A Lesson in Poor Management

Borders, the giant bookseller, has finally bit the dust completely. It was too big not to fail. It had too many stores with too many books, too many copies of the same book and too many books on arcane subject matters that would not be sold in our lifetime. Given all those books, they needed huge stores that paid a lot of rent at shopping malls. To me, as writer and editor, as well as reader, these were the reasons for its downfall. Granted that the e-book phenomenon did not help, but had they had more manageable stores, they would still be in business.

A couple of other things did them in. They were constantly moving books around, for reasons that no one could understand, making it very frustrating to locate what you were looking for. Add to that the fact that the computerized catalog was largely unreliable. Which brings me to the other problem: too many temporary employees who knew very little about authors and books, and were unable to provide information to the customer. It increasingly became a pain in the ass to shop there.

So, there you have it.

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