eion wrote:As a former bookslave at both Borders and B&N (totaling about 6 years experience) I can't say I'm suprised. This has been a LONG time coming. We inside suspected that Borders was in for a long downward spiral when they decided it was better to have Amazon run the website then create one of their own. Our fears were confirmed each time we saw the corporate office cling onto the physical music and movie business and refuse to create their own E-reader. Borders consistently fell behind the learning curve of the book industry and the blame rests squarely with their consistently myopic and overcompensated executives.
I feel very sad for all my friends who still work at Borders (for the time being), and shall be urging each of them to submit a resume to my employer or to people I know.
And now that B&N is left (deservedly so) in control of the brick & morter book business I suspect they will face increased competetion from other retailers and online, and now they'll have no one for their customers to compare them to. I don't much like their future either, but they have a much more long term strategy, and have been buying up lots of small publishers and their catalogs to add to their inventory, so their future is much brighter.
Thank god I got out over a year ago and have had time to settle into my new career.
I worked for the company from Oct 2000 to Sep 2003. The first year and a half was the most fun I had working anywhere, and that's accounting for the fact that the pay was only slightly better than at Walmart or Target. Not only was it nice to work around intelligent bookworms, but being close to TCU meant the place was full of insanely hot coeds (employees and customers) and being one of the few straight males in the building (and the only one who wasn't (a) married (b) over 60 and (c) a creepy douche nozzle) made it a VERY pleasant work environment in spite of my beastly appearance and uncouth nature earning me the title of Pet Knuckledragger. It was pleasant for me anyway.
In late January/early February 2001 word from the corporate office was that the mid-level employees would have to either be reduced in pay and benefits to the same level as new hires or leave. That would leave two or three hopelessly overworked managers per store, and new hires trying to do the work of experienced and motivated people who were just told to fuck off. I remember the night we had the meeting where the bigwig came from Ann Arbor to tell us how wonderful this was going to be. It was also the night I nearly croaked from some sort of stomach virus, but attendance was mandatory.
When the bigwig popped a tape into the VCR where the president of the company gave us the same bullshit speech and in a grating monotone, I was sweating not bullets, but artillery rounds. When the president mentioned that loathsome, smarmy book
Who Moved My Cheese? I raced to the men's room and spent the next half hour alternating between projectile vomit and diarrhea, followed by a half hour of silence when The Lolaphilologist* knocked on the door and asked if I needed an ambulance. I didn't and when I staggered back into the meeting room looking like a week-old cadaver -only not as healthy- I got a round of applause because my diseased digestive tract expressed what everyone else was thinking.
The point of this story is that I predicted then and there that in several years Borders would be out of business. Customers who already know what they want will go to Amazon. Those who just want bestsellers will go to Costco, Sam's Club, supermarkets, drug stores and other chains better suited for moving books, music and movies in volume. The one thing Borders had going for it was a large number of employees who could sell the shit out of merchandise that wasn't necessarily on the bestseller lists, and a wider selection of same. There's room for ONE chain that caters to those wanting "just the hits" and that room belongs to B&N and there's no way Borders was going to compete with, let alone supplant them.
*The Lolaphilologist is an amazing woman I worked with back then and we've been friends ever since: writer, actress, opera singer, librarian, script supervisor -a real Renaissance woman. Oh, and she's hot as hell, too (think of Cate Blanchett's face with Laetitia Casta's bod). She had
a concise Amazon review on why
Who Moved My Cheese? was such a noisome book, and why it was so popular among corporate schmucks hell bent on screwing employees in a passive-aggressive manner. I can't help but gloat that the book is, at a penny a copy, an economical substitute for Duraflame logs.
If anyone cares: every time I go anywere for longer than a day or so, I take books with me. Amd since I like to have choices, this means I routinely carry around several kilos of dead tree. So yeah, I almost bought an iPad just for this use case...
"
As I mentioned earlier, textbooks generally have different requirements to simple novels, and as Alyeska says the 'ereader' as a distinct device may just be an accident of technological timing.
