RIP, Borders
Jul. 18th, 2011 10:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lazypadawanToday came the news that I knew was going to happen...Borders is officially going out of business. Liquidation starts on Friday, with plans to have all of the 400 remaining stores closed by September. Borders had already closed scores of shops after it declared bankruptcy. I think there was only one left in town. Almost 11,000 people are going to lose their jobs.
Never again will I wander into Borders while at the Old Navy or Marshalls in Mission Valley, where some kind of ren faire-type music was playing over the soundsystem. Never again will I get the coveted 40% off coupon or use my Borders card. No more perusing the racks of magazines for fun stuff like some Star Wars cover I'd missed or some esoterica like Fairie or Gothic Beauty magazine (I'll have to go to Barnes & Noble for that). No more scooping up new Star Wars novels and books about Star Wars the day they came out. No more in-store Seattle's Best; I'm not a coffee drinker but I liked their handmade colas and tasty treats, pre-weight loss. No more big in-store promos for blockbuster movies. I remember back in 1999 my local Borders in Tysons Corner, VA had a party to celebrate TPM's release. Little did we know it was aimed at kids but they had homemade Wookiee Cookies and we helped the store employee pronounce all of the characters and planets correctly during story time. I got some swag that's still in my collection today.
The internet, technology, and the economy have been rough on the big box business model that became popular in the 1990s. Borders simply made every dumb mistake a business could have made, especially its inability to catch on to e-readers/digital books in time and its inability to compete with Amazon.com. Big stores have lots of overhead, tough to meet with rising rents for lots of square footage and declining sales. Borders could never compete price-wise with its music or DVDs. I couldn't believe that most of its CDs were $16-20 apiece. If you really wanted a CD, you could get one for ten bucks at Target. Or you could get with the 21st century and download a whole album for $9.99-$12.99 with extra content on iTunes. If you don't have an e-reader yet, one can buy books for less at Walmart, Target, or Costco if you'd rather not wait for Amazon to deliver. For too long, the big bookstores encouraged browsing over buying. I've known people who have read entire books in the store without ever buying them.
Whether B&N can continue to hang on and how much of an effect this will have on the publishing industry remains to be seen.
Never again will I wander into Borders while at the Old Navy or Marshalls in Mission Valley, where some kind of ren faire-type music was playing over the soundsystem. Never again will I get the coveted 40% off coupon or use my Borders card. No more perusing the racks of magazines for fun stuff like some Star Wars cover I'd missed or some esoterica like Fairie or Gothic Beauty magazine (I'll have to go to Barnes & Noble for that). No more scooping up new Star Wars novels and books about Star Wars the day they came out. No more in-store Seattle's Best; I'm not a coffee drinker but I liked their handmade colas and tasty treats, pre-weight loss. No more big in-store promos for blockbuster movies. I remember back in 1999 my local Borders in Tysons Corner, VA had a party to celebrate TPM's release. Little did we know it was aimed at kids but they had homemade Wookiee Cookies and we helped the store employee pronounce all of the characters and planets correctly during story time. I got some swag that's still in my collection today.
The internet, technology, and the economy have been rough on the big box business model that became popular in the 1990s. Borders simply made every dumb mistake a business could have made, especially its inability to catch on to e-readers/digital books in time and its inability to compete with Amazon.com. Big stores have lots of overhead, tough to meet with rising rents for lots of square footage and declining sales. Borders could never compete price-wise with its music or DVDs. I couldn't believe that most of its CDs were $16-20 apiece. If you really wanted a CD, you could get one for ten bucks at Target. Or you could get with the 21st century and download a whole album for $9.99-$12.99 with extra content on iTunes. If you don't have an e-reader yet, one can buy books for less at Walmart, Target, or Costco if you'd rather not wait for Amazon to deliver. For too long, the big bookstores encouraged browsing over buying. I've known people who have read entire books in the store without ever buying them.
Whether B&N can continue to hang on and how much of an effect this will have on the publishing industry remains to be seen.
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Date: 2011-07-19 05:29 am (UTC)Here in NZ, our Borders shops will probably be all closed down within the next 18 months, even though they had a different owner than the US ones. *snuffles*
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Date: 2011-07-19 05:58 am (UTC)They were lucky enough to honour my return, but liquidation of the store I went to in MV was staring within the next two weeks.
They were my main source of nearly every book, SW and otherwise, DVD, and graphic novel I bought. I also liked it because they, unlike B&N, had late hours as I was a late nighter.
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Date: 2011-07-19 10:33 pm (UTC)Hope BN hangs in there (she says as she fires up her Kindle).
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Date: 2011-07-24 05:01 am (UTC)