Borders is Bankrupt

[jon]

While Amazon.com long ago proved naysayers wrong who said that Amazon would never make a profit, brick and mortar bookstore Borders has declared bankruptcy. Borders owned 650 bookstores across the U.S. and the Canadian chain Indigo patterned itself after them.

One of the key reasons for Borders' failure is rooted in its misunderstanding of all things digital. For example, rather than build their own Internet sales channel, as competitor Barnes and Noble did, Borders used competitor Amazon as its Internet sale. How dumb is that?

You can read the full story here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/busin ... .html?_r=1

[groundwave]

Indigo could very well wind up following it's U.S. mentor all the way to a similar demise.

Before Christmas I was pricing out a newly released box set of a well known action, sci-fi movie trilogy on Blu-ray. Indigo's online asking price was $85 with (I believe) shipping gratis. Amazon.ca (that's right, .ca, with all prices in Cdn dollars ) was asking $48 - shipping included. I had later spotted the same item priced "on special" for $58 at a physical Future Shop store.

I wonder if the situation is different within the book portion of the business. For Indigo's sake, I hope so.

[PMC]

I am not surprised to the see the u.s. operation fail... many things are failing there. Don't be surprised if a company from China buys the remains.

A point to buying a book is get the clerk to scan the price to see if it has been lowered, but not changed on the book price sticker itself.

There was a tech book that had a $10 difference when I bought it.

Coles/Chapters has a great computer system to find books. Here at the Coles store, they encourage people to use the computer to search with, because the store is small... the nearest Chapters is 110km in Nanaimo.