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.

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. recommended

This story has been corrected since its original publication to clarify the circumstances of the Borders employee who died of a heart attack.

132 replies on “Books Without Borders”

  2. @1: No slight—there was just a whole entire, you know, MUSIC SECTION for that kind of display, and it really was the best display spot in the whole fiction section.

  3. Good luck using unemployment benefits to finance a new degree or a move to another city. I say that in a depressed sense rather than a nyah-nyah one.

  7. I lasted less than a month at Borders back in 2006. I couldn’t stand working there. It felt so cold and soulless. While I’m not sorry to see the chain go, I feel horribly for all the hard-working people who will be out a job. 🙁

  8. The first half of this reads like the plot to Empire Records. If only Borders had thought to hire Renee Zellweger to host a roof party, this all could have been avoided.

  11. “A tiny, mean ferret of a man became our store manager…”

    Just now, my Schnapple bottle cap educated me:

    “Ferret comes from the Latin word for ‘little thief’.”

    How serendipitous…

  13. Having worked with Paul for a while at that same Borders (including time under the reign of the small ferret-faced manager — who never referred to books or CDs as such, but as “product”, and used awful corporate terms like “no-brainer”, which cause me to hate that term to this day), experienced much of the same Ann Arbor-fueled assery at that store, and observed the changes in Borders over the years since, I’m anything but surprised that Borders is closing. It was a lumbering beast that had its moment (maybe one-two years in mid-late 1990s) where it was doing most everything right in terms of where publishing was, but then the corporate types got greedy and stupid, and with no forward-looking vision (as displayed most powerfully by the decisions to not move to selling DVDs early on in that cultural shift, or the focus on an internet presence, and to hand that over to Amazon.com), I feel like most everything they’ve done since I left (and even before then) has felt like the flailing before the death (especially adding in their greeting card/wrapping paper/shiny crap line).

    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.

  14. @6: Hand-selling just basically means selling a book to a customer by personally recommending it. As opposed to a customer looking for a specific book or picking a book up of a display, hand-selling is when a bookseller says “you should really read this book because…” and convinces the customer to buy the book. It’s the main thing that physical bookstores can do that online retailers can’t.

  15. I knew the ferret-faced manager when he was some sort of corporate zealout for the Syracuse store. Initials were CC, I believe.

    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.

  17. I didn’t work there, but I really liked that Boston Borders store. It was a good place to browse, and they keep the special orders inside an old bank vault.

  19. I only went to my first Borders a few years ago, but I can easily picture everything the author described. By the time they got to liquidation, there wasn’t a single book or other item in Borders I would want to buy, even at deep discount. I went to my local Borders shortly after they announced the liquidation, browsed for TWO HOURS and bought NOTHING. What a waste.

  20. @Paul – you obviously love books and you are obviously a passionate guy. You got a lot of things right in this article. I was right there with you – up to a point. I was with you until you began to malign a person for the purpose of making your story sound better. Sure, you didn’t mention his name. But, if you worked for Borders when that individual did (or if a person can use Google as well as you) it isn’t too hard to figure out who you are talking about. Maybe you are okay with that. But, it made you a little less credible to me. I too, once worked for this individual (but not at the Boston store). I found him to be a great boss and a decent human being. Your experience, it seems, was different than mine. But no matter how you cut it, I can guarantee that the “tiny, mean ferret of a man” would never be so disparaging (especially in such a public forum) to anyone he ever worked with. And that makes him a more stand-up guy than you.

  21. This is the best article on Border’s we’ll ever get to read. Thanks, Paul. (And yeah, @19, I don’t understand the liquidation thrill-seekers. It’s been hard to find really good new books in Borders the past couple of years, so why would I want to go buy some cheap bad books now? Oh yeah, resale to compulsive Internet buyers … but I’m not in that game.)

  22. I also worked for Borders, on and off, and while our store was calmer than the store in Boston Paul talked about, I developed very similar views about Borders management between my first stint at Borders (’93-;95) and my second (’01-’02). The demise of Borders was no surprise at all, and it wasn’t all Amazon’s fault: http://nolongerslowblog.blogspot.com/201…

  24. It was hard to stay human during the Ron Marshall years. He was a horrible person. I don’t think he realized we work with books, and have maybe read books on management. None of them advocate bullying and abuse as a tool. I would also list the horrible inventory systems which never really gave us inventory control and the 20 year leases which made it impossible to resize stores even when we realized the trend to smaller retail was here. After that, just corporate mismanagement. We were among the top selling religious/bible store in the company, yet could never keep stuff in stock. No one at AA would go out on a limb to spend the money, though the sales were there. After sixteen years I’m losing my family, the people I work with, which is the only thing that kept me there.

  25. Good analysis. I worked at store #93 in Santa Monica from July of ’95 thru final closing sale & clean-up in January of 2009. The corporate shifts were definitely felt at the ground level and yes the .com miss around 2000,2001 was a big one.

    Bob Bass

  26. I was an assistant manager at store #66, Seattle downtown when it opened, and worked there for three years. Even back then (mid-90’s) it was clear that the company was going down the drain. Our original mandate was to “localize” the store by having staff order books to fill their sections, keeping local interests in mind. That stopped by year two, and we were told what we were going to stock. Business started going down at that point. I’m really amazed it took this long for the company to fold. It was a long, painful decline.

  27. A few of our local Borders closed in the previous round of liquidations. I went in the final weeks, and easily spent $300. Maybe that makes me a soulless bitch, maybe the wealth of remaining sellection indicates that people in Denver don’t read. In either case, there are a handful of stores in our metro that are cllosing in this the final round, and I’ll be shopping those stores as well.

    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.

  28. Thank you. I worked for Borders for ten years until 2010, when I was run out by a GM who was fired a few months later for stealing from customers. You have written the most honest testimonial of what really happened to Borders. Word for word, your experience there was my own. It was nice to finally read an article written by someone who truly understands what happened and what is happening.

    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.

  29. Thank you. I worked for Borders for ten years until 2010, when I was run out by a GM who was fired a few months later for stealing from customers. You have written the most honest testimonial of what really happened to Borders. Word for word, your experience there was my own. It was nice to finally read an article written by someone who truly understands what happened and what is happening.

    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.

  30. What a well written, true and heartbreaking read.

    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.

  33. Paul, you’ve answered the questions I had. I hate to visit the Barnes and Nobles bookstore in Springfield, MO because I can never leave without spending at least $50, usually more. I live 100 miles from a book store so I always have a pent up demand. When I happened to be in Springfield last February, I noticed the signs on Borders advertising “Everything 10% to 50% off.” How could I resist? I quickly discovered that only the magazines were 50% off, everything else was 10% off list. No matter, I’m used to paying list. Two hours later I left and bought nothing. I couldn’t find a single book in my favorite genres that looked worth buying, even discounted. I’d never had that happen before. Usually, when I visit a bookstore I have to restrain myself not to bust my budget but Borders manage to have not one book that tempted me.

  34. Borders’ lack of a good website and lack of attention to ebooks really was its downfall. Of course, I was mortified when, during the final closeout at our local Borders and we had $100 of book purchases, my husband mentioned to the checkout girl that he hadn’t bought a physical book in quite a while and only read ebooks anymore. He didn’t seem to get it. I said quietly to him as we walked away, “you know you just told that girl that you’re responsible for her store closing, right?”

  35. my store closed back in april, was unemployed for over a month, living off unemployment benefits that didnt even cover my bills. the 12 month period they based my unemployment on was during the year borders figured a skeleton crew was enough – i.e., 8 hours a week = less than $200 every two weeks in unemployment. working retail again, but stil heartbroken over the rape and murder of my store by the corporate dickfors that “always know better”.

    I still cry in the bathroom a bit after accidentally answering the work phone with “thank you for calling Borders, this is..”

  37. I was such a loyal Border customer back in the day. Their music section was dynamite. It had EVERYTHING. But I noticed, as the 90s closed, a change in the store. Employees were way less friendly, and of course, the music section was yanked out. But like Paul, I loved it for a while.

  38. Wow. I’m a former Borders employee (store 36 in Charlotte, NC) and reading your article is like reading my own thoughts. When people became the least valuable asset at Borders, Borders became a hellbound train. I really loved working at Borders, but, in the end, they deserved what they got.

  39. i dont know about you but not all books are the same. alot of them are picture books and art books/cofeetable books. you can’t replace those with a kindle. kindle might be fine for reading only text, but we still need bookstores for picture books and art books.

  40. As someone who also went to work for Borders in 1996, I agree completely with this article. I left in 2000, but still shopped often & visited old co-workers. I had the same thoughts about their lack of iniative in regards to an online presence. My local store closed last spring. I’m still terribly sad and miss it. I especially miss the Borders of the 90s. That was a company that was different and had hope.

  42. I can relate to the closing of a business and what that entales. I was with a retailer for over 28years and the liquidation process is brutal, not only do you have to tend to people who had never been in your store, you have to deal with the personal emotions that are tied to your employment the years of memories the knowing that most of the people that you seen on a day to day basis those you worked with will no longer be there to share experiences with. It was an extremely emotional experience for one that I never want to repeat again. I psyched myself up thinking that I could actually handle the experience but on the day after everything was over it hit and hard I was depressed I had plans in place however no plans on dealing with the fall out. No one prepares you for after everything is over gather with some people who are experiencing the same thing for support no one unless you go through it too. It is a loss and should be treated as such nothing will ever be the same and your world does get turned upside down and inside out.

  45. This reads like a multitude of once promising companies going under. Bigger, faster, stronger morphing into dumber, slower, blander, and out of business…it’s the American way.

  47. I worked at the Michigan Ave store in Chicago for a couple of years. (Heck, I sorted that store!) Started in True Crime/Western/Romance and moved to New Books. Loved my job, loved the people I worked with, loved the location, hated my paycheck. I was a part of a group who tried unsuccessfully to unionize the store and then I left to go back to school. When I moved to Seattle I applied at the downtown store only to be told I wasn’t qualified to work there. My indignation was so complete I could barely speak. Tell me you aren’t hiring, tell me you don’t like me, tell me you’ll let me know and then never call. But do not tell me I’m not qualified – not when I worked in the busiest section of the flagship store and rocked it out! Hindsight being 20/20 and all, I now know I was damn lucky not to get hired there. I never had to deal with Borders Reward cards or Make items or the ever-worsening managers. I hear stories of what the later employees (2000 -onward) dealt with and it makes my head spin. Borders destroyed itself.

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