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. 
This story has been corrected since its original publication to clarify the circumstances of the Borders employee who died of a heart attack.
I work at an independent bookstore in Canada and the scary thing is that I can see shades of my own bookstore in this article. I feel sad for the employees, if not the regular customers.
Sounds suspiciously like the present Books A Million chain (now the second largest chain since Borders closed) right down to pushing/selling “Millionaire Cards” to customers for $20 a pop, James Patterson novels and diet books taking over the store (and the amazing amount of right wing propaganda the store I worked in lined the aisle with, Glenn beck, Bill O’Reiley, etc…ugh). Also, the Birmingham, Alabama based chain has now partnered with Barnes and Noble to sell the Nook! I feel bad for my friends that still work for the company, but I’m secretly praying fo their demise (I quite a few months ago after 3.5 years). They treat their employees and store managers like crap (and there is definitely a trickle down effect taking place there…)and expect loyalty and blind devotion, especially when it comes to selling those stupid discount ards, which they claim, pay booksellers salaries! Idiots…
If you think Borders was bad, you should have worked for an insurance company. You may not have thought it was the best place to work but you stayed for quite a long time and it paid your bills. No employer is perfect and management within a large company is usually bad. One hand doesn’t know what the other is doing and nobody asks the little people who are actually in the trenches trying to make the business profitable, for any advice. Why didn’t Borders try to get some autors to come in for book signings? We had a terrific little Mom & Pop book store nearby that used to have Mary Higgins Clark every few years. Unfortunately they went out of business – or retired, I’m nto sure. Maybe this will bring back those little stores – if they also had coffee bars, that would be a big draw for me.
Having worked for Waldenbooks as an Asst manager through most of the 90s, I can totally relate to much of what you say here. There was a 2 year period where Ann Arbor let us do pretty much whatever we wanted, except for a couple mandatory displays each month (this was during the big move/consolidation of Waldenbooks/Borders HQ under the Borders Group banner, and as a result, they didn’t have time to bother with telling each store how to run themselves, and our District Manager was very cool, so he let us do our thing, too)…
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.
I always went to Borders. Never bought anything there, though. I liked the attmosphere and their coffee shop was way better than Stabucks (who is partnered with Barnes & Noble).
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.
please don’t underestimate the adverse impact on borders’ finances of the “borders rewards” card and the concomitant coupons, and the “buy x get y free” trade paperback promotions. none of these were funded at all by vendors. so, borders essentially gave up from 25% to 50% in earned discount on all such sales. if these had been to strictly new customers, no problem, but borders started aggressively pushing the card/coupons/free offers to their existing customer base, without hope of margin recapture. CDs and DVDs were also being purchased from AEC, a distributor in florida for from 12% to 20% and offered for up to 30% discounts. conversely, purchasing more from ingram or baker & taylor for stock-turns rather than from the publishers for discount, would have freed up valuable dollars as well. ceo phil feffer tried that and was pilloried by the then-board of directors members diromauldo and mrconic, who resented being kicked “upstairs” to make room for the ex-ingram and ex-random house president. i honestly believe that borders could have survived the internet debacle if it hadn’t been for such wanton surrender of gross margin. oh yeah, that and horrendous freight-in and freight-out costs and excessive inventory carrying costs. also, borders was very opposed to refusing any returned book almost in any condition whatsoever, thus turning the dominant bookseller in many towns into the area’s largest lending library. claiming they could re-shelve or return the book masked the reality to non-book industry dimwits that they were effectively purchasing used books at no discount only to re-sell it at sale prices again and again. sic semper tyrannosaurus.
“Closed the public restrooms”? What public restrooms? The few times I went in that crappy, overpriced store I asked to use the restroom (something about book & music stores makes me have to pee) some grouchy employee told me there wasn’t any. I always laughed when I heard about some homeless person pooping in the aisles.
i knew folks who worked at borders. i would go every few months and they always knew me. it will suck going and knowing i will never see them again. i could always find some cool tunes there or just unique folks. i remember going there with a friend once and we just chilled on the floor reading the zombie survival guide while some musician was there playing a live set. i bought the zombie survival guide… well 2. one for me one for a friend. i will miss that place.
When I saw that you worked in the Boston store, I wondered if you would mention the manager. “a tiny ferret of a man” I couldn’t have described him better. I was a new GM in his district. What hell he put us through. There were 5 female GM’s in the district, when I went sceaming out the door several months later, there was one female left. He was a large part of what went wrong with Border’s at that time. He was the rising star in the company, no wonder they are closing.
That Borders at the Maine Mall was the best. They had a decent criticism section and I even remember picking up a couple of Killing Joke cds there. RIP Maine Mall Borders.
I feel tremendously sorry for those who have lost their job in this bloodletting (i lost my job a year and a half ago in another industry that mirrors the book business) but as I advanced my way through this story I got increasingly irritated by its tone and apprehension of the particular circumstances of Borders’ demise. It occurred to me that I read similar pieces years ago on the demise of the big box record/CD stores like Tower and Virgin. Borders fell victim based on a confluence of factors that afflict all retail establishments that are predicated on specific market forces. Bad management doesn’t help but please spare me all the sturm und drang about how it was some corporate utopia prior to the crisis. These stores developed organically over time and worked well under a different environment. That environment was never going to last forever; that’s why no one reading this is shopping @ Montgomery Ward or Sears. Sorry. books are product, literary product but nonetheless. They’re not product when they’re in a library. Corporations are always telling employees they’re family until it all goes south. Then you’re just another person selling books and trying to hang on as forces beyond your control have your destiny in its hand. Complaining about individuals in these circumstances is petty. You’re ALL cogs in a machine. I know that’s harsh but welcome to ‘Modern Times.’ Might there have been a moment when the management could have found a better way? Maybe. But Jeff Bezos is a competitor and he’s coming to rip your heart out. Failure to grasp this elemental concept is folly and your executives failed to understand what was coming. Does it hurt? Yes. But acting churlish doesn’t alleviate the situation although it’s clear other Borders ex-employees can identify. And with all due deference to Orwell, there’s always been a dissonance between the business of book-selling and the art of books. Ask those who make sausage and those who like to eat them.
@20: See 61.
I worked for Borders from 98-03, and your experience mirrors mine very closely. At store 97, we were talking about the end of the company ten years ago.
I worked for B&N for 11 years. Starting at a large concept store when it was a BookStar owned by Bookstop in Texas. I loved those years working with books and great people and became part of management. Barnes and Noble bought Bookstop/Star and kept the names on the existing stores because they had a loyal following. The next five years the company changed to become a streamlined monster that would drive out rivals such as Crown Books, etc. . I’ve seen a lot of ugliness over the changes that would follow, from selling spacing to publishers and monthly directives form a corporate world on the other coast. I could write a lengthy story of experiences from the other side of this fence. Weekly we were asked to do a “competitive analysis” of the competition (spying) and submit our findings to the District Manager which always made me feel dirty. I spent many hours in Borders stores and always admired (in the early days) the atmosphere it presented. My favorite thing was that the employees did not need to wear ties and dress shirts as a pretense for a professional image. I always thought Borders would outlast the less creative and slow moving giant of Barnes & Noble… the truth is it will… but not by much.
As someone who is 2 weeks away from quitting my job at the Canada version of Borders… I hear ya. I fucking hear ya.
The content is excellent, of course, but the structure and format of this article enters the realm of the sublime. Very beautifully crafted.
A+
I went to the South Hill Puyallup liquidation , bought nothing, then went to my car and cried.
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…..
I worked there for 6 years, saw many changes, and came out in the end heartbroken.
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 worked there for 6 years, saw many changes, and came out in the end heartbroken.
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 with this essay. I was a manager for Borders and loved the fact that I could dress my own way. Then one day it was “collared shirts” for management. My customers thought I was crazy for going along with it. My usual attire was along the lines of rockabilly/punk. The staff recommends section went from a table to a bookcase to an endcap in my time. So sad. I would tell customers if I hadn’t read a book but if someone I trusted had and liked it. They loved that I was honest. I still see customers 5 years after I left saying that I really made them love coming to Borders. They all said the management after I left had no concept of what a book was.
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.
I never liked Borders anyway, but it was a good article. I would say that it was basically the same as B&N except they made worse business decisions. Inside the store they have been roughly the same for years. Maybe B&N had better service and recognize the future better. Either way, on-line and small stores is the real future of books, and isn’t that what book lovers want anyway? One down, one to go.
Hi there,
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.
I worked in an independent bookstore in the 1970’s and loved it. I first walked into a Borders in suburban Boston in the mid-1990’s. It was such a fantastic, well-run place that I didn’t believe it was part of a chain (my father finally was able to convince me that it was). I loved the notecard recommendations the staff placed throughout the store, and the fiction selection was amazing. Going to Borders in those days was a treat, something I never felt about B&N. Over the years, Borders gradually lost their best attributes, and this article paralleled my experience as a buyer. Even in the past year, I still loved Borders, and she will be missed. Fortunately, the Boston suburbs still have a few good independents, but I wonder how long they will last.
Barnes & Noble is doing all the things that, according to this article, Borders didn’t do. Will it survive? Maybe. But Amazon will certainly continue to thrive. A lot of hand-lettering scribes were laid off by Gutenberg’s revolutionary press, and protested en masse… The real question is whether this post-industrial out-sourced economy can any longer absorb all the people laid off by the automation and internet revolutions. Maybe it can’t.
I worked for Borders in 1986-87, and it was an amazing place. Everyone there loved literature and every store had its own personality. Then it was bought out by Rite Aid and began its slow decline. Unfortunately, Borders does deserve to go under. You can’t run a bookstore if you don’t love books.
I worked at two different Barnes and Nobles part time back in the 1980s off and on for about three years. I was there to use the employee discount to build my own home library of books. I read every Sunday book review supplement, helped customers special order books from publishers, and hand sold all the great books by new authors. Whenever an author published a new book, I made sure the customer new about their backlist. Unfortunately, no one else there loved reading or cared about books. The assistant manager never read a book review. If she did not recognize a book the customer asked for she lied and said it was not in stock yet or that we never carried it. She said she had never read a book review supplement and had no intention of doing so. I would signal customers when she walked away and help them. Our store manager filled the end caps on every book shelf with the crap books pushed to sell, and created an annual Christmas shop of books that could only have books that that had the word Christmas, New Years Ever or Holiday in the title. When these two women were off we changed the end caps to showcase the best selling books in our area. The Christmas shop was changed to include holiday books for all religions. The teens that worked at night and weekends all fell deathly ill on Friday nights and only worked weekends when it was raining. After I acquired a decent library I quit. I have no regrets about my time working in a chain book store because I got to help children and teens get passionate about reading (as an alternative to video games) and helped adults turn reading at home into family night. I have a Kindle now and mostly order my books and music online from Amazon. I rarely go into a book store now.
Mirrors my own experience with the store as a _customer_. It started out so great and slowly became soulless. Less cool music, fewer obscure titles, more diet books and Ann Coulter. And I was amazed way back in the day when I discovered Borders had no website. I thought, even back then, “these guys are losing money here.”
I worked 3 years for Barnes & Noble. I’ve worked over seven years for Books-A-Million. It’s bewildering that Borders is the one that went over from this description, as BAM has been run like Borders was since at least 2002 (when i wound up stuck there the first time around,) only to extremes that many might not even be able to conceive. The contempt and mendacity that roars out their Birmingham home office is endless. Although i still work for the company and have quite a few friends there as well, i’ll rejoice when it crashes and burns.
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.
I used to love Borders here in the UK, but by the time the big stores they had here in my city closed down, the stock was abysmal and I can well understand your frustration about the tat that was being promoted at the expense of good writing and classic literature. Our main bookseller here is now Waterstones which I haunt on a regular basis, a place filled with towering shelves of amazing stuff to discover and it feels like a place for the reader not the corporate machine – at least for now.
I can not fathom how Books A Million is able to stay in business. Take the stupidity of Borders and multiply it by 1000. I worked for both. The ONLY thing BAM cares about is suckers falling for the discount card and the magazine scam they run.
I liked that Seattle Borders. For years I went in there while waiting for the bus or just to kill time. I read a lot of magazines. And one time I even bought a notebook.
All the more reason to pay a visit to Powell’s in Portland if you live in the Pacific Northwest.
My biggest persistent complaint about Borders was that no one ever wanted to work the cash registers. There’d be three or four employees in the cafe, three at the info desk, and one poor shlub at the cash registers.
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.
Once a company starts referring to what was once a creative endeavor as “product” it is time to leave.
Whine, gossip, rude. Cheap article, low blows, trash talk. How this garbage was published is anyone’s guess. Go back to school and finish your education—you might learn a thing or two.
That Boston store was crap– I’ve been there.
This article doesn’t really reflect the beautiful bookstore in the heart of downtown Ann Arbor that I remember. RIP.
Great article. Shows that the internet doesn’t kill a corporation… its the MBAs.
i worked at borders from 2000-2006. just as others have said, there was talk of the company going under long before now. when i started, i loved the ability to keep your store unique; we made our own music displays, selected our favorite books. when they took away our ability to make our mark on the store, that is when it started to die.
I worked for Borders for over 4 years, while I was in college and after I graduated. I can definitely identify with your experience. I made friends I hope to keep for life, and had life experiences that I’ll never regret. Seeing the store I worked at close, seeing the manager that had opened the store close it was a sad moment for me. Of all the full-time employees at Borders, only the GM received a severance package. Once the liquidators got in the store, the vibe turned from dismal to panicky. I really appreciate what you wrote: a real and no-holds-barred testament to a company the exemplified that not being in touch with reality on the corporate level, not accepting the times that you are in and not being able to teach the old dog new tricks was the demise of this company. Many people blame the fall of Borders on the e-reader, but that’s not true. Waiting until 2008 to develop your own website, letting your biggest competition manage your website, and other decisions like not cross-training your employees to work all parts of the store (a tremendous waste of manpower, in my opinion) hurt Borders on the store level.
Great article, Paul. I feel your pain. I worked for a bookstore chain that went under, too, only I was there to the bitter end — Upstart Crow in California. I have a friend who managed a Borders for a while, and was the best bookseller I’ve ever met, but who left when the management idiocy you describe got too overwhelming.
Thank you from another bookstore lover. If you’re ever in San Francisco, check out Green Apple Books, best new and used place I’ve ever found. I’m on a serious budget these days, or I’d go to my local liquidating Borders and gorge myself on the marked down inventory, but I just can’t afford it. Too many political contributions, too many donation s to the food bank.
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 last Borders is expected to close in September.” The Singapore store is allegedly not closing down – anyone have intel on whether that’s true?
Thanks for that.
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.
I worked at two Michigan Borders (not at Ann Arbor) from 1990 to 2001. This article is so accurate it’s frightening.
“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.”
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.
Seattle still has a good selection of of book stores, but for a lot of small towns who have no other options than to go to a shopping mall, Borders was it.
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.
Excellent article, Paul. I worked for Waldenbooks (owned by the same company as Borders, I do believe) for 8 years, from the mid-eighties to the early nineties, and so much of what you relate here happened nearly identically at Waldens. Well, except for Internet sales and eReaders, of course. Otherwise, the scene played out the same, even right down to the “tiny, mean ferret of a man” manager. Oh yeah, we had one of those. Mismanagement at all levels of the organization, displays filled with junk completely unrelated to books (as one of my co-workers put it at the time, the store should have been renamed to “Waldencrap”), quotas for pushing club cards..yeah, it all sounds scarily familiar.
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 story mirrors my experience at “The Good Guys” electronic store in 98/99. they’re dead now too. these were commission salesmen, the managers were all dickheads.
I like how the author takes credit for predicting the demise of Borders, yet the reasons he gives have nothng to do with what actually caused the end. In fact, the very reasons he gives are the exact reasons Barnes and Noble are still in business.
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.
Excellent article, Paul. I’m sad anytime any bookstore anywhere closes. 🙁
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.