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Borders: CEO Jones Not Responsible for Sins of the Previous Management

"I do not believe the concept stores are ore profitable for one second. It is a nice design but it is contrary to everything else Borders can do: more capital, more staff, more inventory."

I could not agree more. Those of us who have worked in the trenches for Borders know how the scorecards are manipulated to make things seem more rosy than they are. A concept store where people can go to download things they can download at home is a good and profitable long-term venture? Pull the other one.

It's too late now, but Borders could have saved itself and provided for the next ten to twenty years of growth by a complete rebranding. Refocus on the original core business, and I mean ALL of the core businesses including music. What's that you say? MP3s have killed music stores? I'm a tail-end boomer, and consider myself an early adopter of technology, but I don't download. Sure I have an iPod, but I still want to buy CDs. Classical music fans don't download. Jazz fans don't download. Classic rock fans don't download. They want to browse, and hold something in their hand. Yes, those are generalizations, but true, nonetheless.

Borders should have rebranded itself as the place to go for the immediately available selection that you can't get anywhere else - whether it be books, music, or DVDs. Remember when we boasted that our flagship stores carrried 200,000 titles? Anybody and everybody can sell the top 200 bestselling books, movies and CDs. But ten years ago, if you decided to go on a Japan kick wanted to pick up a Kurosawa flick, a coffee table book about netsuke, a sushi cookbook, and the latest J-Pop CD, you could do that all in one trip to Borders. It was destination shopping. It was recreational shopping of the highest order. Shopping at a bookstore is justifiable even to those who resist commercialization and big box retail. It's justifiable even when money is tight.

Somehow Borders decided to compete with the rest of the retail world for the Joe Sixpacks shopping for those top 200 bestsellers that are already sold for less at Target, instead of branding themselves as the store of those who seek depth, breadth, and intelligent choices and who want a bookstore which will confirm to them that they are people of depth, breadth and intelligence.

The amazing thing is that so many of the things that made Borders what it once was were virtually free. Remember Penny University? That was a total labor of employee love! Remember when musicians performed regularly on Friday nights and were paid in 10 dollar gift certificates?

Sure, those things don't really work in a 450-store enterprise, but maybe Borders should never have grown that large in the first place. The constant growth was something of a Ponzi scheme, as all big box retail is in the long run.

It's all mindboggling. But had Borders required every person at HQ to spend two weeks a year in a store, on the floor as a bookseller, these things would have been obvious.