I can’t explain how I feel about Borders closing. “It’s disappointing” isn’t strong enough, but “it sucks” strikes me as a tad crass.
But it’s more complicated than that. No matter how Borders tried, it always felt somehow inauthentic to me. Truthfully, I never really liked the chain. Even though it stocked my books in-store far longer than Barnes & Noble did. Even though it introduced the concept of cafes in bookshops. Even though some of the earliest dates with my wife, Michelle, were spent at the local Borders. Wait, maybe I did like Borders. Yeah, it’s complicated.
I’ve had trouble explaining how I feel—so I made a video instead.
When Borders first started closing stores in February, 2011, I visited the Kips Bay location in New York City (fifth store in the video, around :38) to see if I could find some bargains. While I was there, this song came on the music system. I didn’t know the track, but the experience was almost as if the store itself was singing, eulogizing its past, wrestling with the knowledge that the end was near. It was a very weird moment—since I’d anthropomorphized a corporation for God’s sake—but on some level, I was moved. Accordingly, this video is an attempt to share the feeling I had that day.
Don’t get me wrong—the chain had been overpriced for years (everything was list price, always) and the Borders Card system never worked, no matter how many times I gave them my email. Also, we hear about independent bookshops closing all the time, and some of that was due to entities like Borders, shoving their way into every nook and cranny of our nation. Nonetheless, seeing the failure of a massive bookstore chain—one that had put so many local bookshops out of business—was even more sad in a way. For some communities, Borders was the only bookseller they had left, and its closing forced those customers to resort to the solitary, empty experience of buying books online—or worse, just not buying books at all.
On the other hand, I had to use an app on my phone to find out what the song I’d heard was, and then headed to the CD department to buy the album (Longwave’s 2003 opus, The Strangest Things—which is excellent, by the way). Borders didn’t carry it, but they had about 5,000 different John Mayer discs. I wound up buying the LP (vinyl!) via eBay and bought the individual song off iTunes for this video. Computerized commerce was my only recourse—that’s how the world works these days, and it ain’t gonna change back.
If there’s anything to take away from this then, it’s to support retailers you like that have communities built around their businesses—bookstores, CD shops, coffee houses, theaters, libraries, restaurants and so on. Don’t take them for granted; go to them. Use them. Enjoy them. You might think they’re too firmly established to vanish into thin air, but if you don’t visit them, they’ll evaporate into nothingness—just like Borders did.