How Borders was "Maked"

The former northeast side Borders at River Crossing Indianapolis, where I worked on and off for the last 15 years, was the ultimate “third place.” You’re probably familiar with the meaning of this term, even if you're not familiar with the term itself. It was coined in the late 80s to define a space outside work and home that provides a free platform for public interaction.

The Borders café was particularly inviting with its wide tile floor, high ceiling, and plentiful seating. It attracted a diverse clientele; an ESL group met almost daily at their favorite table caddy corner to the service counter. There was also a women’s discussion group that attracted quite a few foreigners and newly naturalized citizens. These women used the open-ended discussion format of their meetings as an opportunity to improve their English skills and to express their mostly left-leaning political viewpoints (often this particular group was too large for the café and met elsewhere in the store) while the Indy Libertarians turbocharged their monthly meetups with liberal doses of espresso.

But maybe you just came to Borders to relax. And you could’ve done so while reading any of your favorite books or periodicals (you didn’t have to pay just for browsing) or the text on your laptop. (Free wireless was also available in the store.) You could’ve hung out all day if you wanted while drinking your favorite espresso-based drink. The River Crossing Borders, in particular, was a place that you might have appreciated for its relaxed ambiance. It was, in essence, a private-sector-supported public square. No other bookstore came close in providing such a service to northeast side Indianapolis—a built-up area of strip malls, apartment complexes, and office parks.  There’s just not a lot in this area in the way of parks and other types of public spaces where people can congregate. This is one reason, I think, that the River Crossing Borders was such a popular hangout.

Among the regulars were some unforgettable slacker characters. One guy in particular spent many hours wandering the shelves and reading business books. When he found a particular concept particularly enlightening, he usually felt the need to share it with a Borders employee. I recall the evening when he came across Clutch by Paul Sullivan. This book, which describes the qualities necessary to avoid being a klutz in a pressure situation, nearly made his eyes pop out.

I was something of a klutz for staying so long. Borders was both my path of least resistance and my safety net when other jobs didn’t work out for me. There were, believe it or not, some advantages to working in a bookstore (although my paycheck was not one of them). I didn’t take my work home with me, for one thing. Largely because of this, I had been able to pursue a moderately successful side-career in freelance writing and editing. And lately, I had found something of a niche at Borders fulfilling corporate and school orders. Somewhat quixotically, I had thought of this position as a stepping-stone to some administrative job somewhere that paid a living wage.

When my letter of separation came on March 17, 2011 signed "Sincerely, Human Resources," it wasn’t a total shock. Borders Group Inc. was already liquidating two of its Indy-area stores—the Carmel and the Downtown locations—and this liquidation announcement came in February 2011 simultaneously with the declaration of Chapter 11 bankruptcy. A third of stores nationwide were also slated for liquidation at this time. My fellow employees at River Crossing had been relieved to escape the first round of store closings; we didn’t think that we were headed towards the same downward spiral (At the time of this writing, the Castleton, Noblesville, and Greenwood Borders stores are open and are not in liquidation mode.) But the statistics weren’t on our side; most corporate Chapter 11 bankruptcies end badly. It’s no comfort to me that thousands of Borders employees—booksellers, supervisors, and managers alike—now find themselves similarly cast adrift in the rough waters of the current economy.

In retrospect, you can chart the decline of Borders back to more than a decade ago when Amazon shipped its first book. In 2001 Borders scrapped its own online book-ordering site and teamed up with Amazon only to wind up—surprise!—getting the short end of the stick.

Borders finally detached from Amazon in May, 2008.  The newly revamped Borders.com was launched a month later.  Borders couldn't compete with Amazon on pricing, but Amazon didn't have a brick and mortar presence. The thinking at the store level, at the time, was that the company could turn this presence into an advantage in the online world (despite a very late start) by luring store customers to order online with incentives like deep discount coupons and free shipping.

Not long after the Borders.com launch, Ron Marshall became CEO.  The most generous thing you could say about Marshall is that he seemed very dedicated to his misguided ideas.  His most notorious mandate to store level employees was to accost customers with a pre-selected slate of books chosen at the corporate level—"make books"—and try to hawk them. Effectively, he attempted to turn the ranks of Borders associates into an army of hucksters. I mean, wouldn’t you feel a little weird being approached by a barely post-adolescent bookseller enthusiastically recommending Kathryn Stockett’s The Help to you as if he’d actually read it? And believe me, this kind of thing happened all the time. I know, because I was also forced to hawk books I hadn’t read, and had no intention of reading.

The setting for all this, you may recall, was the tail end of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Most people basically stopped buying books (at least at retail) during that time. As a result, Borders Group Inc. started to accumulate massive debts with publishers.

At the same time there was a revolution going on; the e-book revolution that is, led by Amazon’s Kindle. This was yet another tectonic shift in bookselling for which Borders was utterly unprepared. The fact that you could download your books in a few seconds for a modest price, without going to a bookstore and paying retail—without even going to your mailbox for product ordered online—meant, essentially, that the revenue lost during the Great Recession, as it’s now called, could never be regained by Borders no matter how many "make books" were designated. And while Borders associates were still accosting customers with said books, and while Borders corporate was trying to work out the kinks in the Borders.com website, Barnes & Noble unveiled its Nook Reader. This was in October 2009.

Borders jumped in too late in this game—almost a year later—with a selection of e-reader products. Most of these did not come close to the Nook (let alone the Kindle), in terms of ease of use and versatility. Even the ones that offered a comparable alternative could not compete because they hadn’t been branded effectively.

When Ron Marshall unceremoniously left the company in January 2010, after only a year in that position, the "make book" program stopped. Things didn’t really get much better, though, under the reign of the next CEO Mike Edwards. By this point there was little he could do except cut costs. The really important decisions had already been maked, as it were. One of Mike Edwards’ cost cutting solutions was to get rid of outsourced cleaning crews in the stores and get booksellers to scrub toilets. But that was before he decided that declaring Chapter 11 was a better solution to scrubbing away a billion or so dollars in debt that roughly equaled, in early 2011, the company’s assets.

Still, this company, mismanaged though it was, had legions of loyal customers. Throughout its history—from its beginnings in Ann Arbor in the mid-Seventies up to the present—Borders managed to maintain a loyal clientele that appreciated the bookstore for its wide selection as well as its inviting ambiance. Until fairly recently, Borders stores had a selection—not just in books but also CDs and DVDs—that was far superior to what you’d usually find at B&N. The problem was that these loyal customers didn’t want to pay full price for their books. They wanted to hang out all day at Borders while buying their books at Amazon. Borders tried to cater to such customers with its Borders Rewards Plus loyalty program and an avalanche of email coupons. But such incentives cut the profit margin to less than zero.

During the liquidation sale that lasted from late March to early May, many customers expressed their sadness to me, as if they were losing an old friend (while buying books at progressively greater discounts as the sale neared the end). And in fact, there were lots of friendships made between booksellers—many of whom were walking encyclopedias of genre literature and popular media—and customers. It’s this severing of contact that was one of the most painful things for many of us.

And yet, there’s something larger at stake here than just the failure of one certain bookstore, or of a certain bookstore chain. If it’s a lack of public meeting places in cities like Indy that leads people to congregate in places like Borders, then maybe it’s time to think of possible solutions to this problem. That is to say, if you value the notion of the public square and what it represents, then you—we—need to pay for it somehow. The bookstore-as-public-square model only works, really, if customers are willing to buy their books at retail. The public sector model isn’t faring much better these days. Just consider all the public libraries that are now in jeopardy all across America. In fact, the very idea of public space itself seems to be under assault by a certain sector of the body politic. The Libertarians who used to meet at the River Crossing Borders would probably have a different take on all of this. In the closing of their monthly meeting place, however, they have a glaring example of how the private sector failed them.

(Note: It's now official: Borders Books & Music is now going out of business and all stores are now in liquidation mode.)