Borders in trouble - B&N not much better

Discussion in 'Marketplace Discussions' started by paulg61, Dec 19, 2010.

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  1. Roland Stone

    Roland Stone Offending Member

    Videogames don't bring in revenue. They bring in customers, who may buy something else that brings in revenue.

    New games have a very low markup that probably comes out as a net loss when all is said and done. GameStop makes money reselling the used games and accessories that people trade in to lower the cost of that new must-have title.
     
  2. tommy-thewho

    tommy-thewho Senior Member

    Location:
    detroit, mi
    Thanks for all answers regarding video games...
     
  3. Oatsdad

    Oatsdad Oat, Biscuits, Abbie & Mitzi: Best Dogs Ever

    Location:
    Alexandria VA
    Maybe it was out of stock? :D
     
  4. kozy814

    kozy814 Forum Resident

    For the cash
     
  5. yesstiles

    yesstiles Senior Member

    No way a retailer is gonna give cash back for a return with no receipt. An exchange yes (except Barnes & Noble).
     
  6. GregK

    GregK I'm speechless

    Location:
    Baltimore, MD
    Who says they didn't? I bought a Wii game at Borders in December of last year.
     
  7. GregK

    GregK I'm speechless

    Location:
    Baltimore, MD
  8. GregK

    GregK I'm speechless

    Location:
    Baltimore, MD
  9. Robin L

    Robin L Musical Omnivore

    Location:
    Fresno, California
    One of the funnier articles on the imminent 'Downsizing' of Borders:

    This° comic strip from October sums up perfectly how I feel about the Borders bankruptcy.

    Barnes & Noble is reportedly considering buying the unused inventory and picking up a few of the choicest store locations. But with the loss of any major bookstore chain, we move closer to the end.

    Much ink has been spilled about the death of print media, some of this ink rushing to spill itself onto the burning pile of newspaper as a gesture of solidarity. And I love books. I will continue reading actual books until they tear them from my cold, malfunctioning 2063-era robot prostheses. If anyone gives me a Kindle, I will consider it an act of war.

    But this isn't about the books. It's about the bookstores.

    Many have torn their hair, beaten their breasts, and keened about the demise of independent and used bookstores. That old man who comes and sifts through the remainders with an air of knowledge, or the flannel-clad hipsters talking about how they were into Melville before he sold out, or the woman with a lot of bags who organizes poetry readings -- these familiar sprites of the indie bookstore scene come to us in the middle of the night to show harrowing visions of a world where they no longer exist. Although that could have been something I ate.

    But nobody has stuck up for the megastores.
    Megastores are like megachurches -- you get the same basic product, but louder and more commercial, and there's a guy behind you who sounds like he needs to be exorcised.

    But there's more to it than that.

    One of the appeals of a bookstore is the serendipity. This is, frankly, impossible to recreate online. Yes, Amazon.com suggests other books, but they're books you might actually want to read. There's no online equivalent to walking past a rack of novellas for teens to discover that angel werewolves are the new regular werewolves.

    In a real bookstore, you can feel the cashier judging you, so you feel the need to purchase a copy of Roget's Thesaurus with everything. "This is for research," you mutter, as you place Snooki's book on the counter. "There is literally someone holding a metaphorical gun to my head as I buy this."

    And until they develop a feature that allows you to bump into nervous but friendly lawyers while browsing through the Business Tomes section, Amazon can go whistle. In a real bookstore, you can tell that it's unwise to approach someone because he's standing in the self-help section reading a book called, "Sex for The Incompetent" upside down. You can't tell that online. And even with a Bumping Into People app for online bookshops, you would never be 100 percent certain that the other party wasn't secretly watching pornography at the time.

    In a real bookstore, some of the copies are autographed. What are we going to do, have David Sedaris sign our Kindle, like a skateboard?

    Yes, we'll have our iPads and our Nooks, but we're going to lose something. The fewer physical bookstores, the fewer physical books, the less real reading we'll do.

    A personal library is a physical manifestation of a human mind. A megabookstore is a physical manifestation of our collective mind, as embarrassing and exhilarating as that implies. There, Miley Cyrus autobiographies lounge cheek-by-jowl with The Iliad and the Audacity of Hope. They encompass all of us: The people straying in and out with coffee, the ruck of humanity scrambling for the outlets, the smell of new books and returned books and that one man at the end of the aisle in one of the more advanced stages of decomposition. Online, we're cabined up in our own preferences. People suggest to us things that we would like, based on the other things that we have liked, or the things that people who like the things we like have liked. It's personalized. That's what we've been told we want, after all. More of what we like.

    But sometimes we want things we don't know exist. How else to account for the popularity of meeting new people?

    The other thing the Internet promotes is the blending of content. Books require concentration. Walking into a bookstore says either, "I am one of the homeless men who lives in the café and won't let you use the large tables" or, "I intend to buy a book." Online, there is no such clear purpose. Go online to look up the correct number of hours of sleep and, several days later, you emerge, Rip Van Winkle-like, blinking, having skimmed articles, watched videos, posted several ill-advised tweets that seemed funny at the time, and purchased six shakeweights.* That doesn't happen at Borders. Books, by definition, require concentration. They often have plots, or symbolism, or at least arguments you need to follow. In them, form and function mesh. They require focus, and with their decorous rows of text reposing on the page, they promote it.

    Sure, eReaders offer a measure of insulation. But they allow you to converse with other readers, to play games, and to access parts of the web. Read books on your iPad, and you can dash off to the web to buy shoes at a moment's whim.

    And this evolution is bound to change books. Soon, Anna Karenina may come with a link to family therapy on the opening page. "All unhappy families are unhappy in different ways," it will say, "but you don't have to be, with Ron's Counseling!" Animal Farm? Pork recipes. Fahrenheit 451? Links to Best Buy, to purchase a wall-sized screen.

    *for regular readers, this brings me to twelve shakeweight references this week! Keep track! It'll come up in the chat!

    By Alexandra Petri | February 15, 2011; 1:03 PM ET ​

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  10. Robin L

    Robin L Musical Omnivore

    Location:
    Fresno, California
    Mild und leise . . .

    And now it's official

    From Bloomberg, this morning:

    Borders Files Bankruptcy as Expense Cuts Don't Stem Losses
    By Tiffany Kary - Feb 16, 2011 3:56 AM PT

    Borders Group Inc., the number two U.S. bookstore chain, filed for bankruptcy in New York today after management changes, job cuts and debt restructuring failed to make up for sagging book sales in the face of competition from Amazon.com Inc. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

    The 40-year-old chain, whose market value shrunk by more than $3 billion since 1998, racked up losses by failing to adapt to shifts in how consumers shop. Borders’s first e-commerce site debuted in 2008, more than a decade after Amazon.com revolutionized publishing with online sales. The world’s largest online retailer beat it again by moving into digital books with the Kindle reader in 2007, a market Borders entered in July.

    “Instead of leading and being innovative, they were certainly a follower,” said Michael Souers, an analyst for Standard & Poor’s in New York.

    Borders, based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, faced decreased consumer spending since its last annual profit in 2006. It began looking for cash in December after disclosing that lenders cut its borrowing capacity and that failure to find replacement credit could lead to a violation of its loan agreements and a “liquidity shortfall” in the first quarter of 2011.

    In its filing U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan, the company listed debt of $1.29 billion and assets of $1.28 billion.

    The case is In re Borders Group Inc., 11-10614, U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Southern District of New York.​

    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-...ruptcy-protection-with-1-29-billion-debt.html
     
  11. If that is accurate, a liquidation should get creditors a lot of money.
     
  12. Robin L

    Robin L Musical Omnivore

    Location:
    Fresno, California
    I think they're attempting a re-organization. Of course, there's plenty of liquidation in store, but that can only depress an already depressed market, driving prices down even further. If they come out of this with 200 stores still standing at the end of 2011 they'll be real lucky. In any case, I'll bet they're overvaluing what's on their shelves. Borders always had issues with massive returns of heavily promoted items. Once that John Grisham or "Twilight" hardcover roll-out is remaindered down to $5.99, it's no longer a $28 book.
     
  13. Gene Parmesan

    Gene Parmesan Forum Resident

    Location:
    PA, USA
    According to the NYT article, they plan to close 30% of their stores in the near future.
     
  14. mike65!

    mike65! Senior Member

    Location:
    Connecticut
    Darn. As much as I despise what has happened to Borders (shrinking stock, less variety), the selection was still better than my local B&N, who (yes, I know, like Borders) has chosen to go the route of coffee, calendars, and board games.

    At least, unlike B&N, when I walk into Borders, I could always find something of interest in the way of books.

    Oh well.
     
  15. quicksrt

    quicksrt Senior Member

    Location:
    Los Angeles
    I think it could also mean that creditors get a lot of books back before they see a dime in cash.
     
  16. KeithH

    KeithH Success With Honor...then and now

    Location:
    Beaver Stadium
  17. rstamberg

    rstamberg Senior Member

    Location:
    Riverside, CT
    I used to work at a Borders and it's a miserable environment to work in and a miserable company to work for. Their so-called "flagship" White Plains, New York store —which was always busy — shut down two years ago, probably due to high rent. Every Borders I've been in since has been a useless mess, especially the music department. I say good riddance to bad trash. Sorry people will lose their jobs 'n all ... but Borders sucks and has sucked for ages. I can't tell you how many times I had to ask for a new release because it was not put out on the shelves but was in the store. And I'm talking about 10 days after the release date.
     
  18. jukin

    jukin Forum Resident

    Location:
    Lancaster, PA, USA
    Seems to me that bookstores are going through a transition phase rather than being eliminated. I have a Kindle and almost never buy a paper fiction, biography or similar type of book. However there is no way in hell that I am going to be able to read a photographic book on Everest or on shipwrecks on a Kindle or an iPad. I like my magazines to be full-sized and don't want to have them squeezed down to even a 9-10" digital format. I would guess that the switch to ebooks has almost overwhelmingly affected text based books and really has not affected larger, graphic, books. I know that more and more magazines are being formatted for the iPad but I still don't see that replaceing 'real' magazines for most readers. ebook readers with a screen large enough to display coffee table type books and almost full-size magaines would be way too expensive and way too heavy and bulky for people to carry around.

    What I see is books splitting into two distinct camps - text based books becoming predominantly e-books, some graphics based books being able to transition but still leaving most graphics based books and most magazines to be much more suited to paper.

    I think if bookstores were to consider marketing plans based around that kind of division then there may still be a healthy future for them.
     
  19. jimac51

    jimac51 A mythical beast.

    Location:
    Allentown,pa.
    The future of ereaders and ipads will change much of that. Imagine a biog with video attachments. Image hooking up an ipad to a giant TV-a screen five times bigger than the coffee table.Imagine a biog about a musican with music added at a touch. Imagine blogging much as we do here with othere reading what you are reading while you are reading the book. There will still be books and colllectable books will still have an audience. But things are changing. And the physical book seems to be left in the dust,and that may not be a bad thing.
     
  20. GregK

    GregK I'm speechless

    Location:
    Baltimore, MD
  21. LordThanos1969

    LordThanos1969 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Phoenix, AZ, USA
    You can keep all that stuff. I would rather have a good coffee table book anytime.
     
  22. SoundAdvice

    SoundAdvice Senior Member

    Location:
    Vancouver
    SH forum is my browsing. I make a list I used when i stock up at a music store or go online.
     
  23. Gary Freed

    Gary Freed Forum Resident

    Just left the Barnes and Noble in our neighborhood. It's in a great location so the foot traffic inside the store is always pretty good. Not sure who is actually buying or just killing time browsing though. Lots of folks were lined up at the Coffee Bar though.
     
  24. jimac51

    jimac51 A mythical beast.

    Location:
    Allentown,pa.
    Well,good for Starbucks,as they run the cafe. Bad for Starbucks,as they also run Border's cafes.Starbucks have seen this coming for months as they now have Seattle Best agreements with Borger King & Subway. Hope the rent isn't too high in both stores.
     
  25. GregK

    GregK I'm speechless

    Location:
    Baltimore, MD
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