Rocket Bomber - article - retail - commentary - More Borders - and Matt's personal pipe dream.

bump to the main page: Shannon Smith comments on the Borders Redux post

Good stuff but I warn against the upgrades. Borders has wasted millions on upgrades. Whey you say “upgrade”, they hear “hey, lets throw away millions on digital garbage that won’t compete with Best Buy or Wal-Mart anyway”. I say no to upgrades. You don’t really need to upgrade a book case. It’s pretty simple technology. But yeah, dump Walden, dump Paperchase with a vengeance and I would throw all the damned CDs and anything music related in the street. Waste of space and labor. If it ain’t a book and it does not make a ton of money it should not be in that store. I’d keep the coffee though. It keeps the repeat customers that spend some cash on magazines and impulse buys.
But no to the upgrades. That’s what got them in this mess. (I say this as a former Borders employee who spent seven years re-modeling and upgrading worthless crap when we should have been helping customers and selling books.

Damn straight we’re keeping the coffee. Do you what the margins are on coffee and sandwiches even after allowing for the fact that you’re throwing away a quarter to a third of your product every week? Coffee is good business. That, and it’s a supplemental sale, something to bleed the marks for cash up to, until, and after they actually buy books from you.

But the digital crap is in fact, as Shannon points out, crap.

E-commerce is a vital chunk of the new retail world, though, and using technology and appropriate web applications (shopping online but reserving books to pick up in the store, or ordering same into your local for physical pickup, customer kiosks allowing casual shoppers—or folks without internet, they’re still out there—to do the same thing from inside the store, & using the website as a broadcast network to tell people about books,

…& maybe e-books too, but the jury is still out on whether customers actually want them and how do you deliver them from the storefront anyway, USB thumbdrives?

So maybe Borders new concept is still off. But they have to try something.

Here’s the part of the new concept that I actually do like:
“In the middle of the store are three of Borders’ ‘destination’ sections of merchandise – for cooking, travel and wellness. Here, the drop-tile ceiling gives way to a circular, taller ceiling with skylights and various words painted in a jumble on the taupe-colored walls. Kiosks let customers search for travel recommendations, book trips, print recipes and search for books.”

IF I had the say-so and IF I were trying to revive a bookstore chain I would still remodel older stores — especially so I could drop music & DVDs right off the bat, including any of this burn-your-own nonsense that Borders has mistakenly picked up on. Other media was so… 1992. Concentrate on the books, and open up store-within-a-store “boutiques” for

• graphic novels & manga
• cookbooks
• travel (including the photo “coffee table books” which is a misnomer but that’s how everyone asks for them)
• biography
• science & philosophy. (Oh, sure, you don’t think the two go together but like chocolate & peanut butter this is a winner. Just wait until you see my bookstore.)
• religion (Christian books is big business)
• Award Winners… and Oprah. I hate to lump the Booker and Pulitzer with a talk show host but a single ‘shop’ for all the Recommended Must Reads? Some folks will eat that up. (and buy buy buy buy buy buy buy…)
• & co-branded sections with select publishers. Get RH, HC, S&S, Penguin, & Macmillan to bid against each other for the one or two publisher-specific mini-stores in your big box. If nothing else, they can split some promotional costs with you

Each of these modules would be about the size of a mall bookstore (600-1500 sq ft) and would be interchangeable, mobile (in as much as a ton of books can be moved), and hopefully would also have 1-2 dedicated booksellers to “own” them, to enthusiastically get behind their favorite genre and to supplement the buyer-selected titles with their own recommendations. And I can easily think of others, including some stuff for kids, so if one concept doesn’t play out in your local you just return a few, move the rest to backlist, and try something else.

the Kids business is it’s own beast, but on this same model I’d set up mini-stores for:

• teen fiction
• juv. fiction (ages 8-11, give or take)
• picture books
• educational toys, craft kits, & games

…I don’t know the el-hi business as well as I should. Obviously outside of these concept ‘stores’ there would be a significant chunk of kids backlist.

Which is also true on the adult side: it’s great to create Destinations for your customers, but you still need to stock the classics, and genre fiction, and business and computer titles, and self help (well, maybe self-help gets a boutique, too) and 20 or 30 other categories that people expect to find in a modern bookstore—

I’m giving you half a football field; there will be room for all that.

My personal dream (killed before birth due to crushing personal debt — but I buy $2 in lottery tickets every week just in case) is to open much the same kind of store as described above, but instead for Graphic Novels, art books, photo essays, and selected kids titles. I call it the Illustrated Empire. Thoughts of a 20000sq.ft. graphic novel bookstore keep me warm at night, they allow me to shrug off the slings and arrows of outrageous customers, they are my solace when I am most low and an amplifier when I am flying high.

Alas, ‘tis not to be. Until I get money. Come on Mega-Millions, Papa needs a bookstore of his very own. (more, perhaps, on this Pipe Dream in future posts)