During the last week of my employment by Borders, I took what I knew would be my final walk through the old Merchandising area on the first floor. The place grew more barren every time I went down there, which I did every now and then, just to see what had changed. I had been located there myself until the company announced that it was closing, and everyone who wasn’t in the initial round of layoffs got moved to higher floors so the liquidators could have a staging area to sell off everything that wasn’t nailed down.
By that last trip through, most of the cubicles had been taken apart, separated into their constituent parts, and placed on pallets to be shrinkwrapped and shipped off to whoever had bought them. I know that the cubicle is a universal symbol for the soul-crushing office job, and there certainly have been plenty of times when I’ve thought that very thing while occupying one, but there’s something sad about seeing them dismantled and moved out, too. The reason for that might be what gets left behind. Because while there were wide, exposed open areas of carpet, the telltale signs of previous habitation were there… every pen that had been dropped behind a filing cabinet and forgotten about was now brought to light again, along with a vague grid of worn spots where thirteen years of wheeled office chairs had rolled and spun in tiny little areas between shelves – and piles -- of books. The place was full of reminders like this, and would be apparent even if I hadn’t been there for all of those thirteen years the building was home to Borders Group.
There were even more touching reminders of what once was lined along the walls of the main hallway. It used to be standard practice for artists who visited the main office to sign a three-foot-by-three-foot placard with their most recent album art on it. Most of them have “Thanks for the support, Borders!” or something like that scrawled across them. Our office was, for many artists just starting out, a major step in their road to achieving their dreams of stardom. And now all those good wishes and gratitude had been pulled down from the walls and stacked for easy viewing. The opportunity afforded to these men and women, not only in our home office and our 400 stores nationwide, is now available for purchase at $100 a square yard.
As I walked out of the building for the last time, as one of the small group kept on to maintain the business through the process of the intellectual property sale (including our website), I resisted the temptation to throw my fist in the air a la Judd Nelson at the end of The Breakfast Club. It might have been the weight of the last box of accumulated stuff that I was carting home. But I did want to do *something*. I wanted to write a sort of tribute, a way to tell a little of the strangeness that occurs when a previous Fortune 500 company finally teeters and falls. Of course, I can only give such a story from my own perspective, but since I was able to hold on longer at the corporate office than most people did, maybe there’s some extra value to it.
Borders was supposed to be forever. My family moved to Ann Arbor in early 1985, and my mother got a job at what was then the Book Inventory Systems warehouse two months later. That business was part of the beginning of the Borders empire, and in 1994 I started my own tenure with the company. My wife followed in 2005, working there for over a year and a half. And now, 26 later, a new period of time is starting where Borders is not part of our lives.
Borders’s homegrown origins destined it to always be the scrappy underdog to larger competitors, and in ways benefitted from that position. The fact that we weren’t the biggest or most business-savvy made us the “serious” bookseller, one that focused on the books instead of the bottom line. Our customers perceived that we became who we were through sheer passion and grit. Even if that wasn’t entirely true, it gave us an extra air of legitimacy. This same company personality trait ultimately caused our downfall. We were late to the game in important areas (online retail being the most prominent example), and were quick to rush into others that we just weren’t ready to handle (international expansion!). In the end, we were too many smaller companies and computer systems strapped together in haste, and no significant change could be made without it adversely affecting the way hundreds of other bits worked.
We were too small, too locally-based, to get as big as we were. And once we did, the CEO shuffle began. A company that large – scratch that, because now we were a *corporation* -- needed a worldly CEO, a real business leader, and we had plenty of those. It’s just that none of them until Mike Edwards (our last), knew how to sell books. In fact, it’s quite clear that some of them didn’t realize there was a difference between books and any other product – one in particular all but announced his ignorance of pop culture by referencing someone named “Britley Spears” three times during an all-hands meeting. But by the time Mr. Edwards came around, there was too much damage control to be done to afford him time to get us back to our core goal, which was to pass on the love of books, one customer and one transaction at a time.
Part of the problem was industry-wide blindness, as well. The proliferation of the Internet in the late ‘90s caused a dip in sales of books that contained information that could be more easily obtained, and be more up to date, on the Internet itself. So what was the first to go? Computer books and travel guides. It was a slow decline, but eventually even sales general non-fiction titles, as well as the high-end university press stuff and textbooks, which had been our high-margin bread and butter, dropped away. I don’t think it’s going to stop there, either. I don’t see physical books containing anything other than fiction within the next ten years. You can look up what you need for free, instead of paying $12 for a paperback written last year that might not have anything else to offer. And even when it comes to novels, folks are crossing over in droves when they realize that ebooks are a faster and ultimately cheaper way to read for fun. I think the collapse of the big bookstore is inevitable, and believe Mike Edwards when he said that Barnes and Noble will be facing a similar situation to ours sooner rather than later.
Okay, so the upper management for the most part was a mess. So what did we do right, down at the personal level? Well, we were able to feed the fire of passionate readers (yes, I know it’s a bad metaphor, but I can’t think of one more apt). We were one of those rare companies that the customer felt was “on their side”, not only providing them with what they wanted, but validating them because we loved it too. And all business operations aside, the people who decided what books to put where, how to arrange and display them, and those that were out on the floor selling them, hardly ever did so without a strong opinion about the product they were working with, good or bad. They knew their stuff, they knew the industry, and lived for it.
What I take heart in, now that Borders is over, is the knowledge that the people who worked there, along with their collective love of the printed word, have been dispersed into the general population. Those good people aren’t going to stop wanting to put the books/music/movies they love into the hands of everyone around them. If you’re lucky enough to have one of them in your circle of friends, you can rest easy in the knowledge that you’re going to have at least one person you can count on to not let a great -- maybe obscure -- work that just might become your favorite pass by unnoticed. In a world of constant information barrage, when you just have to accept that you’re not going to be able to sample 90% of pop culture because it just goes flying by so fast, that’s the most valuable commodity you can have.
