Borders opened about 14 years ago in Orland Park, but it seems like it's been here forever. I loved going to that store and now that it's closing, it seems like the entire world is collapsing.
Borders was great, but then I have always been out-of-step with the world. Apparently, Barnes & Noble has been doing a better job although int he past 14 years that I have visited Borders in Orland 1,000 times, I may have gone to B&N 10.
It's the way the store was laid out. The great new titles were in the front. That changed about a year ago when they s tarted to use that old strategy of putting the best towards the back to make people walk through the garbage. Some business consultant who never bought a book obviously convinced someone that was a better way to do business. It's not. I'm happiest when I find a book and if I find a book very early on entering the store, I end up walking around the store and browsing longer. If it takes forever to find a book I want, I usually just leave and buy it.
Business consultants are not like political consultants. They're just dentists who couldn't be doctors.
One of my favorite pasttimes is book store terrorism. Well, not in a violent way, of course. I walk through the store and terrorize the extremists, turning their book covers inward so I won't see their names or their faces. Ann Coulter. Glenn Beck. Sarah Palin. Michelle Malkin. I love going through their books and turning them all around. You have to fight extremism with extremism, sometimes.
Although I will certainly miss my assaults on the rightwing fanatics on the book store shelves, I did get some satisfaction as I wandered through one final time as Borders began unloading its library of books at discounts between 25 and 40 percent. (25 percent off for the good books, 40 percent off for the politics, and 30 percent off for biographies. It tells you what sells, I guess.) Yes, I found satisfaction in thefact that Beck's books, Palin's books and the books of other right wing nut jobs are still on the shelves, not moving even with a close out sale. In fact, I saw all of George W. Bush's memoirs still crowded on the shelf. Not moving an inch. And, the hate books attacking poor ineffective and weak President Barak Obama are not moving either. The one that calls Obama a "gangster" is outrageous. That one I grab many copies of and then walk through the book store planting them behind other books all over the place -- cover facing the back of the shelf, of course.
We'll miss you Borders. Jeez. When Cattle Company shut down and you couldn't meet women any more and then it got replaced by Hooters where all you can do is stare at women, times really changed and I had to settle down (for the third and final time). But now, Borders?
Say it ain't so Joe?
-- Ray Hanania
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I worked at that Borders around 11 years ago and generally liked it. The discounts were great and most of the managers were fantastic, inclund the head manager who ranks as one of my favorite bosses of all time. The one negative though was the overt favortism when it came to giving those in the "clique" more hours while often laying off people or reducing them to part time (happened to me).
ReplyDeleteFor me it was a stop in between jobs and the following year I went back to school and received my masters three years later.