Posted on 07/22/2011 1:27:55 PM PDT by rhema
You have to have a heart of stone not to feel a pang of sadness at the passing of the bookstore Borders.
The retailer is liquidating its 399 remaining outlets and letting go nearly 11,000 employees. Gone will be the era when no shopping-mall parking lot in America seemed complete without an adjoining Borders, offering up its capacious aisles to browse for books you had no idea you needed.
Nostalgia aside, the extinction of Borders is the very model of a free-market economy at work. The store fell victim to the unyielding injunction of a truly creative economy: “Adapt, or die.” It failed to keep up with evolving technology and shifting consumer preferences, and so has been forced to make way for more adept competitors.
This ruthlessly efficient reallocation of resources took place because Borders wasn’t big or politically connected enough to get a bailout; because its employees didn’t belong to a powerful union favored by the White House; and because it didn’t sell something, such as green energy, deemed worthy of taxpayer support. The upshot of the changes that buried the store, and were allowed to unspool without governmental interference, will be cheaper and more readily available books.
The story of Borders has been repeated again and again by all the countless American companies that have risen to prominence only to disappear. It started with an inspired innovation only to be overtaken by subsequent innovations. It had an advantage that, in new conditions, became a liability. It lost its footing on the free market’s ceaseless wheel of change.
Read about Borders circa 1995 and it is lauded as “a chain that seems as attuned to the new world of technology as the refined old world of literary society.” It had a state-of-the-art inventory system. It stocked its enormous stores with tens of thousands of titles. Borders thrived by providing choice and convenience, two of the pillars of the consumer economy.
Then it didn’t recognize quickly enough the new ways of delivering them. It had to rely on Amazon to sell its books online, a boost to the online retailer that would do so much to make the Borders model obsolete. It branched out into sales of CDs and DVDs, an initially profitable move that backfired when the music industry went digital. It missed out on e-books. Locked into leases at uneconomical locations, its voluminous real estate began to weigh it down.
Barnes & Noble, in contrast, developed a website to sell its books online itself and marketed its own e-book reader, the Nook. It secured a prized partnership with Starbucks for the coffee at its cafés. It lost $59 million last quarter, but it’s still standing.
In the late 1990s, the romantic comedy You’ve Got Mail was built around the heartlessness of a mega-bookstore moving into a New York neighborhood and killing off a small family bookshop. Now, it’s the turn of the mega-bookstores to be eaten, with delivery of a $9.99 e-book just a few clicks away. In a free economy, the top dog always has to run scared.
Does anyone fear Microsoft anymore, the behemoth that government spent so much time and energy trying to cut down to size in the late 1990s? The same thing, eventually, will befall Google and, yes, even Facebook.
Government exists in an entirely different plane, characterized by stasis and the lack of market or any other kind of discipline. USA Today reports that “federal employees’ job security is so great that workers in many agencies are more likely to die of natural causes than get laid off or fired.” Washington is locked in a debate over whether health-care programs designed in the 1960s can ever be reformed to account for new realities.
If Borders were a government agency, its budget would have been fattened up during the past few years, and it’d survive in perpetuity, whatever its merits.
Call me old school, but I much prefer the physical book. I hope Barnes and Noble and Books a Million don’t go the way of Boarders and the whole video rental industry. I know you can still get stuff online, but sometimes you don’t know what you want and it takes browsing or something catches your eye that you weren’t looking for. It sucks that you can’t rent a DVD anymore without ordering online and waiting a few days for it to come or using a Red Box with little selection.
I must have a heart of stone then because I'm glad they are going under. I remember the stories about Borders employees trashing Sarah Palin's book and not displaying it in urban areas (or displaying it with negative commentary). Good riddance to bad rubbish.
I patronize the local booksellers for regional books and some of the better known books. I go to Amazon for the hard to find stuff and convenience. B&N is fine for many things and great to browse through. Only one Borders in the general area but seemed a second to B&N.
BAM is supposedly trying to buy a few dozen Borders book stores to keep them operating.
Waldenbooks is part of Borders, so it’s gone too.
I am a Historical Fiction war freak and I am not interested in books on the World Wars, Vietnam, or really any thing post renaissance. There aren’t that many of these books and they do not have their on genre in any physical or online bookstore. They are stuck in there with all the other fiction. Since I have been reading for years, the only way to find something new is to walk the aisles and look for a cover with a warlord or knight donning a sword and shield. Even the historical fiction message boards online are geared not toward my liking, but more toward romance and gossip (ie. gossip on the court of Henry VIII).
Borders exploded in the 90's and kept on all the way up to the last presidential campaign, as a very powerful koffee klache meeting place and book/magazine talking points hub for suburban Clintonite soccermoms.
Doesn't seem that the maintaining of that function is desired any longer, LOL.
Hard to put your finger on it but Barnes and Noble simply out-executed Borders. B & N may still go under themselves - time will tell - but Borders didn’t do anything as well as their competition did IMHO.
“I must have a heart of stone then...”
Just what I thought. Then I thought,
“Never break, never break, never break, never break, this heart of stone”
I always used to enjoy buying conservative books at Borders, though the DC clerks were too professional to let their scorn show. The college kids working at the Fredericksburg store could barely choke theirs back, so it was more fun to shop at that one. I made sure to be extra nice to them, too.
Last year when my daughter and I did our university tour I was surprised to see that just about every major university bookstore was now 'managed' by Barnes & Noble. Years ago when I visited The Harvard Coop for the first time in many years, there was something oddly familiar about the wood trim and title placards; sure enough, B&N had taken over the Coop! Now they've spread just about everywhere.
I go to the library. One of the few uses of my tax dollars of which I approve.
Give me Barnes and Noble any day. But give me Amazon every day.
In NYC, Barnes & Noble started out as a college bookstore. The one on 18th street still houses endless textbooks and cheap paperbacks. In the early 70s, that’s where every college kid went to get their cheap Penguin books.
I prefer the physical book myself. I kind of enjoy browsing at a bookstore. That, and when all else fails, you can read without electricity. I buy from Amazon when I want some obscure historical text, or some out-of-print tome that you won’t find on the shelf at B&N, and I shop at some small used bookstores.
I found that as well, now that our son is heading to college. It's a smart move by Barnes & Noble. It also means that any gift cards that come our way can be used to help him buy textbooks.
I'll miss Borders. I used to shop at the original store when I was in college, and for years I've enjoyed browsing there for movies or recorded TV shows. They've carried some unusual items that were good gifts for one of my family members.
I’m with you, if new physical books stop being made I stop reading new books. Luckily used book stores and what I already own should keep me in material until I die. E-books just don’t provide many of the pleasures of books, they just provide the content, which is fine but there’s a more to a book than just the content.
ECON 101: Government exists to pervert the natural workings of the the market. The market always gets the last laugh, though.
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