CHAPTER ELEVEN
Borders: Too Comfortable with Its Comfy Bookstores
Borders (along with Barnes & Noble) is blamed by countless independent bookstores for driving them out of business. But then technology changed the game. As readers began to buy books online and, later, download digital books onto e-readers, massive national chains and book superstores lost some of their charm. The first casualties were B. Dalton and Crown Books. And then Borders—the second largest US bookstore chain behind Barnes & Noble—collapsed. It is hard to imagine anyone feeling nostalgic for the retailing pioneer and 1990s high flier. Nevertheless, Borders’ bankruptcy filing was a sad ending for the 40-year-old Borders. What happened?
THE HISTORY OF BORDERS BOOKS
Brothers Tom and Louis Borders opened their first store, a used-book store, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1971. The book industry was a different place then. Borders stocked a rich assortment of books that rivals could not match. If readers wanted books, they could be relatively confident that Borders stocked them. Over the next few years, Borders grew into a successful chain of superstores. It was quite proud of its success and even bragged that its store employees took written tests to prove their knowledge of literature.1
Borders and the Rise of Book Superstores
In 1992, the Borders brothers sold their chain of about twenty superstores to Kmart for approximately $190 million. Kmart Corp. combined the Borders stores with its Waldenbooks unit. In 1995, ...
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