Borders CEO lays responsibility for Borders’ success at the feet of Publishers

“We know we have a business plan that works, but it requires a lot of support to get it there, and our publishers are going to make or break our ability to transform this company at the end of the day.” ~Mike Edwards (Bolding mine)

And why am I not surprised? Oh, because I spent 7 months getting cheerful “encouraging” messages like this from Edwards almost weekly. Borders has been shifting the blame for a long time.

Sure, the employees should be facilitating sales. But the push quickly came off making more recommendations or pushing add ons and on pushing the $20 member card. To the point where management was supposed to do DAILY “assessments” of each employee and one of the things to be scored on the assessment was “Did employee overcome customer’s protest and sell card anyway?” While these assessments were said to be a reward system (if you got a 100% you got a free drink from the cafe) there were reports of RMs demanding GMs terminate poor scorers.

Also just a hint at the goal numbers- from Black Friday till the week of Christmas we were expect to  sell 50 member cards a day. The week of Christmas the number went up by about 5 a day.

After Christmas a mysterious new policy came out that only managers could ring up employees. Why? Because corporate caught several stores selling things to make their goal to employees who would then return it to other stores.

So really, this demanding that publishers foot the bill so Borders can stay in business is completely typical of the attitude of the CEO. Before you say I’m just bitter, truth is I WANT Borders to come out of this. I’ve always cheered for the underdog. But if their business plan is “sell more cards, close more stores, get the publishers to send us more books we won’t pay for” then screw them, publishing doesn’t need any more of that crap.