I won’t be at the store today, but I need to lay down a few things that I know to expand this play a bit more.
I don’t want to feel like I’ve been royally screwed. I don’t want to be one of those people furious because a failing corporation had to make cuts to stay afloat. I’m not a victim or Enron or Circuit City. This didn’t come out of the blue. And while things are going to be tight and stressful this (probably) won’t mean that I can’t pay bills. I do have a little more support than many people, which I’m very, very grateful for.
But it’s hard not to feel any hard feelings when you’re knowledgeable about the book world in other ways and you’re getting bombarded with information. Like PW reporting “newly-named svp, restructuring Ken Hiltz will bill full-time at a rate of $855 an hour” (which is probably more that my store pays an hour for all their on clock employees put together). Or the brilliant agent Joshua Bilmes who points out that Borders isn’t really closing the stores that performed the lowest.
So here in New York City, there’s a store in Glendale, Queens that is still remaining open, in a failed attempt at an upscale shopping mall. So failed that the shopping center itself was just sold at a bankruptcy auction.
Given the hard sell push we’ve been given the last few months, and Borders’ public statements that it plans to focus more on membership programs (and the new $20 Plus program) and selling non book items (up selling and likely less book inventory and more “other” inventory) makes me jump to the educated conclusion that us not selling the 45-50 plus memberships a day that Borders demanded of us played heavily in our elimination. I wonder how the other stores who had employees buy ereaders and memberships then returning them to other stores fared in all of this.
And while I recognize that a paid rewards program has worked well for Books-A-Million and Barnes and Noble, that it does benefit many buyers and is an effective advertising tool the switch over from free to paid damaged Borders at a time when they couldn’t absorb it well. The priority of selling BR+ over actual books males utterly no sense to me. (But at least I wasn’t around during the “Make books” era where Borders accepted co-op money and required all employees to hand sell a single title to every customer.)
In my only partially educated opinion here’s what caused the Borders downfall:
They stripped the stores of personality which cost money and:
Proved that they lost sight of what people wanted in a book store. The cozy coffee shop feel was replaced by a generic sales environment from the appearance down to the books on the shelf:
Of which there was less. As the focus continues to be on sales and not BOOK sales they continue to scale back what’s on the shelf. Individual stores have very little say in which books they are sent to stock, so it’s common to have the first, third and fifth or the last two books in a series but none of the others. There are fifty copies of a single new title (or a best selling one like those damned Stieg Larsson books) which are replenished as sold, but the one copy of Grimspace or King Maker is sold the day it’s put on the shelf and just not replaced (which by the way, also renders any effort of the bookseller to recommend or hand sell titles they’ve enjoyed completely useless. It also discourages employees from buying from the store because if they buy the only copy of something it’s not going to be there for the customer.)
Most of the Paperchase product is increasingly hideous. Okay, that’s a personal opinion, and while Paperchase does come up a lot in these kinds of rants the truth as I’ve seen it is that people DO buy these things. They love notebooks and calendars, pens and markers and little bags and cards and wrapping paper. We’re in a major business section and these kinds of things account for a lot of our sales as people often stop in for a present for a friend on their lunch hour, or a gift card for an office exchange, etc. But seriously this is ugly as sin (and pretty expensive too).
And then there’s that Borders expanded too fast and got locked into some outrageous rental fees. In my more honest moments this is the one that killed our particular store. But, I’m not at Borders for that, I’m mad at the city of Louisville. About seven years ago the site of 4th street live was The Galleria, meant to be a sort of inner city mall, the city was surprised when it appealed more to a certain crowd of people than to the same kind of people, say, Mall St. Matthews in the upper-middle class side of town. The city decided the best thing to do was scrap the Galleria and build 4th Street Live! (yes the exclamation is part of the name) and they decided the way to make it more of an upper crust shopping center was to, well from this end it looks like charge insane space rental prices. We’re talking into the tens of thousands a month, multiple tens of thousands a month. And they enacted a dress code. That’s right, there’s a dress code to go to a shopping center that’s mostly bars because only bars have the profit margin to stay open in that space. Borders is not the first store in 4th Street Live! to close. Now all that’s left is a CVS (which is most expensive than Borders across the board) and T-Mobile store.
You would think if the city wanted to keep retailers in 4th Street Live! they would have made some sort of effort to keep the Borders, which was the only big store in the area, there. But nothing. No attempts, not a word from anyone in the city. I hope they like big gaping spaces in their fancy, high priced glass domes, because the Game Stop that closed about two years ago still hasn’t been replaced, so how will they replace a two floor Borders?
Or I could be wrong. I mean, maybe they already have a replacement and that’s why they’re letting Borders leave without any effort.
But I also want to say this. The Borders downtown did a lot of business with the disabled and the low income. We were on the bus line, and easy to get to for the people who often times needed extra assistance because of physical or mental disabilities. For the people who didn’t have a bank account and couldn’t buy online, but they could buy or order a book directly from the store. We were the center of business for people who work downtown and wanted a place to go on their lunch hour and for the people who just wanted an actual person to help them instead of a machine.
The loss of our Borders is a blow to the city, one that the city doesn’t even want to seem to acknowledge. Now the closest bookstore to the west end, to Portland, where most of the low income people in the city live, is over 20 miles and an hour bus ride away. 40% of people on my end of town don’t have cars. In my daughter’s kindergarten class she was given a Webkins because the teacher knew she was the only person in the class that had a computer at home. African American fiction was without a question one of my Borders’ top sellers and our AAfic section out classed most other AA sections in the city (I should point out that our indies often don’t even have a romance, or more than half a book shelf of SF/F/H much less an “urban” section.)
So exactly how are we supposed to encourage people to read when the people who come to love reading, who discover it because of a store like ours, are now left literally without reading as a viable option? The city doesn’t care about these people. The corporations don’t care about these people and most people are too intimidated by the market, the state of publishing and the perceived “badness” of this area to risk anything. But that’s exactly why we need a downtown/West end book store.
