In a bold maneuver, the current Chief Executive Officer of Borders Group Incorporated, Mike Edwards, announced that the nationwide retail book chain will partner with Build-A-Bear, "the leading and only global company that offers an interactive make-your-own stuffed animal retail-entertainment experience."
The announcement of this move, coming almost simultaneously with the announcement that the troubled, downward plummeting Borders retail chain is to close its 23,000 square-foot flagship San Francisco store, unashamedly demonstrates that (like his predecessors) Edwards intends to pursue a marketing strategy that treats his core business of books as an incidental inconvenience that he would rather have nothing to do with. Edwards tried to justify this senseless act of desperation to Bloomberg: "As more books are bought online or in digital format than bought at retail, it creates really the ultimate strategic challenge in terms of redefining the bookstore,” said Edwards, 50. “We are totally rethinking it.”
But, as it is a bit late in the game for Borders to "totally rethink" whether they want to be a bookstore or not, Edwards may well have done better to consider how to make book-selling profitable. While it is true that brick-and-mortar book retail has been heavily damaged by online sales and e-books, Borders has consistently failed to make even a recognizable attempt at being competitive in the online market. Failing, in the early days of the dot com boom, to recognize online market potential, Borders came to the internet market late, and learned nothing from the successes of other online retailers. While Amazon held very little over-head, Borders opened a warehouse for Borders.com that didn't coordinate with local stores. Thus, if one ordered a book from Borders.com that was not in the Borders.com warehouse, one would find that the book was unavailable, Out-Of-Stock, even if the Borders store down the street from the customer had several copies on-hand. Mystified by their failure, Borders gave up its online management to Amazon.com by 2001. Amazon reportedly ran the entire Borders.com business, giving Borders an undisclosed share. Borders severed ties with Amazon in 2007, running an unimpressive website in an unsuccessful attempt at direct competition ever since.
While children may now enter a Borders and have the dubious pleasure of custom building a bear, one must wonder why it is that nobody thought that an in-store print-on-demand service might better serve the book-buyer? Certainly more obvious than bear-building, the on-demand printing of rare, out-of-print, digitized books - or even perhaps self-publishing of books that could then be sold at local stores on consignment - would seem to appeal more directly to a book-buyer market that presumably enters a bookstore to shop for and buy books. It turns out, Print-On-Demand had occurred to Borders at one point. But, instead of capitalizing on their brick-and-mortar presence by offering in-store printing & local author representation, Borders briefly offered the service online before giving up POD to Lulu.com, much as they once passed off their website to Amazon.
In fact, Borders has a long and terrible habit of out-sourcing their services and contracting basic tasks to third party organizations. Years ago, the company even effectively removed the ability of store management to choose their own staff when they contracted an outside company to filter applications, along with a personality test assessment, online. They passed off their cafes to the Starbucks owned Seattle's Best. They co-opted store space to a stationery retailer, Paperchase. They have conducted employee surveys through third parties.
Among some of my valued relics, I have a CD that was produced by VH1 on behalf of Borders that was designated for mandatory in-store play. The CD contains top-50 hits from that year with a "DJ" between tracks helpfully announcing what was just heard, as well as the sale-price of the CD, which could of course be found in the music department. As should not have been surprising to corporate management - if they ever took the time to consider what one prefers in the book-store environment, as opposed to, say, a grocery store - there was an out-pour of customer complaints (according to store employees) regarding this encroachment into the mental environment, and the VH1 plan was scrapped. So, while Borders would have aggravated customers less and saved money by trusting their employees to choose appropriate over-head music, they opted for a third party intervention instead... and this all seems to be in the name of micromanagement.
In fact, Borders displayed something of a fetishistic enthusiasm for micromanagement during the mis-management of former CEO Greg Josefowicz. Josefowicz became the Borders CEO in 1999, perplexing everyone who may have been paying attention with senseless assertions, often comparing book-selling to grocery marketing. Josefowicz even seemed obstinately proud of his lack of book market knowledge, touting his rise from being a grocery store bag-boy. As he began his ill-contrived "category management" program in the Borders stores, one may have rightly wondered if Josefowicz was even fit to stuff toilet paper and produce into paper or plastic. Category Management, or CatMan, divided up the stores into so many senseless and redundant sub-categories of book genres, that it soon became impossible to find a book without some type of assistance. And this was at a time when the stores began cutting staff to bare-bones, leaving customers to hopelessly wander, wondering what the difference was between sections like "World History- General" and "World History- Other". And even if such a nuanced distinction was eventually made clear to the customer, who could guess if it was equally clear to the Borders headquarters employee who had to decide which category the book was to be shelved in?
Happily, Borders addressed this problem with its "Title Sleuth" kiosks where customers could look up books on their own... only to find that the Title Sleuth on-hand count was not synchronized with the store's own database, nor did the Title Sleuth maps of the stores often match the reality.
A close friend of mine, who prefers not to be named, worked as a manager at a Borders store for many years before moving on to much better things. Before he quit in 2005, he sent a long letter to Josefowicz and the regional management of the company in which he decried the company's refusal to recognize the failure of, and thus undo the damage of, the CatMan project, lamented the bookstore's increasing tilt toward a less browsing friendly environment in favor of a grocery store environment, and criticized the lack of follow-up regarding the Title Sleuth roll-out. "The next day [after sending my email]," he told me, "which I think was my last day, I got a call from Ann Kubek, who was in charge of operations, I think, at the time. She began by telling me that she didn't disagree with everything I had written, but as we talked I was hard pressed to figure out what she disagreed with me about at all. She acknowledged the problems with Category Management, she acknowledged that Title Sleuth was in a problem state. She led me to believe that all of this was being worked on. I went into a store years later, found that nothing was any different. Then, of course, further down the line they're in bankruptcy, being kept afloat by loans. They can't blame the internet for this. They failed on their own merits. Corporate management has long shown nothing but contempt for books and book buyers. Announcing that their new plan is to sell stuffed bears is just another symptom of this... and it's no surprise at all."
No, it really isn't a surprise, is it? If there is one thing Borders has demonstrated, it's that they're willing to do anything to "think outside the box", even if it brings them so far out of the box that they disregard their core market entirely. Good luck with the stuffed bears, Edwards...
[recommended reading: Rushkoff, Douglas: Get Back In The Box]
Comments
Bear is a b word. It makes sense. Come on Doug, a friend at Borders? You have no friends. Eventually they're going to get you.
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