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I worked for about a year in the Glasgow Borders when it opened and it was frickin' huge. Occupied pretty much an entire city centre block, a building that had previously housed a bank.
That was years ago, but since then they've opened many smaller stores dotted around parts of Glasgow. I have no idea exactly how they run their business - I was but a lowly bookseller - but somehow I'm not surprised to hear they're going down and, er, I always preferred Waterstones, which to my understanding had a much better internal working culture, at least at the time.
The attitude seemed to me to be 'we will dominate and devour', an approach which one would assume would entail some fairly big financial risks, but maybe that's an attitude endemic to all businesses. They came in hard, taking over Books Etc and Paperchase, then seem to my admittedly untrained eye to have stalled at the first sign of recession.
To be honest, my equally uninformed opinion is that the big box bookstores like the Borders in Glasgow or elsewhere have pretty much had their day.
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