Tales Of Bad Management At Borders
I hate to keep kicking Borders after they’ve already fallen, but their downfall is a great study how not to run a book chain, or any retail chain for that matter. It’s easy to blame ebooks and/or Amazon for their failure. I’ve already argued that ebooks and Amazon really weren’t the reason why Borders failed.
What was the bookseller’s biggest enemy? Borders themselves. That’s right. I’ve maintained that it was their own bad business decisions that brought about their downfall. And the following comes from a former Borders employee and seems to had further evidence supporting this theory:
Back in ’04 or ’05, they realized they didn’t have a decent web presence when it came to allowing customers to reserve an item on-line and pick it up later. So they rigged up something half-assedly that would send us e-mails when a reserve came through. They didn’t trust store management enough to watch for the e-mails, so they sent every store pagers that would go off when an e-mail wasn’t responded to in a timely enough manner. Pagers. For this purpose only. Every store.
A couple of years later, they decided they didn’t like the way the overhead paging system worked. Whenever an employee would page overhead for a manager or backup, a loud beep would sound before you could say your piece. That was disruptive. And it truly was. Was the answer to have someone re-program the phones to eliminate the beep, and enact practices that require less overhead paging overall? No. For money-starved, payroll-strapped Borders, the answer was to send about 15-20 walkie units with earpieces (a la Old Navy) that would eliminate overhead paging altogether. 15-20 walkies. Every store. Hundreds of stores.
To me it sounds like there was a huge disconnect between upper management and store-level operations. This type of inefficiency can cost a company a lot of money. For Borders, it cost them everything.
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