Borders. In the end, the bottom line of both remainders and new books is volume, volume, volume. Any brief successes I had in creating something unique to the store (a discounted staff selection area) or expressing any sense of my or my co-workers' senses of personality in displays, etc. was crushed by the advent of Oprah's Book Club and ever-increasing micromanagement of what books we pushed, paid or gave attention to by Ann Arbor.
One of the saddest moments I've ever had was about two years ago when I went back to the Boston store, and saw one of the folks Paul and I worked with (over 12 years ago) still in the DVD and music store. I couldn't bring myself to say hi.
All that said, I loved working with (most of) the folks I did at that store -- some serious characters, at least until Ferret-face arrived. I loved being around books (even if it meant I sometimes had to stress out about maintaining our stock of awful ones like "The Rules"). And while I didn't have quite as wild a time as Paul, I distinctly remember some ridiculously wonderful parties (not the Christmas one with the BJs, thank God) and times.
And likely my most favorite time was when I got to sit in a room with Arundhati Roy, right after "The God of Small Things" came out. Boston was her FIRST stop on her FIRST US book tour ever, and I got to sit in a room with her for an hour while she signed books in preparation for her reading, and talk to her about writing, life, etc. I always talk about that whenever someone brings her up. Sometimes I think that hour made all the other crap worth it.
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Great article.
Initially the booksellers had to take some sort of trivia test to show their mettle, but it was "deemed" too difficult for future generations of employees.
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Bob Bass
I love Barnes & Noble, Borders always felt very sterile and not like I could sink into a chair with a book. But I much prefer the small local bookstore, I just haven't found one here yet. I'm disappointed every year at Christmas (which apparently starts in stores in Sept) when B&N is full of toys and other crap. I hate to buy books online, I don't care how much of a discount Amazon gives. I like to be able to pick up a book, smell the new paper and ink, flip to a random page and read a few paragraphs. There's no subsitute for that.
I'm not a bit sorry that Borders is closing. It's why the corporation deserves. But my experiences there will always be a part of me and I am grateful for them.
I'm not a bit sorry that Borders is closing. It's why the corporation deserves. But my experiences there will always be a part of me and I am grateful for them.
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I'm lucky to work at a small independent bookshop now - the 5 years I spent in the Border's book mines helped me secure the job after an ill-advised stint trying to work a desk job at a small publisher didn't work out so well.
I got out not long after the Borders Rewards cards came about - when they started lording the quotas over us, I knew it was time to get out. Borders was no longer selling books - we were marketing a lifestyle. I was not going to play a part in that.
It makes me so sad. The mismanagement, the fact that quite a few people I know will now be among the (many more people I know) without jobs.
I'm so lucky to still be working in a bookshop. The pay may not be the best, but damn I love my job.
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I still cry in the bathroom a bit after accidentally answering the work phone with "thank you for calling Borders, this is.."
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Anyhow, once the consolidation was done and they pretty much mapped out how EACH AND EVERY end cap in the store had to be set up, I could see the future and it wasn't bright. And when they wouldn't embrace the internet, still trying to cling to printed newsletters, even as late as 1998, I could hear the bells starting to toll.
The thing that always got me about Borders was they put the prices of everything well above the MSRP and then plastered their 30% OFF stickers all over it, giving the impression of being able to buy it for a deal. Well, it worked for awhile, since the average Joe is stupid enough to buy based strictly on a sale or clearance sticker than based on proper pricing or need. But the last few years, the average Joe has become more frugal and intellegent in their spending. Which is why Blockbuster is pretty much gone, and Borders is now closing.
Naaah, just kidding, you still suck, dood.
I just can't figure out why Elliott Bay Book would ever even look at you with a background like that?????
Try an interesting subject next time, big guy!
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A+
My late husband and I spent many many hours @ Borders, took our children there, enjoyed a coffee, made friends.
B&N does nothing for me, they don't offer any place to sit, it's sterile.
RIP Borders, I will miss you.....
Especially around the time they were making us sell "key and make" titles. Books that Borders made us sell a certain quantity weekly. If we didn't hit our goals we were written up, 3 write ups and we were fired. That is like going into a grocery store and having an employee push a certain brand of butter on you that no one has heard of and the employee hasn't even tried.
If we were not heard mentioning the "key or make" title of the month in every conversation, it went on our :report cards." Also, the store received DAILY posts about how our store was failing / winning this goal compared to the other stores in the district. Instead of unifying the district we were pitted against one another frequently.
Some of the worst business decisions I have ever heard of came through Borders. Let's hope that no other company becomes like it did in the end.
Especially around the time they were making us sell "key and make" titles. Books that Borders made us sell a certain quantity weekly. If we didn't hit our goals we were written up, 3 write ups and we were fired. That is like going into a grocery store and having an employee push a certain brand of butter on you that no one has heard of and the employee hasn't even tried.
If we were not heard mentioning the "key or make" title of the month in every conversation, it went on our "report cards." Also, the store received DAILY posts about how our store was failing / winning this goal compared to the other stores in the district. Instead of unifying the district we were pitted against one another frequently.
Some of the worst business decisions I have ever heard of came through Borders. Let's hope that no other company becomes like it did in the end.
I totally agree that the nail in Borders coffin was when they let Amazon sell for them online. Welcome to Borders and then redirect to Amazon. How many people would come in with books they got online and say "Aren't you and Amazon the same company". I say good riddance to a company that forgot that the thing that separated them from the competition was the quality of the person selling the book not the price of the book.
Wow thank you for writing that, you captured perfectly how I feel. I work at a Borders in New Zealand, and I know you said you were against it going international which is understandable, but our store was just the same. We were like a family who would go out each Friday night, we all had our staff recommendations around the store and we all loved books.
And then things changed and we got in 100 copies of the same new book and none of the classics or hard to find series we were known for. We couldn't put up a display without approval from Australia. And we got loads of junk to sell instead of CDs. And now needless to say we're closing too. Sad story.
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At the moment, BAM has partnered with B&N to sell the Nook. The training the employees receive is superficial, with a few details about how it can hold thousands of titles, ect. We receive no hands-on training and are encouraged to buy it ourselves to learn how it works so we can sell it. We were not informed before Christmas that the Nook could not directly access the BAM website, that e-books must be downloaded to a PC, then transferred to the Nook. Only the B&N site is supported directly. We lost quite a few customers in January, as their brand new Nooks were not truly compatible with our store.
The book collection did go way downhill from what it was when it first opened and esp. in the last three years when it was just crap.
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This article doesn't really reflect the beautiful bookstore in the heart of downtown Ann Arbor that I remember. RIP.
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I think the two posts holding up the tent of civilization are uncensored public libraries, and well stocked, well managed book stores. Seems like we're losing both, lately...
The first job offer I ever turned down as a starving recent college grad was $19K/yr and Tuesdays and Wednesdays off at the A2 flagship. Interesting to imagine where that path might have led.
Having gone from working for the original borders.com directly to working for Borders International, I heartily second this analysis. A mis-guided trade-off that really came back to haunt the company.
I like smaller shops so I didn't shop at Borders in Seattle, but when I did I would see people sitting around browsing and not buying.
Another bookstore going down. RIP. Again such bag of crap for the people who are loosing their income.
I'll miss Borders. I went to my local store every week, but I doubt I'll go to the liquidation sales. Deals or no, it's too depressing.
This whole article celebrates mediocrity. It is quotes nd thoughts fro people, including the author, who are tiny widdle cogs in a large corporate world. That he is still so naive as to thnk that ANY of his time at Borders was special, that they were ever NOT a corporation bent on profits, shows just how mediocre he is. It is all wishful thinking.
It remnds me of current Starbucls employees. They were all "barristas" until they had to make a breakfast croissant; then they became glorified fast food workers.
Get over it, dude. If your ambition in life sticks you in retail for very long, you've made a serious mistake somewhere.
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Great more unemployed Americans. It's like this whole country is a bus sliding off a cliff in slow motion and John Boehner is driving.
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Also, what happened to Book Stop? I remember them being the 'death of mom and pop bookstores' scourge of the 80's and early 90's, with their discount card.
my first beef is that the borders paul is writing about in 96 is in a completely different environment than bookstores are now. you would need to work then AND now to get a good reading about why borders didn't work out so well. my understanding is that borders never had a successful online presence when things started to change.
the days of big box retailers are over. it will be comparable to when big box cd/dvd stores went down. things change, ebb and flow. it certainly does suck to work these jobs when big change comes about.
i'm holding onto my job for health insurance reasons. i would love to apply at an independent book store but i can't afford to go without health insurance. i love elliot bay. my job is becoming more and more unpleasant - upper management uses threats (sales quotas) instead of positive reinforcement to make numbers. i have a feeling it's only going to get worse.
but, back to paul's article: picking on certain managers for the downfall of the company seems a little petty. and the bookstore i work at, even though it's a big box, carries zola.
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Hmph. Sounds legit.
"Wall Street loved the flash and glitz of Borders' international expansion, and it paid out well in the short term"
That quote really sums it up. The entire business outlook now seems to be for 'the short term'. They care about next quarter's profits only. They ride the cash pony fast & HARD until it's allll worn out. Then they hire some expendable ferret-faces to take over and finish running it into the ground while they sell their stocks and disassociate themselves with the business. They don't give a crap about books or employees or anything else. They just want to ride that cash train and get out the second their quarterlies dip below a certain %. Then they make or buy a new business and start all over again. This most basic thought process is the reason our country is circling the drain economicly.
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Then the awesomeness of cleaning shit off the walls of the public restrooms started to wear thin. And gathering up the unpurchased photography books arrayed around the shitter, opened to nudes.
Then the efficiency consultants arrived to watch us take change out of the tills and to explain that we were wasting company time by turning our wrists this way instead of that way. And so on.
I have fond, wistful memories, but I knew it was dead before I left in 93.
"Wall Street loved the flash and glitz of Borders' international expansion, and it paid out well in the short term"
That quote really sums it up. The entire business outlook now seems to be for 'the short term'. They care about next quarter's profits only. They ride the cash pony fast & HARD until it's allll worn out. Then they hire some expendable ferret-faces to take over and finish running it into the ground while they sell their stocks and disassociate themselves with the business. They don't give a crap about books or employees or anything else. They just want to ride that cash train and get out the second their quarterlies dip below a certain %. Then they make or buy a new business and start all over again. This most basic thought process is the reason our country is circling the drain economicly.
It was my first retail job and it was a trial by fire. I worked during the "key" and "make" book era. We were required to push certain titles - regardless of our opinion of them and whether or not we'd read them - and our numbers were tracked. Employees with low key and make numbers were fired without consideration of what else they sold, how well they knew their store and clientele, or how long they'd worked for the company. The managers of stores with low key and make numbers were also punished and at times fired, regardless of their performance in their district.
Well. I just ran out of steam thinking about it all. Suffice to say by the time I left I felt I might as well have been selling shower curtains at KMart (who paid more, btw). It was retail hell and the smell of desperation in the air stunk.
I am snarkily interested to see how my local GM fares. Over a decade of people management by firing and allowing the computer generation to pass her by is about to bite her in the ass. A legion of employees she sacrificed on the alter of Ann Arbor's absurdities is about to bite her on the ass.
I'm sorry for the people on the ground who are losing their jobs in this miserable economy, but when a corporation's senior management makes bad decision after bad decision, the only appropriate outcomes are either to clean house at the top or to just shut the damned doors.
The first week of the close-out when the computers were shut down, we smelled the stench of what they were pulling and have not been back since.
RESTROOMS: "Sorry, no public restrooms. Plumbing out of order."
INVENTORY COMPUTERS: All off, some removed.
BOOKS: Did not see popular books. Removed for re-sale elsewhere? A lot of new books that reminded me of warehouses dumping non-sellers.
MAGAZINES: Half the shelf space. Other half 100% Books for Dummies. Score a "Windows 2003 Server for Dummies" there.
SEATING: All seating removed.
SEATTLE'S BEST COFFEE: Long since closed.
CDs and DVDs: Still double Target prices.
PRODUCT SELECTION: World's largest collection of cookbooks and Romance novels, large inventory of Lady Gaga magazines.
BOARDER'S REWARDS CARD: "Sorry but that ended yesterday."
NEW PRODUCTS: Full selection of bathrobes and bath slippers for women.
This actually does not surprise us here in Seattle. When Fredric & Nelson went out of business, all the good stuff disappeared overnight and profoundly inferior products appeared on all shelves throughout the store. In the ensuing uproar, David Saby informed the P.I., Times, and the public it was his store and he would sell WTF he wanted to.
Great article!
People who love books and reading, will continue to read regardless of the format/media their books come in. And if books are presented in a way that is compatible with the busy and mobile way people live nowadays, all the better. Lugging a thousand-pager on the commuter train or on a camping trip would be quite inconvenient, for example.
You complain about not being able to unionize Borders earlier. The fact that they weren't unionized probably extended their life (and the ability for 11,000 employees to enjoy a bookselling job) a few years more.
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