Blink of An Eye

I knew I had one more post about Borders in me, but I hadn’t expected that R.E.M. would be the thing to bring it to the surface. If you’d asked me about 15 years ago that the demise of R.E.M. would be announced within days of the final closing of Borders, I would have been sure that both events were a lot more than 15 years away. I'm not implying any particular connection here, but what links the two things in my mind is that, when I went to my local Borders during the closing sale, I noticed that they seemed to have about 100 copies of the most recent R.E.M. album on the racks. That combined with a seemingly similar number of the Irish group Anuna's Christmas album and a collection of posthumous recordings by Michael Jackson suggests that a lack of buying acumen in recent years was at least one key driver of the company's demise. Having learned recently that many of their longest tenured buyers, many of them my one-time colleagues, were either pushed out and/or forced to jump by upper management (doubtless with the shameful complicity of a worthless HR department) only adds to this feeling.

Of course, it goes beyond that change, however much it reflected a sea change in a corporate culture that once valued individual effort even if it didn’t always recognize it as much as it shold have been. Listening to a friend who worked for Borders during the last several years, it’s clear that the problems go beyond any one individual’s decisions. Whereas the company once customized inventories to reflect the interests of their market, by most indications this philosophy had gone out the window in recent years dovetailing with an equally dubious approach to merchandising. A case in point my friend observed was the Borders in Madison, Wisconsin – one of Borders’ oldest stores in one of the most liberal-leaning markets in the country. So, of course, they’re merchandising right-wing oriented best-sellers almost certainly guaranteed to alienate the customer base they’d built up over many years of hard work.

My friend also pointed to some less-discussed elements of the collapse such as the bad real-estate decisions that ultimately dictated closing stores with strong sales and the increased focus on discounts via the Borders Rewards program. As someone who used those coupons, it would be hypocritical for me to say too much about that, but the overall focus on discounted merchandise was clearly another example of the rot that took hold.  

After leaving Borders, I eventually went to work for a video company that sold to Borders. This meant that in addition to now being on the other side of the table from my former co-workers, I remained an interested observer. The last time I went to Borders HQ in Ann Arbor was February 2007, which seemed to be before the rot took hold in earnest (i.e. there were still some knowledgeable buyers there. Not too long after that, I noticed something at my local store that epitomized their problem. There was a display table full of deeply discounted movies near the registers. Doing the math about likely wholesale costs and studio marketing support for those titles compared to the boxed sets we sold of things like BBC mini-series (i.e. things that clearly fit the "Borders customer" we used to hear about so much when I worked there), I realized they needed to sell something like 6-8 copies of any of those $7.99 movies to have the same profit margin as one copy of a boxed set. In short, it was clear that they were working from the discount store playbook, trading the depth of selection that had distinguished Borders for futile attempts at driving sales volume. In a way, though, it was worse than becoming a discount store, because Borders could never fully commit to the approach. By attempting to straddle the line between high-end and discount store, Borders (or at least its management) not only divested the company of what had made it special they also made it irrelevant. And that, as much as the rise of e-books and digital downloads or the ongoing economic downturn, is what made Borders a prime candidate for the fate that just unfolded for it. Needless to say, there should have been a different ending but there was no one left with both the power and the vision to write it.