Quote:
Originally Posted by anamardoll
*throws up hands*
Fine. Borders did everything it possibly could to drive traffic to their stores and the fact that I spend thousands of dollars on books per year and NONE of those dollars at Borders was not their fault but rather me being mean spirited. There is no other explanation. 
I maintain that our local Borders did not try to innovate and as far as I can tell depended on sheer inertia to keep their business afloat. There seems to be an argument in this thread that that simply isn't possible because businesses are smarter than that. I disagree. Considering that Borders IS closing, I think Occam's Razor demands a more likely explanation than that they were fated to fail in spite of all their best efforts. 
EDIT: And if that seems snippy, well, I find it tiresome to provide REAL examples of how my local Borders could have gotten my business only to hear the circular reasoning that my idea of opening earlier on Sundays COULDN'T have been profitable because if it was they already would have done that. Provide your evidence that businesses always act in a rational, smart manner -- provide something other than just "business are smart 'cause they are businesses", please.  |
I'm not trying to quarrel with you, I genuinely find this to be an interesting discussion. It says something of the various mindsets based on regions and between business and public. I also respect you, and often agree with your posts.
Borders as a whole didn't innovate. They pissed away what could have been their share of the ebook market, by subcontracting it out. They rarely did much in the way of advertising on a large scale. I mean, earlier in this thread someone commented about how they didn't have sales on a national level at all stores, which isn't true. They just didn't really say it when they did. I'd get an email for being part of the Borders Rewards, and that was it. Even in stores they didn't have banners or anything up to announce the sales. The point of a sale is to draw people in, and if your customers may not know that a sale is going on until they're at the checkout and find out something is cheaper than they were expecting, that isn't doing it right. Hell, and even if you were in the borders rewards, not all rewards members got the same info. There were times when I wouldn't get any thing from them, but my girlfriend did as some sort of reward for buying more books.
As far as the part about the store hours, I just know that the store location could adjust their hours, and so that it was possible they had already tried having it be open earlier and moved away from it. The reason I know that this was possible, is because the one store I traditionally went to shifted store hours. I'm just saying it was possible that they had it at one time open earlier.