This week we found out that Borders will not be restructuring but will be closing. Liquidation will start as early as this Friday. A large business failing is a sad thing. But this one is really going to affect a lot of businesses including the publishing industry which is doing a serious \u201ccircle the wagons\u201d. The fallout of from this will be far reaching. Remember Barnes and Nobel isn\u2019t doing much better.<\/p>\n
Border and I go back to my moving up to New York. I didn\u2019t know about Borders because, at the time, we didn\u2019t have any in Atlanta. Oxford Books had already gone under which was a crying shame in itself. So we had Walden books and B. Daltons and I am not sure about the B. Daltons. There was the Science Fiction and Mystery Bookshop which had most of what I wanted to read.<\/p>\n
Peter introduced me to the local Borders and I thought it was a very nice store. Shortly there after I got a job there in the Children\u2019s department which I really enjoyed. Eventually I moved into management since I had quite a bit of experience between the bookstores and the comic books stores I work at. I took over the caf\u00e9 and worked hard to keep it up and running and under budget. It was hard work but there were a lot of nice people to work with and a majority of the patrons weren\u2019t jerks. <\/p>\n
Borders and I parted ways when I got the job at Del Rey, but it was my go to store for books, music, and movies. If I was in another city, I knew what I could find at the local Borders and the layouts were pretty much the same so I knew my way around the store well enough to be asked at least once, no matter where I was, \u201cDo you work here?\u201d<\/p>\n
I can remember being back in the Borders I had worked at and a couple of the regulars saw me and asked what I had been up to. I told them that I was at Del Rey now they congratulated me but said that they missed the heck out of me at the store because I could find anything if it was in the store. But I digress.<\/p>\n
Time past and I started noticing some changes that didn\u2019t sit well with me. The music selection was getting slimmer and slimmer. DVDs were less diverse. Best Buy rapidly became the place to go to if you wanted something that was more than 6 months old. That a third of the store was now paper goods didn\u2019t fill me with warm fuzzies either. Then I started to notice that there were few new books on the shelves. They could order it for you but it wasn\u2019t just there. I would end up at Barnes and Nobel or Amazon to get what I needed.<\/p>\n
I kept up on the Borders situation through Publishers Weekly and the news was getting worse and worse. I saw the handwriting on the wall Christmas of last year when I went to my local Borders and couldn\u2019t get even a 1\/3 of what I was looking for. Borders tried to change but really didn\u2019t want to change. They always seem to be behind the trends rather than in front of them which they were at one point.<\/p>\n
I feel sorry for my friends who are out of jobs and the patrons who no longer have a local bookstore because Borders was the local bookstore. The publishers are out an entire chain which must have the numbers guys eating a lot of Tums. <\/p>\n
And I am sorry for all the readers and writers out there. Good places to find books are becoming harder to find. So support your local bookshop especially if it is independently owned.<\/p>\n
I am grateful for my time at Borders.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This week we found out that Borders will not be restructuring but will be closing. Liquidation will start as early as this Friday. A large business failing is a sad thing. But this one is really going to affect a lot of businesses including the publishing industry which is doing a serious \u201ccircle the wagons\u201d. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kathwp.malibulist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kathwp.malibulist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kathwp.malibulist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kathwp.malibulist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kathwp.malibulist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3196"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kathwp.malibulist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3196\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kathwp.malibulist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kathwp.malibulist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kathwp.malibulist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}