Greetings everyone,
I thought I'd start this blog with the big (but not all encompassing) event affecting my life and many other book enthusiasts: The closing of Borders.
As someone currently employed at a Borders Bookstore, it saddens me greatly that the place is closing. I am not saddened at the business model of the store going away, that had plenty of issues. What I am saddened by is the loss of all those bookstores from our cities and towns. We already had a preview of this earlier this year when some of the Borders locations closed. Now that they are all going away, I worry that this will lead to a domino effect, and that even when they get the Borders customers, Barnes & Noble might be next on this track.
Then what are we left with? Online orders through Amazon and the remaining small bookstores that learned to survive around the big chains? Great for the little bookstores, but it will take time for people to find them, and none of them will try to maintain the atmosphere of sitting and browsing their books in the coffee-shop style the chains did. And worse yet, with the competition wiped out, I seriously doubt Amazon will keep all the book prices as low as they do now, so we'll basically be paying full price again for books we'll never see in person until they've been shipped to us. None of this rubs me the right way.
To help lighten things up after that rant, I'll examine some odd purchasing trends I've seen at our store. First off, be warned these are not national trends, but just what I've seen. Obviously some of the bigger books that have come out recently, like The Help in paperback. Others are surprising, like how we got cleaned out of Ayn Rand at only 10% off. Meanwhile genre fiction and most of the rest of Fiction is generally untouched at the same discount. Computer books are still there in large amounts, but business books are flying off the shelf, though that is less surprising as we are located in a business district.
Next time, I'll post something a bit more geeky and a bit less melodramatic.
