Is this a standalone Borders or is it part of a larger complex? If the latter, check back in a few weeks. Could be that they’re not removing books but rather rearranging them into a smaller area in order to reduce store size thus also reducing rent. A Borders in a local mini-mall did that.
My Borders rearranged some of the book sections a little while ago. It seems like the Sci-Fi section took a little bit of a hit but that might be an illusion. The bargain books section seems to have been expanded. Last week They took all of the DVDs off the massive wall shelves and relocated them to shorter freestanding shelves. The massive shelves are still empty, not sure what they are planning to do with them.
My friend heard that a lot of the stores are closing. I hope mine survives despite a huge Barnes & Nobles opening up around the corner…
Anyone know why they aren’t doing well? Is it just that all retail is suffering or is Borders suffering even compared to other book chains?
I heard that Borders in the US was going down the tubes some time last year. I sincerely hope it doesn’t affect their Aussie operations because they get all my book buying business now. I have never paid full price for anything since the first purchase I made there. They asked me if I wanted to get their weekly email and I said yes. Every week it has a pile of vouchers - this week “buy one book get 50% off a second” and “25% off all crime and true crime books.” Christmas before last I had a $150 Borders gift voucher and got about $350 worth of stuff. My Borders has a coffee shop inside so that you can sit and read for hours if you want to.
Borders @ Woodland Mall, Grand Rapids, MI just closed. They’re building a Barnes & Noble right now. That Borders used to be a Waldenbooks and was at that mall for at least 20 years.
The funny thing is there’s another B&N 1-2 miles away. I wonder if that’s closing 'cause the new store looks bigger.
Well, there’s the recession, so you expect a certain amount of shrinkage across the board. You expect more shrinkage in the non-essentials–luxury goods, movie tickets, restaurants, that sort of thing. Books fall pretty squarely in the non-essentials category, and most people have a library at least as handy as the nearest bookstore. So bookstores in general are down.
I think the big chains are probably somewhat more down than independents, because of the whole “buy local” movement that had been growing pretty well before the recession. And when a recession starts hitting close to home, people tend to be more conscious of keeping their money in the local community, so folks who are going to buy a book instead of getting it from the library are even more likely than before to go to their local independent rather than the big chain store. So Borders has that working against them, too.
Why they seem so much further down than B&N, I don’t know. All I know is that I’m reasonably sure there’s a Borders somewhere in the nearest big town, but I couldn’t tell you where it is. I can give you very precise directions to the independent bookstore and the B&N, though.
Oh dear. Just yesterday I stopped at the local B&N and bought several books and magazines. I do this maybe 2-3 times a year, because I buy most books online or download to my Kindle.
The guy at the cash register was just relentless about my joining their discount club. I (politely) said no, not interested. He got snotty… “must be nice, turning down X$ in discounts you would have gotten today if you’d joined”.
I walked out of there thinking to myself that I must avoid this B&N in the future and do my bricks-and-mortar book shopping at the Borders about 5 miles away. Now I wonder if the Borders store is even open!
I understand Borders getting rid of the DVDs and CDs- they are loss leaders for other chains and they cannot make money on them if they compete on price.
So far, my local Borders still has plenty of books, but they are located in an out-of-the-way strip of big box stores, of which at least half have been closed in the last year… I think they are dying for lack of easy traffic. 
The two Borders I go to seem fine, and crammed full…and the big one has a Barnes & Noble just two tiny blocks away…they are both in the same “Lifestyle Center” I was surprised by the sheet of coupons my Borders Express was handing out…lots of good deals, and they didn’t even want to take the coupon for $2 off a magazine, so I’m going back today to get another magazine.
I think the brutal truth is that Amazon, and the internet in general, has been slowly killing Borders for ten years or so.
Borders’ strongest point was its variety of titles, which Amazon beat by an order of magnitude. 300,000 titles in a brick-and-mortar store is a killer for inventory. Just not a viable strategy anymore.
I’m sure you’re right, but still it’s a shame. Amazon is great when I know exactly what I want, but I’ve bought hundreds of books at Borders, B+N, etc. at the spur of the moment just because I was browsing through their stacks.
Ed
I loved Borders for their bargain books. Especially their computer books. You’d get last years book on a program or C++ programing for $5.00. Yeah it’s changed a bit but not so much you can’t still use 99% of it.
I also miss browsing as one poster noted, Amazon is great but not for browsing. And their “You’d probably like this…” is totally off, at least in my opinon.
But I will say I’m guilty as anyone else. I go to B&M stores and then go online and get it cheaper.
I heard these kinds of stores were getting rid of CDs, as they aren’t worth the floor space any more. You know, I wouldn’t even know where to go to buy an obscure CD any more.
So after the store closes, the chairs smoke, play poker and drink all the Tequila?
The city one just closed because the building’s being redeveloped. But the suburban ones I’ve seen don’t appear to have changed recently.
The Borders store I visit most often in San Diego (the Mission Valley store) has been rearranging content for some time.
Earlier this year they created a dedicated “Paperchase” section (greeting cards, stationary, gift wrap) towards the middle of the store, replacing a smaller selection of gift cards and stationary that had been tucked in one corner of the store and had not been labeled “Paperchase”.
Several overstuffed chairs have been placed in the area that smaller selection had been in.
And they’ve been shuffling around areas of non-fiction books for several months.
Overall at this store I have been getting the impression of some fairly minor inventory reductions, especially in the music section, but nothing at all severe.
Just from my observations of numbers of people in the store generally, and numbers lining up for the cash registers, they still seem to be getting plenty of business.
Aggravating the trend away from brick-and-mortar bookstores (expensive) to, say, Amazon (cheap, but you gotta wait) is the uptick in the use of the library (fast and free). I’ve seen recent news articles about how libraries are packed these days; it turns out that when people become unemployed for an extended period of time, they cancel their internet access and drag their laptops to the library for free Wi-Fi. My guess is that those people are also noticing the, uh, books. 
It’s been nice knowing you, Borders.
Actually, I can see Borders’s point on this one. When I first started going there years ago, they had a lot of seats, including plush comfortable ones. Homeless guys would start hanging out there, either sleeping or causing trouble, and a lot of those problems went away after they cut the seating in half. For a while, though, that part of the store was not very pleasant to hang out in.
I don’t go nearly as much as I used to, because I’m in grad school now, but damn I miss it. It’s noisy, but no one bothers you, and you can eat, drink coffee and read. It’s about the closest thing to Mycroft Holmes’s Diogenes Club that I’ve ever run into.
A friend of mine works there and tells me that, as Borderses (?) go, they are a very successful store. This mostly comes up when I tell her she ought to be looking for another job. She seems to think it will be the last Borders standing.
A typical Borders carries millions of dollars worth of inventory in stock. And, of course, except for The Kite Runner and You On a Diet, most of it just sits there for months or years waiting for some bibliophile to wander by and decide he must have it. Meanwhile, certain sections (Sex, Graphic Novels) get pawed to death such that some significant proportion is unsaleable.
Even though a lot of the merch is returnable, the float on that costs a lot to maintain and, as noted upthread, it just can’t compete with Amazon anymore. Amazon doesn’t require the same overhead, because they can stock 20 copies of a cult seller for the whole country, while the big box stores need a copy in every store if they don’t want to lose the one sale to that guy in Redbank or Shreveport. And in addition to their other advantages, they get a huge government giveaway in that they don’t have to charge sales tax, which on balance covers shipping charges. (Or it did, before Amazon’s volume got so high that they could eat most of their shipping costs.)
It’s terrible for me as a person who loves books and who loves learning about new books by walking around in a bookstore. The public library around here is great, but they don’t have the diversity of the local Borders. (What’s worse – they make you give the thing back in two weeks.) It’s bad for the industry and, some might even say, the written word, because it means less browsing for books instead of just purchasing books you already know you want. And it’s bad for the employees and owners of the chain. However, as I said on more than one occasion to my colleagues when I worked there – you can’t feel that bad for Borders, because we did the same thing to the independent bookseller 10-15 years before.
–Cliffy
I just went to the Borders in Oak Park, IL yesterday. The main floor seemed the same as usual, and there were plenty of shoppers. I didn’t check the lower floor where the DVD/CD section is, so I don’t know if that has changed.
I usually go to Borders for a few magazines that are published in the UK and that the smaller bookstore down the street doesn’t carry. Buying them at the store actually costs less than subscribing would be. If the Oak Park Borders goes away, I have to find a B&N nearby for my monthly British photo magazine fix.