When the Borders brothers sold their budding bookstore chain, the company was well known for its impeccable customer service, top-notch inventory system and large-format approach that uprooted the way the books were sold.But the Borders shopping experience eroded over the years as the chain grew in size, management became unwieldy, the Internet encroached on sales and electronic books emerged as an alternative for avid book readers.[1]
A number of reasons have been given as to why Borders, a
used bookstore founded in Ann Arbor in 1971 that became a retail chain in 1992,
ended in bankruptcy in 2011. Among the most prevalent are: the rise of the
ebook, competition with Amazon, overexpansion of retail locations,
overinvestment in music sales, and various mismanagement decisions. Slate.com
quipped, “It died by a thousand—OK, maybe just four or five—self-inflicted
paper cuts.”[2]
But Nathan Bomey is right when he places the erosion of the
Borders shopping experience at the head of the list.
A shopping experience may be a more difficult thing to
quantify than the ubiquitous assertion of mismanagement, but it is very real.
In the case of Borders, the erosion of the shopping experience was deadly.
I grew up in suburban Detroit in the 1970s, about 40 minutes
from Ann Arbor. Two youth counselors at my church had been students at the
University of Michigan, and were well acquainted with the first Borders Store
on State Street, and took us there on an expedition. This was not its very
first location, but it was already a fully mature destination of wonder. Large,
with brick walls and multiple levels, it seemed to have every coffee table art
book under the sun, scholarly titles, mystical new age books, books on world
cinema, and cultural journals. I never had any money in those days, but in the
early 80s, when me and my friends haunted the art film houses ensconced all
over campus, Borders was a place to explore before or between screenings. (Undoubtedly, the mystique of Borders influenced the naming of 1980s science fiction comic book saga Border Worlds.)
When store #9 appeared in the South Hills of Pittsburgh in
the early 90s, I did have money, and I spent a lot of it there. I can’t
remember if I saw the store logo driving past, or heard about it from a friend,
but as soon as I learned that a Borders store had opened, I realized that the
world had become a better place. It was not as great as the Ann Arbor location,
but it was still a destination and a treasure house. I spent many a rainy
Saturday night there, sipping coffee and coming home with Neil Forsyth’s The Old Enemy: Satan and the Combat Myth,
or Joseph Campbell, or many a coffee table book that I still have in my
library.
When store #174 open in the North Hills, it was not as great
as store #9, it was still good. From 2000 to 2005, I worked there part time on
and off. It was there that I was inspired to go back to school, finally earning
my PhD in art history in 2013. This was during the heyday of Harry Potter and Chicken Soup, and one of my own freelance illustration jobs, for Al
Franken’s Lies and the Lying Liars Who
Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right appeared. It was only
slightly absurd that the book for which I had drawn The Adventures of Supply Side Jesus was one of the innumerable items I
rang up as a cashier, or helped people to locate as a bookseller. (No, I never
mentioned that, by the way, I was the cartoonist!)
But I was not that unusual in having an example of my work
on sale at Borders. A number of the staff were highly creative, particularly in
music but also in theater. The manager recorded a smooth country album produced
by another employee that played on the store sound system for several weeks,
and other employees often had publications and creative offerings of one sort
or another featured in the store.
 |
| Life without Culture: Undoubtedly, the mystique of Borders influenced the naming of 1980s science fiction comic book saga Border Worlds. An unpublished panel. |
But during my time at Borders, the shopping or customer
experience did erode noticeably, along with the employee experience, at the end
of my time there quite precipitously. At the beginning, each store had its own
CRC or Community Relations Coordinator, a person responsible for scheduling
events such as folk singers in the café, local author signings, or weekly or
monthly meetings of the poetry group; it had a rack of free brochures and local
independent newsweeklies; a plethora of scholarly titles; and still a wide
selection of off-beat magazines. Most importantly, it had knowledgeable employees
who cared about culture in its manifold forms.
But quickly the CRCs were replaced by regional staffers
overseeing multiple stores, and finally event planners in the corporate
headquarters. The quirky folk singers were routed out, and events were stripped
down to a few big-label music releases. Author signings followed suit, with
local authors eliminated for fewer, bigger national names. Groups that were
once given coupons for free cups of coffee and announced over the store sound system
were quietly eliminated. The number of sofas and chairs strewn about the store
for customers were eliminated, as well as (maliciously) the stools for
employees manning the service desk. The brochure rack disappeared.
None of these clunky, handmade aspects of Borders were
profit centers in and of themselves, and many of them were inefficient and
bothersome to employees. I personally found the local iteration of the Socrates
Café, a meeting of overly loud bullshitters named after the book, extremely
fatuous. But they all contributed to the atmosphere of Borders as a unique,
even sometimes bizarre experience, and their loss contributed to the erosion of
the shopping experience and, guess what, the bottom line.
A word about those knowledgeable employees: a typical
Borders bookseller was college educated, perhaps changed majors too many times
to complete a degree, maybe had even dropped out of grad school, or was by temperament
or otherwise unsuited either to academia or the corporate business world. For
these sensitive souls, work at a chain bookstore at slightly above minimum wage
might not have amounted to a career, but it allowed them to utilize their minds
and earn an employee discount, and to be among some of the rich cultural resources that they loved.
Such a labor pool certainly existed in Ann Arbor in the
1970s, and nearly every major city and college town into which the Borders
chain initially expanded had a ready supply of such employees. In more than one
way, the growth of the chain eventually outstripped this labor pool, and by the
early 2000s (myself notwithstanding), such knowledgeable, geeky, cultured, and
book-loving employees were in increasing short supply. (College, it seemed, had become too expensive for humanities majors, or at least for humanities majors to drop out before completing their degrees and getting a real job to pay back their student loans.) New employees could have been
working in any kind of retail or fast food business, and manifestly could not have cared
less about books or culture. Indeed, many of the older, knowledgeable employees
of the type that built the Borders brand were consciously being routed out by
management as the 2000s wore on, along with the free weekly newspapers, the quirky folk singers, and
the pompous poetry groups.
While ringing up a Schaum’s Algebra workbook in 2002, I had
a serendipitous (serendipity being one of my church youth counselors’ favorite
words) moment, and realized I should go back to college. I started part-time in
January 2003 at the Community College of Allegheny County, and was full-time by the fall. I earned 60 gen ed transfer credits and started at Pitt in 2005. During this time I phased out my part-time
employment at Borders, which finally concluded with the end of the 2005 Christmas
season (a notoriously bullying manager that had been transferred to our store was summarily fired after the holidays). By this time, the chain had already cultivated a corporate feel
virtually indistinguishable from Barnes & Noble.
It is important to note that even as store stock contracted and the notorious Categories scheme was implemented (turning the de facto control of entire genres over to the highest-bidding publishers), it was still useful to work part-time at Borders even and especially as I returned to school full-time. Familiar with the ordering system, I could make SPOs (special purchase orders) of virtually any title in print and quite a few out of print (particularly those I needed for school), usually at the highest employee discount rate, and virtually risk-free, making it more convenient than Amazon. At some point, however, working at Borders became not worth it, and ordering through Amazon became the preferred mode of acquiring necessary books during grad school.
It is important to note that even as store stock contracted and the notorious Categories scheme was implemented (turning the de facto control of entire genres over to the highest-bidding publishers), it was still useful to work part-time at Borders even and especially as I returned to school full-time. Familiar with the ordering system, I could make SPOs (special purchase orders) of virtually any title in print and quite a few out of print (particularly those I needed for school), usually at the highest employee discount rate, and virtually risk-free, making it more convenient than Amazon. At some point, however, working at Borders became not worth it, and ordering through Amazon became the preferred mode of acquiring necessary books during grad school.
I still occasionally shopped there, but my own shopping experience
was noticeably less enjoyable than in the past. Selection was curtailed, bland
bestsellers dominated, games and gifts replaced scholarly titles, and it became
easier to order books for school online. It was no longer a destination or a
treasure house, but a cold, unfeeling, alienating experience.
The shopping experience had eroded over the years. Was
nobody watching?
I still miss Borders every rainy Saturday night, like one sometimes
yearns for a bygone lover.
