Schrödinger's Lamb

Though I'd known about C-SPAN for many years, I had never really thought of the channel having a founder until I met Brian Lamb while I was helping to get a Borders in Virginia ready to open. At the time, Lamb was a member of Borders' board of directors, and as the many years he hosted Booknotes on the channel indicate he was very much a book lover. In contrast to many of his fellow Cable TV pioneers in the late 1970s, Lamb stands out for his embrace of the value of cable TV to the public than for any personal financial value gained in the process.

In that light, the news that Lamb is stepping down as C-SPAN's chief executive seems all the more the end of an era in today's highly consolidated profits-above-all media environment. There's a case to be made that the advent of C-SPAN and the opportunities for self-promotional speeches it's given legislators has contributed to the poisoning of political speech, but that's very unfair to Lamb whose motives by all indications were entirely noble.

As anyone who's ever seen a reality show knows, people tend to act differently when they know the camera is on them, and in theory our legislators should know better than to overindulge themselves. That they frequently don't is hardly Lamb's fault. Moreover, it ignores the very fundamental premise on which C-SPAN is founded.As he himself put it, “Those meetings are paid for by we, the taxpayers. People should be able to see what [the elected officials] look like, what the buildings look like, what language they’re using.” Whatever impact observation might have on our experiments in democracy, Lamb is absolutely right about that.

When Moore Is Less

A few weeks ago, Michael Moore made a speaking appearance at the Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor across the street from what used to be Borders' flagship store, aka Store #001 for old Borders folk. As anyone who's seen Moore's film The Big One knows, Moore has a complicated history with Borders and that certainly came through in his remarks.

I wish I could say I was surprised that Moore trotted out the same old nonsense about how Borders sought to "eliminate the independent bookstore." That canard was tired back in the mid-90s when I worked for Borders and hasn't improved with age. At its peak, Borders sought to be the best bookstore in America in terms of selection and service. If that service involved calling the local bookstore down the street to see if they had what a customer wanted, that was part of the deal.

Like many people, Moore confuses coincidence and correlation. In Moore's view, the fact that independent book and music stores went out of business in markets where Borders opened automatically means that Borders somehow willed their demise.

This reductive view ignores that in many places those stores thrived and sometimes even expanded - at least until the rise of Amazon (but that's another store). More significantly, it fails to recognize that the stores that succeeded did so because they evolved to meet their customers' needs, while those that didn't do so are the ones that failed. This should be totally obvious, even to someone with an agenda like Moore, because it's ultimately the same principle that defined Borders' collapse.

I've enjoyed some of Moore's films and agree with him on many things. As a filmmaker and social commentator, though, he's a one-trick pony, foregoing any attempt at a nuanced debate in favor of bludgeoning. Unfortunately, that particular trick isn't getting any better with age.

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.

Airlifted Onto the Titanic

Last year, a friend and former co-worker from Borders HQ was one of many people laid off by Borders. I recently learned he'd been rehired at his old job. The fact that something like this happens with someone who worked for the company for over a decade says a lot about why Borders is in the position it's in currently. For his part, my friend said he felt like he'd been airlifted onto the Titanic. In light of today's news that Borders appears headed for liquidation, it's hard to argue with that assessment.

I've said lots about Borders in previous postings, so I'll just add two things. The first is that this certainly isn't the way I imagined things ending for Borders (if I imagined any sort of ending at all) when I first walked into that most amazing book-store in Center City Philadelphia. The second is that when I worked in the stores I did my utmost to help every customer, even if all they could tell me was the color of the book's cover.

Borders of Idiocy - Buzz Edition

Any doubts that the current management of Borders doesn't know what they're doing are further dispelled by the recent announcement that they're attempting to end their deal with Seattle's Best Coffee to operate the in-store cafes in favor of doing it themselves (again). As reported by Bloomberg News, the reason is that Borders feels that operating their own cafes would "generate significant cost savings, and boost cafe profitability." Maybe I'm missing something, but I could swear that cutting costs and boosting profits was the rationale for making the arrangement with Seattle's Best Coffee and ditching some very bright and talented people in the process. For their part, Seattle's Best is trying to block Borders attempt to end the deal, though, I can't help but wonder if it's really a fight worth having. Here again, maybe I'm missing something.

The Number of the Beast (Borders Edition)

Back in the 1990s, the number of the beast when it came to Borders was 10. That was the designation of the Rockville, Maryland store, especially after it moved to White Flint Mall. The store was the top-selling in the entire company for some years and even when it had been surpassed by others was still an amazingly busy and in many ways simply amazing place to shop for many years to come. It's where my wife was working when I first met her, and she's just the most obvious example of the many good friends I made through Borders who worked at "the beast".

All of that made it a little sad to see the doors closed and the sign absent when I walked through White Flint earlier today. As with most Borders, the store had ceased to be an amazing place to shop for books and music (let alone video) some time ago. The closing just made it official.

Thankfully, the closing doesn't mean anything in terms of the friends I've made. I get to keep them and to be honest I think I've gotten the better part of the deal. Sure I miss the employee discount, but the now-routine 40% coupons I get e-mailed from Borders Rewards offset that, and the benefit of Beth, Sean, Michael and all the great people I've come to know through them is beyond measure. Still, it's a shame the management of Borders had to screw things up so badly. Someone should write a book about it.

Bordering on Ridiculous

Since Borders' unsurprising bankruptcy announcement last month, many people have weighed in on where the company went wrong and what the future holds for them and the book business in general. Some of it has been interesting and thoughtful, even in areas where I think the commentators are wrong, but a lot of it has been petty and distasteful. In particular, I'm thinking of the wave of "serves them right because they put so many others out of business" schadenfreude.

At its early-to-mid 90s best, when I had the pleasure of working with some of the brightest people I'll ever know (many of whom remain friends), Borders bridged the gap between chain-store selection and independent store knowledge. At that time at least, Borders didn't set out to destroy anyone's livelihood, they set out to be the best book/music-store they could be. Did stores go out of business after Borders stores opened nearby? Sometimes they did. Sometimes, they expanded as happened with the independent record store a block or so down Lancaster Avenue from my old store in Bryn Mawr shortly after the music department opened.

The reason that Borders' first store in Delaware, which I helped set up twice (long story), did such great business when it opened in November 1994 was because the people living around it were eager for a store with a knowledgeable staff and a good selection. Nothing leading up to that point precluded anyone from opening a good independent store nearby. Borders did what a good businesses are supposed to do, take advantage of an opportunity to give people what they want (or need, if you think of books and music the way I do). That's what Borders did and did well through the mid-90s. What they did the past decade is a different story, but it doesn't invalidate the benefit to the many people who found books, music and moves they never might have experienced if Borders hadn't helped connect them.

"I Love It When You Talk Retro"or "Do You Sell Books Here?"

Anyone walking into a Borders these days who didn't know the company's history could be forgiven for wondering if they actually still sell books. Even among the creeping clutter of boardgames and cell-phone cases, obviously on some elementary level they do. In the bigger sense of helping a customer find something they hadn't realized they wanted, though, it isn't something I expect to find at a Borders any more.

With that in mind, it was with great surprise that more than a decade after leaving Borders I was on the receiving end of actual book-selling. Admittedly, it was at the registers when it was too late for me to investigate the very sensible suggestion, but it was the most encouraging thing I've seen at a Borders in years. Amusingly, considering how much the conversation felt like something from a different and somewhat distant time in the company's history, the recommended book was called "I Love It When You Talk Retro".

A quick look at Amazon confirmed that the book does, as the clerk described, discuss the origins of everyday expressions. I was tempted to order it from Amazon, but that would seem wrong in a way, not just from a karma standpoint but also because and it's actually nice to skim through a book before buying. Besides, thanks to the slightly desperate ploy that is Borders Rewards, I have a coupon that will let me get it for about the same price as Amazon.

As for the book-seller herself, I predict she'll either quit out of frustration or get promoted, meaning she'll rarely if ever talk to a non-angry customer. Either way, it's probably more of a loss than anyone in Borders' current management will appreciate.