Why Must Everything Go?
You may think of Borders going out of business in the same way you thought of Blockbuster’s recent demise; which is to say, if you thought of it at all, it was probably with a “good riddance” shrug while clicking through to Amazon.
Yes, today saw the release of a lengthy PDF detailing the 200 stores slated to close all across the country (the company is officially still open for business, but I’ll be surprised if the chain is more than a trivia question by year’s end). I opened the list expecting one or two in Chicago, but it looks like there’s only one or two left. I’m not going to defend the book/music/movie empire as a model of solid business practices, but I will be sad to see those big, beautiful red letters stricken from the landscape.
To me, Borders wasn’t just the mom-and-pop-bookstore-killing monolith that, say, Wal-Mart was to grocers or Blockbuster was to video stores; I mean, it was that, but more than anything, it was a place to go and get my hands on media. Yes, my hands. You remember holding books in your hands, don’t you? Or CDs? CDs…they play music.
I’ll admit that the discovery of on-line shopping slashed my in-store buying experience by ninety percent. Who wants to pay cover price on a new Stephen King novel when Amazon has it for thirty percent off, and there’s no sales tax? As for movies and music, forget about it. Borders clung to its bizarre policy of charging the suggested retail price for everything; even in my most desperate, urge-to-splurge moments of weakness, I never bought a movie or compact disc from Borders without a coupon—more often than not, I trudged over to Best Buy, where the prices approached sensible (without ever actually getting there).
I loved going to Borders and perusing the new-release tables; combing the magazine stands for the latest issue of HorrorHound; and running my finger along the spines of the seemingly endless shelves of blu-rays (previously DVDs; previously VHS tapes; yes, it was a mere twelve years ago that I squirreled away enough money to buy the BBC cassettes of Red Dwarf, series one through seven—one per paycheck until I owned them all—only Borders carried the complete run).
While it’s great to save money and have books and films delivered to work, nothing will replace the satisfaction—the triumph—of finding the perfect copy of a prized book in the store; crisp, white pages; crinkled-corners-free dust jacket; and no bumps on the rigid cardboard cover itself. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve received a book from Amazon that looked like it had fallen from the top shelf of the warehouse, through a ring of fire and lint-trap scrapings, before settling in the blood-booger-stained hands of whatever wage-slave happened to be working the hub nearest to my office; he/she didn’t give a shit if my copy of Giger’s Alien had a giant fold in the front cover or pages that were coming loose—as long as it fit in the flimsy mailer, I was still getting a book and a deal.
Part of the reason I’m so obsessed with collecting perfect books is because of all the amazing book signings I attended at Chicago-area Borders stores. I watched a sweat-drenched Lewis Black turn a broken-air-conditioner fiasco into a brilliant comedic lecture a few summers ago. I argued with Borders staff—and, by extension, the Secret Service—when they wouldn’t let a girl use the bathroom during the four-hour wait to meet Bill Clinton. Garrison Keillor regaled a packed top floor of the Michigan Avenue store with stories of his early days in college radio, and David Sedaris thanked me profusely for waiting in line for six hours, even though I’d only wanted an autograph and not to tell him my life story—which is what pretty much everyone else in line did; hence the six-hour line.
In what other venue could I have heard Carl Bernstein, Wesley Clark, Candace Bushnell, Ernest Borgnine, Al Franken, Kathy Griffin, Arianna Huffington, and so many other fascinating people tell stories and field questions, where the price of admission was the cost of a book? Borders. The best times involved taking friends who’d never been to a book signing and initiating them in the ways of the wristband system; or getting sucked into the mad party vortex of a Chuck Palahniuk event; The day Eric Idle serenaded the crowd I was in with “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life”, I knew I’d hit a crucial Save Point, after which I could die happy.
Even if it was artificial, or just perceived, there was always a sense of community at Borders; I guess if you give metro hipsters a hub with free wi-fi and marginally offensive latte prices, you’re bound to have a steady flow of aspiring writers, students, businessmen and retirees milling about. But there was a comforting hum every time I walked into one of these multi-level bookstores that no amount of indie-store ire or anti-corporate rhetoric (regardless of validity) could diminish.
And soon, they’ll be gone. My friend Graham told me today that the Michigan Avenue Borders was empty as recently as a few weeks ago. I can’t even fathom that. And the Clark Street store, across from the Landmark Century is on the Doomed List—as is the one in Evanston, which is also kitty-corner to a Century theatre; both of these places are landmarks to me, places where I killed time before movies or saw famous people speak, or just dropped into in search of new, cool things to peruse.
What will fill these empty buildings now? The shitty economy is partially the reason these places no longer exist, or will soon no longer exist; Borders stores were massive, as a rule, and I can’t imagine another company swooping in and filling them up. As I drive past abandoned strip malls and Blockbuster stores with banners advertising reasonable prices for movies (how many decades did it take for this to happen?), I wonder if there’ll be any landscape to appreciate in fifty years.
As window-shopping gives way to Windows shopping, as home theatres become more comprehensive and ubiquitous than multiplexes, I imagine a sterile concrete graveyard surrounding hive-like honeycombs of efficiency apartments. We’ll live in compact, white-walled boxes, consuming information on three-inch screens and getting food delivered to us via anonymous trucks backing up groceries to feed-slots (GrubHub is the Skynet of fast food).
Look at me, weeping for a brand and raging against the cultural apocalypse.