Michele Lee

I blogged about Borders over at the Apex Book Company blog today. It’s nothing you haven’t heard already if you’ve been reading along here, but it’s a new set of audience members, so it’s a new conversation too.

Today was…more of the same really. Another price drop that I found out about only by Borders Rewards email the evening before. I arrived at the store (I brought doughnuts, but then so did two other people so we ended up with 5 dozen doughnuts and no coffee because they’ve already gotten rid of the coffee maker) and the signs hadn’t been changed because they were still working on packing up the, as it turned out, 8 pallets we shipped today. This morning we only had 6 packed, so I worked the reg for two hours on my own so everyone else could get those others done.

It looks like we just started moving in. Paperchase is pretty much gone. So are our cds, dvds, blurays and two floors of what it left now fits into two thirds of the lower level. The liquidator swears that we’ll still be open til the end of April, but if so we’ll be selling something besides books and even the fixtures.

Speaking of that the fixture sale has started too. People are real excited about that, but seem to think it’s a yard sale. That’s okay, for some reason I thought the prices might be reasonable as well, but not only are some of them near new ($25 for a 2-5 yr old microwave from the break room when I bought one last fall brand new for the same) but there’s a “10% fee just because we can ask it”. They’re calling it a buyer’s premium, but that’s about the only explanation we’ve gotten.

A guy who managed Circuit City through their closing came in Wednesday and said the same thing happened to them. The liquidators stripped all normal business discounts, if not adding more, THEN gave a “closeout” price.

The liquidators said we’ll be open the full length of time. My manager said she expects the “Only 10 days left” signs to go up on the 21st.

Also, my brother-in-law just told me there’s a marathon in town tomorrow morning and the official parking lot is the one meant for 4th Street Live! (which houses my store). So um, yeah. Marathon. Tomorrow I take the bus, to work on a Saturday (when I haven’t typically been working, but employees are thinning).

So how are your Saturdays shaping up?

Found by the permanent market display (yes, on the shelves). We love you all and will miss you too. (And thanks for waiting until we were closing to write on the shelves.)

I’m going with a visual post today.

Every Borders has a Paperchase (journals, address books, pens, photo albums, etc) section. Much bemoaned by some people in our store it’s pretty popular, though the products are more upscale than the equivalent products as places like Walmart. (Of course we also have unique stuff, like wooden journals and pens.) Monday I was on the floor for the first and last hour of my shift. I spent the last hour cleaning up Paperchase, primarily condensing out products onto one display shelf, making them stick up straight and organizing them, a little bit at least, by type. We’ve gone from three double sided shelves of blank books, agendas, etc to three shelves on one side of one display.

This is what I found when I got to work this morning.

(I apologize for the low quality pictures, I was using my cell’s camera.)

Now imagine this over the whole store. Add in products left in the wrong place, all the books from upstairs being shifted, one section at a time, downstairs, 2200 books grabbed at random and shipped to another store and a mess of trash, wrappers and empty packages from people blatantly stealing and you’ll understand why we’re overwhelmed and not able to keep up with it all. (Also add in Borders messing around with our inventory system and locking us out from adjusting it at all, and, as I’ve recently learned, adding items they had scheduled to be shipped to us, but never actually shipped as being “on hand” weeks after they decided to close us down.)

And we sent off more today, and the back room has been cleaned out because we’re packing pallets tomorrow to be sent to a Michigan store. Anyone in Michigan who might be reading this, I swear we’re going to try to pack it decently, not just throw crap in boxes and seal them, which by the way is the standard way boxes arrived to us from Borders warehouses. I know personally if I am going to pack a box to send to someone I’m going to do it as efficiently as possible, not throw it all will-nilly into boxes until they look full. Shipping is not cheap.

After that I cleaned and condensed our sports section. I was trying to at least organize it by subject, but I burned through 2/3rds of my time and got through about half of it, so I had to just put everything closer together as is. It looks like this now.

(I put this picture together from two pictures to give you the full effect.)

This section used to be full. Now seven bays of six shelves each are condensed down to  four bays of four shelves each, plus one and a half shelves of another (you’ll notice the top and bottom shelves only have 2-5 oversized books on them, if anything). And this is selling slowly. Most other sections look a lot worse. Cooking, for example has gone from ten bays of seven shelves to less than 6 full bays (with the top and bottom shelves of each left empty.)

Again, and we are selling slowly.

And occasionally after moving 500 pounds of books in a day and working reg where customers bring up armloads of product then walk out with two items, or haggle, or demand that you give them bags to carry their books in (or coffee) for free, you find this little treasure trove:

Where people just dump things they decide they don’t want (or didn’t intend to buy in the first place.) By the way those are all SF/F books and manga (and one cool Hello Kitty Bat) which are all on the first floor (and have been as long as I’ve worked this store) and are actually on the way out the door from the back of the store (where I found these).

Is it any wonder why we can’t find things?