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I hope Borders manages to hang on somehow. Yeah, they're a big corporate bookstore chain, but I generally had good experiences there. I actually worked at one, oh, 10 years ago or so.
I've never experienced their locations to be much different than B&N, usually they'd be in somewhat close proximity to each other. One thing that Borders had for it was that they didn't censor their shelves. Some books were deemed too controversial, and B&N refused to carry them, but Borders accepted the risk.
I know one thing that hurt Borders, and I don't know if it's changed now, but they'd restructured the job ladder there after I left. It used to be that all starting booksellers had 3 main duties they had to perform on one shift: working the cash register, working the information desk, and taking care of a designated section (stocking/organizing.) When they restructured, they made it so that the starting position spent ALL of their shift working the cash registers. After a certain amount of time, as positions became open, an employee could move up off of the registers. This was even true for someone who had experience in the bookselling field (I found all this out after applying for a job in a new city a couple years after my first job at Borders). For 90% of the employees, working the registers was the most loathsome part of the shift. To add insult, Borders also dropped the starting wage for new employees, so that it was just barely above minimum wage. That kind of strategy effectively weeds out the people that might want to actually stay with a job and make something of it. So naturally, if you have a bunch of employees who aren't happy, you'll end up with customers who aren't happy, which has likely contributed to Borders' current plight.
Still that being said, I still like Borders, and if I'm forced to go to a mall, that's usually the one point of solace that I can find.
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