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The dumbing down of Borders
You leave the country for a few weeks and you come back to ruin. I've visited two Borders stores since my return and both have done away with their new books tables. In one case the table is still there but has about one-quarter as many books on it if that. The very best-selling books now get four to six piles on the table -- or more -- rather than leaving space for a greater number of titles with one stack a piece. The front of the store offers many more paperback books and many more bestsellers that have been doing well for months. Many bookshelves are gone altogether and replaced with non-book, non-CD, non-DVD items, such as expensive writing journals and gift cards. It's much more like a Barnes and Noble.
In sum, the front of a Borders store no longer produces much information about the new titles on the market and it is no longer a good place for the well-informed to browse. I've yet to compare what's stocked on the shelves but I am not hopeful about the trend. It's hard to believe that the front of the store is the only site of ruin.
On the brighter side, maybe Borders Magic Shelf will prove of use. But check it out here -- so far it doesn't compare to browsing a well-stocked new books table nor for that matter Amazon.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on June 8, 2008 at 02:55 PM in Books | Permalink
Comments
"it is no longer a good place for the well-informed to browse"
I expect the number of complaints to be small.
Posted by: Commenterlein at Jun 8, 2008 3:13:59 PM
It's not just Borders, it's retail in general.
I'm pretty much completely given up on shopping retail at all except for groceries, and the Apple Store.
What I find is that every time I want something, and look into the particular item I want online, that either:
a) It can't be had at retail at all
b) Retail wants almost twice as much for it.
Case in point... I've been trying to find a sunshine yellow vase. I've looked in a number of retail establishments for such an item, no dice. Five minutes googling and I found *exactly* what I was looking for, and ordered it.
I suspect that as more discerning shoppers turn away from retail and toward simply buying everything online (due to the effect noted above), retail is catering less and less to those discerning shoppers (who are no longer it's customers), thus hastening their flight.
Interestingly, a similar phenomena seems to be taking place with television as brighter folks increasingly don't watch it at all (none of my acquaintances even own one). The demographic the media reaches is getting dumber and dumber and as a result the programming is skewing dumber and dumber which further causes flight of brighter audiences.
We can call it the Retail/TV death spiral if you'd like.
Posted by: quadrupole at Jun 8, 2008 3:17:32 PM
I agree, borders are dumb!
They're nothing but a social barrier hindering the global economy from reaching efficient political (Tiebout) and labor market equilibria.
And the bookstore sucks too - they sell their items for way too much. All that store is good for is to see what I should order from their online competitors.
Posted by: Jesse Zinn at Jun 8, 2008 3:25:51 PM
There's lots of "smart" TV shows, e.g. The Office, Weeds.
Posted by: Andy at Jun 8, 2008 3:46:12 PM
According to the business pages, Borders recently sold its Australian stores because they were the most profitable internationally.
Do you sense the company might be a tad disfunctional?
(Annoyingly, the company that bought the stores recently began charging publishers for shelf space)
Posted by: Richard Green at Jun 8, 2008 4:22:33 PM
According to the business pages, Borders recently sold its Australian stores because they were the most profitable internationally.
Do you sense the company might be a tad disfunctional?
One assumes they did that because those were stores they could actually get money for. Borders is in deep trouble and if not buyer for the company turns up, bankruptcy may not be far off.
Posted by: Slocum at Jun 8, 2008 4:35:19 PM
Maybe it has to do with Barnes & Noble considering a bid for Borders?
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080521/bs_nm/borders_barnesandnoble_dc
Posted by: Andy at Jun 8, 2008 4:50:39 PM
I don't understand why B&N would buy Borders when their stores are often located so close to each other (at least in my experience). I have heard from numerous people that Borders is on the verge of going under though, so they need to do something.
Posted by: effay at Jun 8, 2008 4:55:17 PM
I had noticed that the Borders at 18th and L streets in Washington had replaced its new books table with an expanded Father's Day display, but had hoped that that was temporary. Your post leads me to the unfortunate conclusion that it's likely a permanent change. I bought quite a few books I hadn't planned on buying after having found them on the new books table. I'm likely to buy fewer books serendipitously (or at least from Borders, anyway)as a result of this change.
Posted by: John D. at Jun 8, 2008 5:00:51 PM
I think that "broadcast" TV may be getting dumber, but if you include cable TV shows, I think we're living in a golden age of television. No other medium can support the rich storylines and complex characters featured in these shows:
The Wire
Dexter
The Sopranos
Rome
Weeds
Big Love
Battlestar Galactica
Deadwood
Carnivale
South Park
Now, not all of those shows are successful, and some have significant flaws. But I would argue that they are some of the best shows that have ever existed. And given their complex plots extending over many seasons, I think they must, of necessity, appeal to a fairly bright audience.
Posted by: Christopher Rasch at Jun 8, 2008 5:29:23 PM
For some years I patronized an online vendor who tried to recreate the front table of a good academic bookstore: the proprietor was a highly knowledgeable former owner of a legendary real bookstore, wrote his own reviews, and assembled monthly lists of the newest and coolest. Sadly, it went under. But it's possible to set up your own virtual bookstore using Amazon's systems, no? Is someone already doing this? This would let you unbundle the expertise of the kind of person who knows publishing and tracks multiple areas.
Posted by: Colin Danby at Jun 8, 2008 5:48:09 PM
It's simple: Amazon owns the "long tail". It's hard to see who can dislodge them. Brick and mortar bookstores need to scramble out of their way and try something else.
In principle, there's no reason why a "sell a lot of only a few different books" strategy couldn't work for Borders. After all, Wal-Mart sells an awful lot of books. Still, Borders does seem to be in a spot of trouble.
Posted by: at Jun 8, 2008 5:57:56 PM
Colin,
The virtual bookstore you describe could not really survive. Too labor intensive, not enough revenue. Ask Tyler how much he makes from his Amazon links at MR; I have no inside information, but confidently predict it's a lot lower than you might expect.
The analogy that comes to mind is: Amazon is the "Wikipedia" to your bookseller friend's "Encyclopedia Brittanica". Handcrafted expertise gives way to crowdsourcing. Automated cybernetic machinery crushes the artisans, sort of an online version of the industrial revolution.
Posted by: at Jun 8, 2008 6:22:51 PM
It's not just the front of the store -- Borders' latest plan involves reducing the number of different titles in the stores significantly, with more titles on the shelves "face out".
I live about five miles from their headquarters, and the local paper has been covering their many problems in detail....
Posted by: Sol at Jun 8, 2008 6:29:07 PM
Unfortunately they are on their way out of business. They are on life support.
I say unfortunate because they were giving B&N enough competition to bring books to the suburbs. If anyone lived in the suburbs prior to B&N / Borders expansions in the late 80's, early 90's -- there was really nothing. There were a lot of really bad small bookstores. The 'Shop Around the Corner' stores sucked, with a few exceptions. Yea, the university towns had some nice stores and every city had one or two (maybe). Overall, you couldn't buy books except bestsellers. B&N may not be as good as the best older Borders, but it is pretty good.
The cd/dvd sections of the business are going to be gone soon enough.
The decade or so that Borders was a viable presence was pretty brief, and people voted with their dollars.
I find nostalgia involving retail interesting. Stuff gets killed off all the time.
Posted by: ziggurat at Jun 8, 2008 6:37:23 PM
i guess this is an example of creative destruction.The money wasted in buying bookstores that no one visit to buy , but for browsing , will be invested in another biz.So where is the problem?
Posted by: karl at Jun 8, 2008 6:52:47 PM
At least Tyler still has a Borders. Ours was defeated by the B&N. In other cities Borders conquered.
Too bad B&N doesn't care what it has on the shelves. I suggest people who care about their favorite subject areas re-shelve brainless titles spine in.
Is it possible the rise of retail bookstores such as Borders and Barnes and Noble is due to consumers demand for rotten content they couldn't find on the shelves of their libraries?
Posted by: Bob Calder at Jun 8, 2008 7:00:19 PM
Borders is in trouble; one way to try to save cash is to keep less inventory and try to display it "creatively".
Retail doesn't last forever. In 35 years ago, Sears was by far the largest U.S. retailer and Wal-mart was a discounter who put their stores all out in the sticks because there was less competition.
At that point, Borders was just opening their first store in Ann Arbor.
Posted by: zbicyclist at Jun 8, 2008 7:07:24 PM
So what's the Amazon cut for a referred book sale?
Posted by: Colin Danby at Jun 8, 2008 7:46:07 PM
Brick and mortar stores primarily for new books is a losing proposition. The used book store that is also an online inventory and fulfillment satellite is a workable model. But they're only workable in the framework of Mom and Pop economies -- so the trend should be toward more atomization with greater latency.
Posted by: SheetWise at Jun 9, 2008 2:18:26 AM
Inline with what many of said, I think Chris Anderson would point this out as being a good case of the head of the power curve... Borders was never able to be a long tail store in physical form, and now it seems that they're consolidating focus even more... which is too bad, because I like them much, much better than B&N.
Posted by: Ben at Jun 9, 2008 7:30:02 AM
Borders is an interesting case study. At present I am including under a file heading of "companies that had something they felt was more pressing than there business".
I used to enjoy Borders and encourage others to do the same. Until...
I knew something was wrong, they opened a "controversial" in a potential lucrative market, near a number of rarefied book sellers, including a feminist book store that was worried. But right from the get go, upon visiting the store, one realized the local clientèle was "too intelligent" for the company. Since then the store has experienced a downward trend in everything from it's music offerings to it's books.
It's like walking into a walmart placed in a nordstrom neighborhood. The store remains open, remains dumbed down, and remains CLEARLY unprofitable, and even incredibly unpopular with the local college kids (a major university is right down the way, and I have heard, via the local coffee shop grapevines, working there to working at Mick D's).
The location is excellent, the hours are excellent, the design of the building, excellent, but the content, book and media selling, is more geared to an average IQ and interest much, much lower than the actual neighborhood clientile.
Why? If I wanted to fail in business, this is exactly the kind of store I would open. Presumbly they are not in it to lose. So what is happening. Really happening.
The market is there, as one freind of mine put it, this neighborhood has something great, it is primed for extreme hedonism, money is flowing, property is (or at least was last month) still selling, heavy influx of literate consumers into the neighborhood, nearly unlimited access for a company like borders to cash in, but they are running away from their own business.
Why?
I'd love to know what's in the CEO's brain.
I'd love to read some research along the lines of Alex's post "Wisdom of Whores".
Border seems to be in the process of deliberately losing profitablity, can't help but wonder if it is a situation which Robin (I believe) referenced once, concerning sailing "back in the day", when if an undercrewman kept an accureate log, even if that log could save them from being lost, risked death by revealing it's existence.
Why is Borders trying to fail?
Posted by: Lawrence at Jun 9, 2008 1:11:30 PM
One of the early signs of trouble at Borders was when they reduced or eliminated the comfortable chairs. This didn't make me buy more books (instead of reading them there); it did make me visit the store less frequently.
Posted by: Paul F. Dietz at Jun 9, 2008 10:21:36 PM
"Magic Shelf™ Technology - This feature allows customers to view book, music and movie titles on an actual shelf like you would in an actual store."
I recall Howard Roark decrying the fact that people develop new materials just to torture them to make buildings look like antiquity.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but is economics not the goal of generalizing financial matters? You can generalize about more and more specific things, but still, the goal is to generalize. Without generalization there can be no prediction of the outcome of similar patterns and no learning vicariously by reading the lessons learned by other people.
If Tyler wants a book store tailored to his needs, he has in store a life of disappointment. He may have the most crafted book selection strategy out there. But, that also puts him unique position to be the guy who builds the website to automate and personalize this. And, I don't think it would look like a table piled with books.
Posted by: Andrew at Jun 10, 2008 4:36:22 AM
You can buy books for less money at Amazon.com. Borders has to be more of a lifestyle destination if it's to survive.
Posted by: Half Sigma at Jun 10, 2008 12:02:46 PM
The only reason to visit Borders was the off chance that one might encounter an unknown book, CD or DVD on the shelves. In addition to the book cutbacks you mention, they have shrunk the amount of floor and shelf space given to deep catalogue stock of CDs and DVDs. It's pretty much down to the best-sellers in both categories. So, no oddball import pop CDs, no exhaustive supplies of classical mainstays (e.g., don't try to fill in your Glenn Gould collection by visiting the store), no obscure film noir DVDs, etc., etc. One very telling sign is that they don't automatically order every new Criterion release, something we used to be able to count on. Amazingly, then, you can't get the terrific new DVD of "The Red Balloon" at Borders, one of the few Criterion releases guaranteed to please the whole family. As for books, forget looking for most of the recent poetry releases, or the latest volumes in the University of Chicago's Collected Works of F.A. Hayek.
Posted by: Kurt Luchs at Jun 11, 2008 10:50:13 PM
Ugh, I'm so late to this conversation, I know, but it's so nice to know that I'm not alone in my Borders horror. I'd hoped the change was temporary and that they would soon bring back the new books tables, but alas everytime I go in there it seems worse.
And while I was happy for Borders when they got their own site, I've found that I don't like browsing on there at all. The lack of information they provide on the books is appalling.
Posted by: J.S. Peyton at Aug 7, 2008 2:20:14 PM
