A final post on the subject, from a reader:
Please, for the love of God, stop with the poor Borders being a victim of market forces, interwebz, blah blah blah. I cringe every time I see business "analysts" go on and on. They know some stuff, but they don't know the details from the bookfloor. I worked there for almost eight years, most of that time as a supervisor. Borders was pennywise and pound-foolish. Always.
Back in '04 or '05, they realized they didn't have a decent web presence when it came to allowing customers to reserve an item on-line and pick it up later. So they rigged up something half-assedly that would send us e-mails when a reserve came through. They didn't trust store management enough to watch for the e-mails, so they sent every store pagers that would go off when an e-mail wasn't responded to in a timely enough manner.
Pagers. For this purpose only. Every store.
A couple of years later, they decided they didn't like the way the overhead paging system worked. Whenever an employee would page overhead for a manager or backup, a loud beep would sound before you could say your piece. That was disruptive. And it truly was. Was the answer to have someone re-program the phones to eliminate the beep, and enact practices that require less overhead paging overall? No. For money-starved, payroll-strapped Borders, the answer was to send about 15-20 walkie units with earpieces (a la Old Navy) that would eliminate overhead paging altogether.
15-20 walkies. Every store. Hundreds of stores.
Fine if your flush, but Borders wasn't. Speaking of flushing, that was the M.O. of shelf merchandising; all of the in-section books had to shelved so that the edges of the spines were flush with the edge of the shelf. We'd get messages during crunch times from Ann Arbor that we be lean and mean; only do what was absolutely necessary; be smart with time and tasks; concentrate on sales. But a day later we'd get a message from the district manager that they would be visiting and that the store should be fully flushed.
Wasted time. Wasted payroll. Inventory sitting in the stockroom because there is not the time or the staff to get it out.
Towards the end, there was a revolving door of executive types, especially in merchandising. Each one wanted to make his or her mark. Which meant new pine tables to replace perfectly fine pine tables. New signage! New colors! New sizes! Which meant new frames! Which they usually got wrong, had to re-do and send again. These new folks weren't from the book business, so New Sidelines! Which anyone with any experience could have told them, "Um, no."
Book inventories were excessive. Hey, if 50 copies of the new Nora Roberts was good, then we'll send 150! It got to a point when every day was a WTF moment.
I could go on and on and on, but I'll stop there. Yes, Amazon surely hurt; yes, the rise of digital certainly hurt. But I'm talking about 2000-2008, before digital. Even societal change is a slice of the pie. But it ain't the whole pie. From the floor level, from the trenches, we could have told the execs in Arbor if they had bothered to ask. Which they never did.
Borders was just one big money suck. I'm sorry to see 11,000 good people lose their jobs, but the market worked. And I'm glad to see it go.
The Dish 