Borders is going to decrease its inventory by 5-10% in order to allow room for more books to be displayed with their covers face-out. Malcolm Gladwell will be so pleased. [Wall Street Journal]
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But they still won't display the NYT #1 (now #2) best seller, "Liberal Fascism", on their bestseller shelf.
That's smart. Last time I went was when I wanted to get a particular book fast. Of course, they did not have it, so I just bought it from Amazon. Guess I should just cut to the chase from now on.
@dorkins:
1. Borders doesn't use the NYT Bestsellers to stock their best seller's shelf. When I worked there they stopped using the NYTBS list and switched to best sellers according to Borders store sale.
2. When I was working at borders, it was usually an old person that accused us of not stocking books of the conservative persuasion. Never made business sense to me, like why a book chain would purposely not want to cater to people from the full political spectrum. People and their crazy conspiracies.
I wonder where that 5-10% will come from? I mean, will they be stocking fewer copies of lots of books, or fewer titles in certain sections...or getting rid of half the romance section since all of those thousands of books follow the same damn narrative anyway. I vote for #3.
How unfortunate for them. As much as bookstores are like candystores for me, I really don't shop at Borders anymore. The last time I bought a DVD set there, I went home and found it on Amazon for $50, as compared to the $100 at Borders. I promptly returned it. They didn't have the book I wanted either, so that whole trip was worthless. Boo...
Who buys at borders without their coupons anyway? Same goes for BN.
If you don't get at least 20% off your in-store purchase, you're getting screwed.
There's enough coupons online.
They could also build more shelves...
Just an idea...
Sounds like a good plan to me.
But why would Malcolm Gladwell care, now? Is this some comment about the "Blink" idea -- seeing the pretty cover leads to a snap decision to buy the book or something?
awesome! one thing i never liked about bookstores - all those damn books to choose from. i hope they use this opportunity to increase the size of their coffee bar, then i'll have a reason to shop there.
That's great because I don't hear "You don't have it in? OK, I'll just order it off of Amazon" nearly enough since I only work at Borders part time.
this just means the company overall is *really* suffering and are going to save money by reducing inventory. The increase of face-outs is a ridiculous justification. Hell, I used to work there and I still buy my books on amazon or other online places b/c it is so much cheaper. And the selection is infinite online.
I love bookstores (browsing, sipping coffee etc) so much that I worked in them for 10+ years. But now I really have to wonder about the future of such brick-and-mortar booksellers.
Finally! Now that Borders has less of that annoying *selection* surely I'll go back to paying their high prices instead of amazon's discounted prices.
Just thought I'd say. I work at a Borders here in Australia and there is a lot of stock out the back of our store. A reduce by %5-%10 would actually be beneficial and make it easier to find books.
Think about it this way, you're probably only going to buy one copy of one book and if at the moment Borders is overstocking on that book then books are just sitting on shelves taking up space where other books could go.
We'd have to see the actual details but I find that if we can't find a book you're after it's usually a book we never stocked anyway.
Yep. That's the winning formula. "We're going to better meet the needs of the consumer by stocking FEWER titles!"