Bye, Bye Bookstore
February 14th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
As many of you have already heard, Borders is (reportedly) filing for bankruptcy this week and closing a third of their stores (about 200 stores).
This makes me really sad.
I’ve worked at a bookstore off and on for the past two years. The setting in my WIP (work in progress) is a bookstore. I work on my novel and research for my home office regularly at – you guessed it – a bookstore. I love bookstores and their cousins, libraries.
Given how abysmal the country is in terms of education and literacy, closing bookstores seems like a step in the wrong direction. Even worse, it seems the stores are closing not because of the public refusing to buy books, but largely because of mismanagement and greed (while they pay staff minimum wage, I’m sure CEO pay has not suffered during these difficult years).
And if Borders manages to stay around but cuts their lowest performing stores, what stores are most likely to be cut? Presumably ones in low-income neighborhoods.
And if the average Borders store employs 20 – 30 people, you can add a minimum of 4,000 people to the unemployment statistics.
And for authors such as myself, there goes another place the public can purchase your book.
