I realize Borders is having ongoing financial problems and has been closing a lot of stores. So I wasn’t too surprised when I was in Syracuse, NY a couple of weeks ago and I saw the Borders at the Carousel Mall was closed. But I assumed they still had another store open somewhere in the area. However I just looked and they don’t - the closest Borders are in Rochester and Watertown, each about an hour away.
This surprises me. Syracuse is not a small town - there are over 700,000 people in the metropolitan area. And it’s a college town.
It also surprises me that the Borders website still lists the Carousel Mall store even though it closed in March.
Get the doctors in Syracuse to sign a petition asking for a return of the bookstore. That will carry a lot of clout. They can call themselves Doctors Without Borders.
It’s not just Syracuse. Austin is home to America’s largest university, and has 1.5 million people in the metropolitan area… but our one and only Borders store closed down in the last year.
We still have a few Barnes and Noble outlets, but I don’t know how well they’re doing financially. The company was quicker than Borders to offer on-line sales and to provide e-books, so they may have a chance of surviving even if the retail stores are ultimately doomed.
There’s still a Barnes & Noble bookstore in the suburbs of Syracuse, and except for a handful of used bookstores, that is the only game in town. I miss Borders, I used to buy a lot of gifty items in there, and it was a nice place to browse and then have an iced chai in the coffeeshop.
The weird thing is that some small independent bookstores have survived outside of the larger cities. There are no independent bookstores in Rochester or Syracuse but there are in Auburn, Batavia, Brockport, Geneseo, Medina, Oswego, Palmyra, Penn Yann, Perry, and Skaneateles.