Apparently, all of the "Borders Exclusive" Twilight merchandise couldn't turn a profit. Here's a tip: when you sell out of a hotly selling piece of merchandise, like the Twilight calender, MAKE MORE AND CONTINUE SELLING THEM!*

*Sour that I didn't pick up the calender for my girl when I had the chance thereby failing to earn massive Christmas present brownie points...

I wonder how they ever make money. My girlfriend shops there all the time and she is always finding 30%, 40%, buy one get half off coupons online.

They've also transitioned about 5 other execs, and are about to get removed from the NYSE from having a low stock price.
I have friends who work in the corporate offices in ann arbor, and its a lot of transition to come back to work to on a monday.

I'd actually be sad if this company went under. They keep hardcover books longer than Barnes & Noble. And their literature section is superior. I've actually found a couple of first editions that are now worth quite a bit more than what I paid originally. B&N turns over their hardcover stock as soon as the paperbacks come in. At least with Borders I know they still might have them around a year or two later.

But unless there's a book boom and people start reading again, I don't foresee good things for Borders. Pity.

@gqcarrick: If they were smart they'd prop up their prices by 30-40% so the coupon would return them to "normal" prices.

I could totally do this CEO thing.

Amazon kills another B&M retailer.

How about they stop with the deceiving coupons? I hate it when I get their 40% off coupons that are off a list price, which is different from their everyday discounted price. Ex: A DVD set I wanted to buy was normally $69.99 but the coupon came off its list price of $99.99. How about you just call it a 15% off coupon and take it off the actual price?

Rut-roh, should we be fixin' to spend all of our gift cards whilst we still have a chance?

translation: stories like this will no longer grace our pages --> "Buried Under Books, Borders Goes Above and Beyond" [consumerist.com]

if there's one thing "private equity executives" know how to do, it's kill good customer service.

well this sucks...i like borders...they are FAR superior to B&N - everything is ALWAYS on sale - even if i only sve $1, its better than nothing...hopefully this doesnt kill them....

@blackmage439: I assume by brownie points you meant suckage like the movie...

I'd really hate to see them go out too. Everyone always whines about their prices, but I've got some good deals there using their coupons.

If Borders goes under, that'd leave B&N as the only bookstore in my city. I'm running out of places to shop! Sure you can get better deals online, but sometimes you want to go out and physically buy something.

@Ingram81: The movie does not do the book justice!

I've got them on my Death Watch List. Ahead of USAir and Bank of America.

@calquist: I should hope not; if it did, the book would have to come from the retailer soggily doused in cheap perfume and body odor, be ripped in half then glued back together, and have half the pages say "and then some stuff happened". With the movie being the worst disservice ever done to a book by a movie, that would still place the book at best in the "crappy PG bodice rippers aimed at teens" category. I'm all for getting kids reading, but that stuff is a bridge too far.

Hopefully if Borders closes, it'll mean opportunity for Books a Million...they've long been my favorite of the big 3 bookstores, but their franchise footprint is still a bit limited.

Hopefully they'll learn that they need to carry a larger variety of books to compete with online stores. Most books I want need to be special ordered, and I cannot use their 30-40% off coupons on special orders or online.

Step # 1 to a turnaround would be to sell Blu-Ray movies for less than $40. I saw Burn After Reading available at my local borders for that price.

@howie_in_az: I'm pretty sure that's how book sales already work. :)

@Ingram81: Only if by suckage you mean *bow chicka bow bow*

/Deadspin'd

Never mind competing with Amazon. Most people I know get confused between Borders and Barnes & Noble. There's your problem!

@skwigger: yeah, that's my beef with Borders too. They need to understand that if I'm in the store looking for something, then I want it NOW. If I wanted to order it and wait for delivery, I could have already done that from home.

@skwigger: Unless things have changed (and there's a good chance they have) then you CAN use coupons on special orders from the warehouse.

I might have a long list of beefs with Borders based on my years of being an employee and all my five years of loyalty being blown on three months of bad management, but at the same time I have to say that while I was there the special orders department was run very well. The warehouses are stocked full of books, you get a seven day guarantee, and there was usually some kind of deal to get it shipped free to your house in those seven days as well. Once you added on being able to use coupons, for me it was always more convenient and better to get books ordered from them than it ever would be with Amazon.

If they hadn't burned their bridges with me, I would still think so. But I have other reasons for not giving them my money.

@hewhoroams: Any idea which ones? Because there was one person in particular that I would throw a party over their departure, but I can't seem to recall her name. I would know it if I saw it.

I feel for Borders and any other bookshop what with the 10th of February coming up: [bookshopblog.com]

@BloggyMcBlogBlog: Although it is Amazon with their poor outsourced customer disservice that should be the one that dies.

If Borders didn't charge $29.99 for a DVD that is $15 at Best Buy I would shop there. Now I just buy books on Amazon and DVDs at Best Buy. Yeah it's a nice store, but I'm not a sucker...

@blackmage439: The fact that everything Twilight-related keeps selling out is not Borders fault. It's the fault of Little, Brown (or whoever publishes Twilight stuff). They have been over a month in getting out any sufficient amount of Eclipse, we haven't had any movie tie-in copies of Twilight in ages, we're constantly running out of the other two books because the publisher can't seem to get their act together and print/send them to us. The Twilight Saga Official Guide has been "delayed indefinitely", undoubtedly due to the fact that they can't even supply enough product for currently existing items. Borders may not be in the best of places, but anything Twilight related is way out of their hands. Whoever is in charge of distribution of Twilight merchandise has totally dropped the ball.

I am a Borders employee and I get tired of answering "why are you out of [twilight item]?" hundreds of times a day.

@schiff: Because it wouldn't be a 15% coupon for anything else in the store. And.. what DVD was that? It wasn't "normally" $69.99, it was on sale for $69.99.

@howie_in_az: If Borders were to do that, I would think it would have to be an industry-wide thing, since virtually everything I've seen there has been priced to what the publisher has printed onto the book. The only exception I've ever seen is when a store sticker was less than the book's printed price. I'm not sure a place is even allowed to sell books at a higher cost than what's printed on the book, unless it's deemed to be some sort of collectible (out of print, etc).

@larrymac808: That's a totally valid point, but virtually unfeasible for someplace like that. The cost to house hundreds of thousands of books that one person might come in for someday far outweighs the $14.95 sale that might come of it. And, yes, most coupons can be used to ship something to your house for free, as long as it's available in the warehouses Borders orders from.

@gqcarrick:
well for books its how everyone does it.

their media sales prices are heavily inflated.

The Borders near my work is horribly miss-managed. I'll routinely go in to pick up a book that their online, instore, and sales-side inventory systems say should be in the store only to leave empty handed. Often times it's because the book is still packed away in a box in the basement.

The Borders employee will then offer to order the book from another store for me. That's right: rather than unpack their own deliveries, they'll make someone else do it for them.