The once-great bookseller is liquidating all of its stores and putting nearly 11,000 jobs on the chopping block. Larison criticizes a key advantage enjoyed by its online competitors:
… Amazon has flourished as much as it has thanks to the unfairness of being able to compete with physical bookstores without the burden of paying taxes to state authorities. It has gained at the expense of other firms by evading taxation that its competitors could not evade, and it has vigorously opposed attempts to subject it to the same rules. One man’s successful business model is another man’s example of gaming the system. Meanwhile, ten thousand Borders employees will have to find other work in a miserable labor market, and the book industry as a whole will suffer significantly from the loss of sales that will follow.
Anthony Gregory glances over the tax issue and sees Borders' demise as a free-market success:
Although it is great that Amazon.com can avoid the state encumbrances that hurt brick and mortar places, the bigger reason for Amazon’s triumph, I believe, is its overall brilliance as a business model.
You can buy most of what you’d want with a click. The prices are great. The goods are brought to your door. There are a thousand times as many products as there are in a Borders, except the shopping experience fits not in a store the size of a warehouse but on your desk.
In any event, many left-liberals have condemned Amazon for undercutting stores like Borders. The corporate artifact that ten years ago was condemned for out-competing smaller bookstores is today being eulogized for itself failing the market test.
Mistermix stakes a middle ground:
Borders was never able to integrate their physical locations with an online presence: for a time, they outsourced their online store to Amazon, and their e-reader is an also-ran third party device. But, even though a lot of Borders’ problems were self-inflicted, there’s no doubt that Amazon flourished because of lack of sales tax, and to pretend that the glorious market is the only contributor to Borders’ downfall is shortsighted at best.
The Week compiles more commentary on why Borders failed. Joe Mullin looks at the bankruptcy's impact on publishing houses. Christina Gossmann wonders what will happen to all those books.
(Photo by Ruthanne Reid)
The Dish 