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.
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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.
Yes. Even the past of the online world is already littered with the hollow shells of what were once giants:
CompuServe
AOL
Yahoo
Geocities
MySpace
The internet thrives without regulation, disproves everything big government advocates say about the need for regulating the market, yet still they lust to regulate it.
The last time I visited my local Borders was about 3 years ago, when caught without a book for a last minute gift. I paid 40% more, and stood in line to check out for 20 minutes, with one cashier working and three managers chatting in the corner nearby. I won't miss Borders, but buy books about weekly on Amazon.
And for those of us who will always like the feel of a real book in our hands, and also like not having to worry if it gets wet, there's this new technology:
The wild thing is that even in a down real estate market, it was Borders size that killed it. The bookstore is going the way of the video rental store, and the Borders locations will become American Eagles and TJ Maxx's. The wide aisles and coffee shoppes will be gone, for more retail selling space, and nobody will complain about the lack of service, because nobody expects that in a clothing store
But with all the Borders closing where will all the 20 and 30 somethings with pierced eybrows and all those tattoos work; I mean Starbucks can't hire them all?
The Government Printing Office used to have bookstores in selected cities. Al Gore didn't like the idea. The cost was too prohibitive and revenue from sales were too miserly. Most stores were shut down 20 years ago. GPO publication sales are strictly online. Oddly enough the 1964 Warren Commision Report fetches high prices in the rare book market. Sometimes GPO printed very good series. The 22 volumes of the magnificently edited Letters of Delegates to the Continental Congress 1774-1789 is now out of print and the Naval Documents of the American Revolution are still being crunched out slowly.
I will miss the magazine stands at Borders. I used to buy copies of National Review at Borders as a routine part of my shopping there.
Good article making a general point that always needs reiterating, but -- despite the writing on the wall, that it hasn't been as nimble as Barnes & Noble -- I am going to miss Borders as a good option for book browsing on a lazy Sunday afternoon.
Borders was especially good at aggregating books (written by many authors) published by Hard Case Crime, an excellent imprint that recently had its own issues when mega-publisher Dorchester gave up the mass-market paperback.
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Large bookstores created a rare space in the culture: as public as any library, but privately owned; a place of commerce, but a quiet space, most importantly one where a person could almost literally stumble across new (and old!) ideas, books on subjects that you didn't know would interest you and which would sometimes lead quite happily to an impulse purchase.
That experience hasn't been quite replicated at Amazon or anywhere else online, and really the world described in the book Bowling Alone doesn't need one less place for people with similar interests to gather, if only to find solitary reading material that interests them.
We're not near the beginning of the end -- only MAYBE the end of the beginning, with the rise of the ebook -- but we are looking at technological changes on the scale of the movable printing press.
As a fan of the printed book as an artifact (and sometimes a really admirable work of art) that is permanent -- that PERSISTS, independently of even the changing winds of political correctness -- I hope the ephemeral and ethereal digital document doesn't wholly replace it.
Maybe there's a place still for brick-and-mortor bookstores, at least for signed copies and higher quality limited editions.
One certainly hopes, Lawrence. All this "creative destruction" ultimately works, one supposes--vacuums of demand ultimately get filled--but that's cold comfort while the vacuums last. It's also a problem if the touches of life that make civilization ... well, CIVILIZED, can't sell themselves to consumers at large.
But what can one do? To misappropriate Churchill: capitalism is the world's worst economic system ... except for all the others.
Borders biggest problem is that they became infected by the Kmart way of management during the time they were owned by that myopic fossil. Kmart management was less connected and caring about customers and less efficient than bureaucrats at the DMV. They made sure Borders took on this same world view. Borders never really recovered, neither did Kmart.
I haven't been allowed into my local Borders since 2009. Everytime I was in the store I would find the books by Conservative writers and put them in front of all the Obama is King books. You would look at the Obama shrine and all you would see were books about and written by Conservatives. I was asked to leave - the next time I was asked to leave and not come back. I tried a month or 2 later, they remembered me and stopped me before I could do my work again! Bye Bye Borders...
I am confident that any profit-oriented business would have done the same. I would have tossed you out, if I had been a Borders manager and you did that.
In a certain highly leftist west coast town where I used to live, Borders was the only bookstore that actually carried mainstream conservative books. If it looked like the kind of thing that would be a good seller, it was featured in front, as prominently as anything else likely to sell; otherwise, it was filed alphabetically by author in the appropriate section. If Obama books were more prominent, it was because they were more likely to sell.
Meanwhile, a prominent non-chain bookstore, located down the street, did not carry even prominent conservative books, except on occasion (such as Palin's book) where it was offered in conjunction with some spectacle intended to mock it. No problem; its client would not even know about the existence of most writers at NRO, much less buy one of those books even if it were prominently stacked in front.
I wonder how often, in any bookstore ever, people casually browsed for books that would present some viewpoint? If I want X's partisan opinion on topic Y, then I ask for the book; I don't find it by strolling the lanes. When I stroll, I buy a book on art or music, or how to make furniture out of used beer cans, or something else that strikes my fancy.
Slightly off topic, but I found a hagiography of Che Guevara in the kids section of my local library a few years back. I slipped it in between two bookcases (in a very narrow gap), where it remains to this day.
Amazon.com may have undermined it's own new retail book retailing by allowing third parties to sell their new or used copies of the same books attached to Amazon's new book listings.
I personally love having such ready access to these third party sellers, as I can get "Good" or "Very Good" rated copies of books at a fraction of the cost of a new book even with Amazon's percentage off of retail, even factoring in the $3.99 shipping cost. Several times I have picked up ex-library hardback copies with mylar book covers in "Good" or "Very Good" condition for less than the retail paperback.
Amazon.com has adjusted things so that, if you have Amazon.com Prime, it's rare that you can get a third-party new copy for less once shipping has been included.
Still, the third-party listing capability has to be significantly cutting into Amazon.com's new retail sales. I keeping waiting for this to be discontinued, but I will gladly take advantage of it while it lasts.
I was buying books for decades before the first Borders opened, and I hope to be buying them for a long time still, but I will nonetheless mourn the passing of a good friend.
Anyone care for some irony? It was in the paper today that the totally Republican controlled government in Pennsylvania will have to "take its time" with regard to getting rid of the several hundred state-run liquor stores. The first attempt at such was done by Governor Dick Thornburgh in 1986. Thats NINETEEN ..EIGHTY ...SIX. Talk about a failed business model. But this is your speedy Republican government in action.
Having lived in Pennsylvania for many years, I can testify that the State Store system for wine and liquor and the Distributor system for retail sale of beer is a pure power play.
Many years ago the State took charge of the sale of intoxicants in response to repeal of prohibition and in furtherance of Blue Laws. The system grew, and the unions and entrenched bureaucrats who enjoy that current system have no intention of giving up the comfortable and remunerative life-time jobs they enjoy.
Those entrenched power brokers exert leverage on the politicians. Consumers have no well organized and powerful lobby to convince the legislators that sale of adult beverages in grocery stores and competitive-market specialty retailers would give those consumers lower prices and vastly improved selection and generate fresh tax revenues for the State.
Absurd , but a commentary on state intrusion into the market -- its very hard to expel the government once it gets entrenched. (Obamacare anyone?)
Part of the public justification for the system is that it controls access to alcohol by minors in the State. I can attest that during my college years in Pennsylvania (while underage) the system in no way hindered access. Both inefficient and ineffective.
Absolutely right. The same thing applies to the myriad of state-run/lobby-inspired licensing rules for various professions (such as the hair-braiding story that John Stossel, among others, has profiled recently.)
Ditto, in the case of alcohol, the states which can or cannot accept shipments of, for one example, wine from out of state wineries all due to political pressure by local stores and distributors--as if a vacationer visiting Napa and wanting to have the winery whose goods he sipped ship a box home for him would in any way negatively impact his local store (and might help it when, having acquired a taste for the stuff, he goes there to buy more.)
On the other hand, there were some stories that the key to breaking the logjam in the recent Minnesota gov-vs-legislature budget battle shutdown was the fact that voters might be deprived of alcohol because the staff who renew the monthly sales permits were part of the shutdown. SO...there can be silver linings, however absurdly-based.
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