The news of a decent, value added business, that provided something that I liked very much, collapsing is very saddening. Personally, the retail park branch near where I live is...was...a destination in its own right. Well stocked, with friendly staff, a thriving local following and events like book readings and book groups. It even had a half decent Starbucks.
Perhaps the most distressing news of all is that the company, which had been struggling for some time, has been the victim of short term management with an absense of any vision. Classic British corporate culture in some ways...Borders has been through several owners in the last few years, the most recent being a management team who bought the company in the summer with the backing of venture capitalists.
Or Vulture Capitalists as I heard them described just now...the deal was only done in July. Now, inside five months, they have pulled the plug.
How can a good business like Borders, (and yes - I mean good in that it met a need, and did it, as far as the view from where I sat looked), fail?
Well, it's a slightly simplistic queston, I know.
In a hundred ways, especially in the toxic economic climate in which we live now.
My guess? Cost. Big expensive stores, crammed with stuff people weren't buying and big expensive wage bills for the people in the stores to look after the diminishing number of customers. Cost that looked more and more unsustainable as first the Net Book Agreement (the restrictive pricing practice that meant all books were sold everywhere at RRP) was demolished by Asda and the other supermarkets, then as the book buying public moved out of bookshops and onto the internet, and then as they started to not buy books at all - downloading and discovering E-readers and the like.
Whilst many businesses put the focus on turnover, they fail to understand the erosive poison of cost. Stocking palette loads of things that people aren't actually buying is a tough business model indeed. And no, I'm not expecting to be getting the Nobel Prize for Economics for coming up with that insight...
The other factor is vision. Absense of it. We face a situation in the UK where the national postal service, The Royal Mail, is on its knees (and will collapse, in my view, in the next five years - at least as a publically owned service, if the balance sheet is the only criterion in play) because no-one in government knew, ten years ago, what an email was. Thus was The Royal Mail prevented from developing and investing in areas which could have saved it. The idea of writing stuff on a bit of paper, putting it in an envelope and then gluing a picture of the monarch on the front which proved you had paid for someone to take it somewhere had, after all, been around since the Roland Hill. And, without the stamp bit, it had been around for centuries before. How could it all be about to change?
But it did, and it does.
Which begs the question, 'Will we even have books at all in 50 years?' It seems almost inconceivable that we won't. But we must conceive of it. Books may well be something found in antique shops, a curious reminder of the past. Loved still by people of a certain generation, as the horse and buggy was, but of no practical use to most. Seems impossible? Tell that to the guy looking for a job lighting the gas lamps in your street...
The age of big shops crammed with writing on paper which was glued or stitched together will be pretty much over, just as age of the wheelwright and the candle maker is behind us. And sadly, not even the chance of a double shot skinny latte in an agreeable cafe - whilst you browse books that you then put back on the shelf and go home and download - is going to make much difference.
Meanwhile, I'm going to go down to my local Borders to tell the staff there how sad I am about what's happened...
