Saturday 19 February 2011

How not to stay in business

A few years ago I made this blog post concerning the re-ordering policy of the Borders book store in Canberra. http://chessexpress.blogspot.com/2007/10/how-not-to-sell-chess-books.html
Well Borders has now gone into receivership (both here and in the United States, despite the US and Australian operations being owned by different companies), and while I feel sorry for anyone who is going to lose a job over this, I wondering whether they could have dome more to stay in business (like re-ordering the same sort of books that they had just sold).

4 comments:

Paul said...

Borders did something wrong from an economic standpoint. It is sad to see them go bankrupt.

Anonymous said...

When I looked through chess stock at their Rundle Mall (Adelaide) shop I realised that they had no idea what would sell. Your best customers are the ones who will complain because they care. Unfortunately my opinion didn't count.

Jim said...

When I last went into Borders or Angus and Robertson for that matter as they are/were owned by the same private equity company, their range seemingly consisted of cookbooks, self help garbage or current release rubbish fiction. The only books of any quality were out-of-copyright classics.

And they were intending to float this on the ASX!? Yeah, right, so private equity could extract its cash and leave the punter holding a bag full of ...four letters, starts with s and ends with t and it is not salt.

OzChess.com said...

I am sad to hear they are going belly up. I quite enjoyed going into the Borders across from the Myer Centre, and enjoying a coffee from Gloria Jeans in the same building, whilst reading Borders' magazines.