I went to my Borders today, and I can say confidently that almost nothing in the store was cheaper than Amazon's offerings. Even with the additional discounts.
Most of the panic-buyers were using gift cards.
I think people are just going to go for the sales if they have a gift card to spend...
If their closing sale is not going to get any better than the 20-40% off that they have now, it isn't really worth it. Like I said, I might pick up a couple of the magazines that are 40% off, but that's it.
But if they make the discounts 60-80%+ shortly before they actually close, I might run in there and pick up one or two books.
By the time the discounts get above 40%, there isn't much left worth buying. All the good inventory was shipped to stores that are staying open and performing well.
If by "good" you mean "popular", I might still be OK. I'm not interested in Stephen King, biographies of politicians (or Justin Bieber), the Twilight or Harry Potter series, or the DVDs.
As far as I know, they are not shipping anything out. Shipping it from AK would cost them a fortune. I expect everything to be liquidated locally, including the store itself.
It's quite funny that the Richard Dawkins section was like the most popular place in my store. I thought I'd have free-reign over that spot, but I guess not.If by "good" you mean "popular", I might still be OK. I'm not interested in Stephen King, biographies of politicians (or Justin Bieber), the Twilight or Harry Potter series, or the DVDs.
As far as I know, they are not shipping anything out. Shipping it from AK would cost them a fortune. I expect everything to be liquidated locally, including the store itself.
Borders failed because of two factors:
1) They don't have a successful mail-order book business to fall back upon.
2) They totally blew it by not shipping their own branded name e-book reader when the field was wide open, especially with the limited distribution of the Amazon Kindle until just recently.
As such, I see Barnes & Noble be even more aggressive into the e-book market, because this will allow for a lot more titles to be available for the Nook e-book reader.
Snip..
The magazines are a great deal at 40% off. I picked up a bunch. The bargain books are all great at 40% off...but most of the good bargain books were gone by the time I got there. I also picked up a dice game. I would like some shelving and will chack that out later.
An in other news....
Looks like Borders will be closing a total of 275 (instead of the original 200):
http://blogs.wvgazette.com/wvbookfestival/2011/03/15/borders-bankruptcy-update/
Might as well throw the ones in closer to the end of lease....
An in other news....
Looks like Borders will be closing a total of 275 (instead of the original 200):
http://blogs.wvgazette.com/wvbookfestival/2011/03/15/borders-bankruptcy-update/
Might as well throw the ones in closer to the end of lease....
Now totally out of business - all the rest of the stores closing...
http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2011/07/18/its-almost-official-borders-is-dead/
“What happens is this: The rewards cards are about to be worthless. Any kind of store credit is about to become worthless,” Cohen said. Once the liquidator takes over, the records for those accounts may no longer be available, so “Go and redeem them as quickly as possible.”
I've bought a fair number of books over the years from Amazon, but they are the bane of brick and mortar book stores, so I try to avoid them when possible.
I shudder at the thought of most book stores being driven out of business by Amazon, even the big boys like Border's and Barnes & Noble. They are still good places to go to look for occasional sales, relatively cheap classics or for the latest bestsellers.
With that being said, I buy 90% of my books from used book stores, where I get them at 1/2 to 1/10th the price.