if this author's experiences were normal, (and from what i've seen, they were) the only surprise is that they didn't crash and burn sooner.

http://larrycorreia.wordpress.com/2011/07/21/on-borders-closing/

When I went in to a Borders I felt like I was in a Media Play or Best Buy. It had that same half-ass box store attitude in a business where you can't float by on half-assed indifference. People who go shopping for books aren't the same sort of people who go shopping for CDs, games and movies.

The atmosphere in Borders was crap, their selection was crap, their employees were worthless and half the store was taken up with inane BS like extremely overpriced DVDs.

My only regret is that my Borders was half a mile from B&N and I can no longer in there on the off chance B&N was missing a mid book in a series I was picking up. (hell, that doesn't even bother me now that I buy ebooks)

The best experience I ever had in a Borders was their going out of business sale.

 

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i am vaguely aware of having gone to a borders in the late 90s. they were mildly helpful and had the rare book i wanted. which is why i drove 2 hours out to the only goddamn borders around here. that said, i had no reason to go back. this was whenever the new thing was to have a coffee shop inside your book place. but it was before the internet was more than aol or prodigy to everyone.

 

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When I lived in Chicago the Borders near my house was awesome. They were (as always) directly across the street from a B&N which was a nice store as well....but waaaaay more crowded.

Great people worked there, and the store had a much larger selection of older books than the B&N across the street....which is probably why they are going out of business.

Too much inventory that took too long to move crowding up the place instead of piles and piles of current "best sellers" and other fast moving stuff.

While the larger selection and smaller crowds was certainly appealing to me, it wasn't a very good business model to follow in 1000 stores across the country.

Note, I'm not putting down B&N...I love the one near where I live now and I'm a Nook fanboy. Just pointing out that what makes a great local book store for it's customers doesn't translate into a great way to run a nationwide business. That said, even with better inventory management B&N is going to have a hard time surviving.

Your Borders was clearly different from mine.

Literally 50% of the fantasy section was wall to wall copies of Twilight and the Twilight rip-offs.

They had this ridiculous metal cage sitting in the middle of the store with Twilight paraphernalia hanging off of it.

 

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stopped buying from there when i found Amazon.com.


no sales tax, free shipping, and 1/2 price.....

 

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Had a Borders in the mall by me. It was a cluster-eff of a mess, nothing was in any sort of real order. I don't think they ever organized a section to look neat, even once.

It only had two redeeming factors. One, I knew the people working there, so I could get stuff much cheaper. Two, it doesn't have hipsters sitting on every window sill like the B&N 2 minutes away, make the place to look stupid.

 

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