Borders Begins Final Series Of Shudders And Heaves?

More bad news for troubled bookstore chain Borders, who in trying to reorganize through bankruptcy has resembled less a shiny new robot being rebuilt and pointed towards the stars than one of those rapidly decaying, half-melting monsters that seem to pop up in Miyazaki's films. The latest article at Detroit Free-Press -- Borders is an Ann Arbor based company that is moving many of its offices to business-hungry Detroit -- suggests a total lack of serious buyers, with a few businesses sniffing around here and there for a small subset of stores or other partial purchase. Meanwhile, the company continues to hemorrhage massive amounts of money according to any standard of time applied to its recent performance: $24.3 million in March alone, $300 million in fiscal 2010.

I think the freaky part of the Borders story is that while the idea of restructuring seems like a plan, and the number of stores closed would seem to indicate that they may have a new philosophy of getting out of some urban markets served by multiple stores and perhaps trying to keep the suburban stores that may anchor an entire region book sales wise, there's little to suggest that the fundamental problems facing the chain can be reorganized off the table. It really does look like an enterprise far enough past its time that contracting to meet what may be required from them right now in terms of corporate set-up and infrastructure will cause the whole thing to shrink to the point it maybe doesn't exist anymore.

I believe Borders remains the second-largest national bookstore chain, and has been a key player in the migration of comics into trade form -- from both traditional companies and translated manga publishers -- and onto bookstore shelves over the last dozen years.
 
posted 11:00 am PST | Permalink
 

---

 
Daily Blog Archives
November 2019
October 2019
September 2019
August 2019
July 2019
 
Full Archives