Borders: A Reflection, Critique, and Lament

Today I found out that Borders has finally fallen on its face, and won't be getting up. They filed for bankruptcy, didn't find a buyer, and now they're liquidating and closing up all their remaining locations. It's sad really. I've had a love/hate relationship with them, as a customer and a former employee.

I worked for Borders last summer, when they opened a store in my area. It was probably a "strategic" powerplay to boost profits, but in hindsight even applying to work there was like hopping aboard a sinking ship. Still, I was desperate, and it was better than working in a movie theater - I guess. I was hired for the "sort" period, or the three weeks prior to the opening where we got everything set up. We went through the whole process, from getting the boxes off the truck to getting them on the shelves, to setting up displays and putting up signs. We also went through extensive training sessions that most Borders employees don't normally get to experience, so I definitely felt lucky. Plus we worked lots of hours, including lots of overtime, so despite the minimum hourly wage we managed to make quite a bit of money, which almost made up for the exhausting, almost back-breaking labor of sorting and hauling books around the store. We also bonded pretty well, and I managed to make friends. It wasn't preferable to sitting on my ass all day, but it did me some good in the long run.

However, they made it clear to us that we weren't guaranteed jobs once the store opened. Knowing this, I showed as much enthusiasm as humanly possible and worked as hard as I could - most of the time (the buckets full of candy they put out for us definitely helped). And it paid off, because I did get a few shifts a week once the store opened. All in all, it wasn't a bad place to work. It wasn't normally busy, and they made me a "magazine girl" which meant spending a good amount of time hiding from the customers in the back room. I liked the hourly rotation, so you weren't necessarily in one spot for your entire shift. I also liked that they didn't make us wear a uniform, they even let us wear jeans to work. Maybe I took too many liberties with the relaxed dress code, although if my outfits were inappropriate I kinda wish someone had told me.

It was retail, and retail is never paradise. I remember people giving me crap for not having exactly what they wanted, especially if they'd waited to the last minute to get their kids' summer reading the day before they left for camp or vacation. Rude people would bark book titles at me, or toss their money across the counter rather than hand it to me. Piggy customers would leave unwanted merchandise anywhere, compelling us to do recovery work, and parents couldn't be bothered to make their kids clean up after themselves. I remember one lady expected me to help her find obscure movies after I'd swiped out for the day and taken off my name tag. People would get huffy with me if I didn't immediately know exactly where something was.

However, what really I didn't like was the constant pressure to push products, get people to sign up for the rewards card, and "pimp out" an eReader that, frankly, no one wanted because it was total crap compared to the Nook and Kindle. When we didn't get enough card signups, we'd be at risk for losing hours or getting fired. When sales were down, it was our fault. I get that we were sales associates, but I really think that means organizing merchandise and helping people find stuff, not getting in people's faces about buying more crap. We are in a recession, after all. If they really wanted us to actively sell products, they should have offered commission on top of our slave wages. Corporate put the responsibility of the store's success on us, rather than take the responsibility themselves.

I think there was more that could have been done, for one thing they could have put out a better Kobo eReader. Yes, the models were relatively affordable, but I think they would have sold more if they had at least one model that was comparable to the Nook or Kindle, and the Kobo wasn't even advertised so I wonder if people even knew it existed. I also think they needed to re-vamp the Borders Rewards system, not just add Borders Plus but actually improve the free program, and in doing so address the reasons why people didn't want to sign up, rather than just expecting the cashiers to be relentless about it when really they just want to move the line along before people started to get too cranky about waiting. I'll be honest, I skipped a few "lines" when things were busy, and I also got the feeling most people just wanted to pay for their crap and leave.

If a store isn't doing well, the answer is not to figuratively whip the employees and blame them for the failure, corporate has to figure out what they could be doing better, or doing differently.

People say that this is to be expected, since people are moving to eReaders and downloaded books, and aren't going to bookstores anymore. That Borders was failing for the same reason record stores have been going under. Others bemoan that this is because people don't read anymore. Maybe people don't read as much as people did in the 50's and 60's when there weren't as many TV channels, and no video game consoles, iPods, or computers - certainly no internet. But I don't think reading and literacy are necessarily dead. Perhaps book sales went down so much because of the recession, and people decided they didn't want to buy every book they wanted to read, and that borrowing books from the library was better.

I didn't necessarily prefer one store over the other in the Borders vs. Barnes and Noble debate, before working there I was neutral and really just went with whatever was closer. Working for Borders made me a tad biased towards the place, especially since I actually had a Borders Rewards card and was getting weekly coupons that gave me a better discount on books than the Barnes and Noble card could have given me. Borders became a familiar environment for me, and Barnes and Noble felt like the enemy enterprise. I even worked for a B&N-owned college bookstore after Borders, and the experience was so bad it's actually made me dislike the Barnes and Noble corporation just a teeny bit. The only thing Barnes and Noble had over Borders, at least for me, was that it had a better selection of gender studies books. However, the Borders I worked for had a fantastic manga and graphic novel section, so I had to give it points for that.

Though I was laid off from my job at Borders about a month after the store's grand opening (they had me train a co-worker on magazines, cut my hours to zero, and never gave me a firm answer as to why I wasn't good enough), I will miss the place. It was a nice spot to hang out at when I was waiting for a table at a nearby restaurant, or killing time before a movie, or just in the area shopping and needed a spot to rest for a bit. I could go in, pluck a magazine, and sit down and read for a bit. I could go in with my friends and hang out. You could browse for a while and not get bored because there was so much to look at. They even had a public bathroom which was fantastic. I get that letting people just chill there probably didn't help profits much, and that even if that location did well it wouldn't have been enough to save the company. But I liked having it there, and I'll be sad to see it go.