They finally put Borders out of its misery.
I recently posted on my social media home, "I loved you, but you were too stupid to live." Let me elaborate on both counts.
Borders opened in my hometown just after I had finished work on a movie, the first movie I ever worked on, in an unpaid production assistant position that was nevertheless one of the most significant jobs I've ever undertaken. I came back home to plan my future and, after a couple of odd jobs, I lucked into the new Borders as seasonal help. It helped that a good friend worked there and recommended me, and after the seasonal work ended they just kept putting me on the schedule. No complaints, as most of my co-workers were great and, like me, a good number of them were folks trying to figure out exactly where their life would take them. I made lifelong friends and even valued the work I did. I worked mostly in the music/video department (back when the company cared enough to staff those areas) and I learned more about wide varieties of music there than probably anyplace else in my life. I eventually moved away and, after a stint at an independent bookstore where I learned more about bookselling than a Borders chain store could ever teach (ironically, I ended up at the indie when a Borders in Seattle wouldn't hire me because they could pay a new, untrained employee around a dollar less an hour than they would have had to pay me), I ended up back at another Borders in Los Angeles, a store that actually valued my experience. My life pinballed around a lot, and many times when I found myself back home between gigs, I kept a good enough relationship with the hometown store that I was able to pick up some shifts and keep the bills paid. I even went back full-time for a while after circumstances saw me back home more permanently. And even when I wasn't working at Borders, it was a place I enjoyed visiting and shopping. If I visited a new city, it was always fun to find the local Borders and see how it measured up.
As I mentioned, I had a great bunch of co-workers at one time, people who had experience with books and media, or at least a passionate interest. A surplus of people worked at Borders because they loved to be surrounded by books and music, even if most of them weren't true audiophiles or literati. We were lucky that very few high school and college kids who just wanted a job they could slog through for a few hours a week to earn beer money made it through our application process. And management actually cared about our opinions; I got more than one friend an interview at the store because I thought they'd be a good fit and most of the management seemed to value my opinion. We had lots of employees to cover shifts, and we had enough customers that all five of our registers would frequently need to be manned on weekends. And many nights, our crew would go grab drinks to blow off steam and complain about dumb customers and what we considered foolish corporate strategies. Everybody bitches about work, I've found, but it turns out those foolish corporate strategies were the beginning of the end.
I can say with some degree of authority that I saw Borders circling the drain for many a year. This was one protracted death rattle. I don't know what was the thing that did the company in. Maybe it was the doing away with each store having a community relations coordinator who helped plan events for each local store. Get rid of that position and, of course, stores are going to have fewer events and, therefore, fewer people coming into the store for events. At the same time, stores halved their management staffs and relegated some to "supervisor" roles with less pay and less authority, showing, in my mind, a dearth of trust in the local rank-and-file who used to stress to employees that, while Borders was a chain, each store was unique and would strive to tailor itself to its community and employee strengths and interests.
Maybe it was the terrible launch of Borders.com, followed by the just plain idiotic turning over of the keys of their internet presence to Amazon.com (I cannot even begin to type the number of words to describe how, even then, I and everyone else with half a cranium knew that was a foolhardy and dangerous lapse in common sense) followed by reclaiming Borders.com well too late for it to do any good.
Maybe it was when stores began to strive to sell novelty items like the loathed, clearly gimmicky and sad Big Mouth Billy Bass singing fish.
Maybe it was when a bunch of department store and/or grocery store executives started running the company and tried to sell books like any other mass-produced commodity, when books are clearly unique luxury items that tend to be bought and sold by people who care about the product.
Maybe it was when the company started pushing "make" books on the staff and the customers, tying store performance to the sale of a specific title rather than allowing employees to properly engage customers and tailor recommendations to what that customer might actually like instead of one arbitrary book.
Maybe it was the attrition of qualified managers and booksellers, as I saw several forced out, some near-criminally, with replacements barely trained and scarcely qualified or passionate for the job.
Maybe it was more than one asshat regional manager lording over dying stores and trying to motivate through fear and the promise of pain.
Maybe it was the endless shipments of mostly-useless kid's toys that most stores didn't have room for, causing the damned children's sections to be even more messy than when they were just places with picture books that clueless, entitled parents left their kids to destroy.
Maybe it was the addition of self-service kiosks at the information desks to encourage patrons to look up items and their availability without aid of a pesky, knowledgeable employee.
Maybe it was Borders' inability to see the ebook revolution on their doorstep and their late-inning partnership with the Kobo e-reader, an e-reader absolutely no one I know owns.
Maybe it was expanding too quickly during the salad years to show "growth" to stockholders and signing long-term leases that were no longer viable when the economy took a tumble.
Maybe it was panicking and relying on a flood of e-mail coupons to drive traffic into the stores, training regulars to devalue the store's merchandise, always knowing there was likely to be a new coupon in their in-box within hours or days.
It was, of course, all of those things. And more.
It was like a rockslide. It started with a few bad decisions that were somewhat defensible, if short sighted, then became an avalanche of bad decisions, which were frequently hastily implemented at the store level, then changed to something else almost immediately, leaving employees responsible for actions which even their managers didn't fundamentally understand.
I am reminded of this thoroughly unspectacular kid I went to high school with. The only noteworthy thing about him was how small and scrawny he was. This didn't stop him from being a real loudmouth, however. That might have been an interesting dichotomy if anything he said was ever interesting or witty, but it never was. I heard a very large athlete once say how much he'd like to hit this kid, but he was afraid he'd kill him. So we learned to tune this gnat of a classmate out and he became mostly background noise to our lives. Had this guy started his academic career as a prodigy of some sort, he would make a great metaphor for Borders. It was a sickly once-promising bookstore that people eventually learned to ignore even as it begged for attention.
I don't want to make it seem as if being hired at Borders made one a saint. I worked with my share of incompetents, losers, lazy-asses, weirdos, bores, burnouts, manchildren, antisocial dicks, power-trippers, and just plain idiots. But, on average, I've not worked with better people than those I encountered at Borders, and most of the above scofflaws tended not to last too long (or were quickly promoted to management...ZING!). But a lot of the really good people who have stuck it out for years are now having to work with liquidators and preside over the wake of their own jobs and the stores they loved. That's sad any way you look at it, and there aren't a lot of jobs to go around right now.
It is perhaps silly to be sentimental about a bookstore. For all the good Borders did me, it also burned me and some good friends more than once, and it should not be forgotten that it helped put a lot of dedicated neighborhood bookstores out of business. It was virulently, almost comically, afraid of unionization. Some of its leadership were not only poor businesspeople, but miserable human beings, to boot. But Borders allowed a greater degree of personality than Barnes and Noble (a store I have never enjoyed shopping in) ever did, and in its heyday it brought a large diversity of titles to areas underserved by other bookstores. Since we tend to remember the good stuff and marginalize the bad, I guess that's the legacy it will leave behind.
I will close with this, an image that will always stick with me, among many images from that time in my life that have persevered. In the music department, we used to be able to open up any CD and allow a prospective customer to listen to it, a perk which was roundly abused by the clientele and rightly abandoned as digital listening stations became de rigeur. One day, a customer came to me and explained that she had to find music for her father's funeral. She was looking for a specific version of "Danny Boy" if memory serves me correctly, and even if I don't remember her exact request, I do recall quite vividly the tears that welled up in her eyes when she heard the familiar notes of her father's favorite song. I said little as I repackaged the CD for her to purchase, but that day I knew that my work in some miniscule little retail job had managed to profoundly effect someone's life and provide a need met in a moment of crisis. I think when most people go to work, they hope they can have a moment like that.
R.I.P.
