There's a Borders right in my area that my daughter use to go to frequently. Yes, it's sad but many things that we've known for so many years will be gone. For instance, newspapers. I use to get the paper delivered every day to my home for years. I haven't had that for at least 8 years now.

Oh, and what about the post office? That was always a good place to work with good benefits and longevity likely. I had a neighbor who worked in the Post Office for nearly 30 years. I don't know that they'll close every post office down but it's a dying business and I think many will close.
Why, by paying all my bills and receiving all my statements on-line I seldom need to buy stamps. I use to buy a book a month. Now, a book of stamps lasts me for several months.

Oh, and I'm not sure who does this job, BUT when was the last time you needed a phonebook or a phone operator to get a telephone number? Here in CA we get at least 3 huge huge books which I never use. I heard there is a way to opt out and I am gonna try that because I never use a phone book anymore.

I just don't think there is a way to stop certain businesses from folding up. It is sad for jobs, but I don't see a way out. You can't stop technology. It's moving so fast.


TIS

Funny Tis, I was just going to make these same points!

These are the same companies that as they were hurting, kept raising their prices more and more. Which in turn drove more and more people away from them.
The newspaper here in Syracuse is just a joke. They are more like a large penny saver type paper. They started to fill it with coupons from companies who are trying to get more business
with value savings.

The newspaper telling everyone that the money you save with these coupons would pay for the newspaper. Which is over priced. The news itself is over a day or two old by the time it makes it to print. The stories for filler are just old stories from other places. They have no real reporters or story writers.

In fact most big happenings hits your blackberry/ e-phone ten mins. after it is reported. So you are reading it almost as soon as it happens, not a day later.

Other things to go are video rental stores and how many shoe repair places have you seen?

Somewhat maudlin but that is Mitch....

Mitch Albom: As Borders fades, so does bookstore magic

I still remember walking into the original Borders bookstore in Ann Arbor. It seemed to take up the entire block.

"You gotta see this place!" a friend had gushed, and when we pulled open the doors, I knew what he meant. A symphony exploded in my head. This was 1985, a little more than a decade after Tom and Louis Borders, two brothers who were students at the University of Michigan, slapped together a used book operation on the second floor of a building.

Now, here on State Street, was this massive pantheon to the written works of the world. New books. Used books. Local authors. International authors. The classics. The arts. Politics. History. Miles of paperbacks. Endless aisles. As a young writer, you wandered through the place and said, "One day, maybe me..."

It was magic.
Magic fades.

Last week I read that Borders is on the brink of liquidation. Barring some final miracle, the company that grew from one Ann Arbor outlet to more than 1,200 stores worldwide would be reduced to scraps, sold in pieces like the bargain-bin books that once sat outside its entrance.

Of all the words I formed when I first walked through those doors, "extinction" was the furthest from my mind.

The bottom line
What has happened to the American bookstore? The cozy yet slightly musty place where a reader could wander among the great storytellers of our time and faintly hear them calling from the shelves, "Read me! I'm a heartbreaking love story! Read me, I'll tell you the history of the Great War!..."

It grew from a dimly lit space to a high-ceilinged warehouse to a coffee-smelling, couch-laden superstore to a multipurpose entertainment outlet. The old bookstores were swallowed by chains. Packaging, bundling, synergizing and the tantalization of profits became the principles. Actual books in these places seemed to be an afterthought, nudged aside by videos, calendars, music and electronics.

But Borders? Surely Borders was safe, right? Didn't we have a soft spot for them? Anyone who ever made that pilgrimage to Ann Arbor on a Sunday afternoon, anyone who ever lost track of the hours while cooing at the sheer enormity of the written word, would insist, absolutely and without hesitation, that Borders, like mankind, would somehow survive.

Instead, we are once again reminded that no matter how lovely the casing, how beautiful the print, how fetching the binding or how stunning the cover, business is still business.
And books are a tough business.

In our backyard
The original Borders operation sold to Kmart in 1992. I guess that was the start of the end. It was somewhat merged with Waldenbooks, was expanded, massaged, made international. It multiplied, went electronic, grew a Web presence, developed an e-reader. It became part of the very expansion that would jeopardize the industry.

But for all the maneuvers, Borders hasn't made a profit in five years, and it keeps getting smaller, losing people, closing doors and praying for a savior. It has been in bankruptcy since February, and its last best chance may have faded last week when a private equity investor deal collapsed.

The problem is people don't love books the way they once did, nor do they read them the same way. Cheaper electronic versions undermine the need for shelf-space. Younger audiences who haven't grown up with rainy afternoons spent inside book pages, don't snap up the latest great read -- unless there's a certain vampire or wizard attached. The backlists of mid-level authors are not lucrative for the balance sheet. And the pressure for profits to keep the stock price high runs diametrically opposite to the slow, meandering, long-term customer approach that used to define bookstores.

I have shopped in Borders, spoken in Borders, done Web programs with Borders, even met a series of Borders CEOs. These are good people who still, for the most part, love books. And for years, we in Michigan always considered it our backyard chain.

But the world has changed. The printed word is gasping. A symphony doesn't play anymore when you pull open a Borders door. And soon, sadly, the doors may not be there, either.

I also resent the changes in the publishing industry, but at times Mitch Albom can really make you want to hang yourself.

That is his niche..

Rich Lowry's neocon take on why Borders' closing is a good thing .

Borders' fall: good for all

Why gov't should save no biz

Rich Lowry, NY Post

You have to have a heart of stone not to feel a pang of sadness at the passing of the bookstore Borders.

The retailer is liquidating its 399 remaining outlets and letting go nearly 11,000 employees. Gone will be the era when no shopping-mall parking lot in America seemed complete without an adjoining Borders, offering up its capacious aisles to browse for books you had no idea you needed.

Nostalgia aside, the extinction of Borders is the very model of a free-market economy at work. The store fell victim to the unyielding injunction of a truly creative economy: "Adapt, or die." It failed to keep up with evolving technology and shifting consumer preferences, and so has been forced to make way for more adept competitors.

This ruthlessly efficient reallocation of resources took place because Borders wasn't big or politically connected enough to get a bailout; because its employees didn't belong to a powerful union favored by the White House; and because it didn't sell something, like green energy, deemed worthy of taxpayer support. The upshot of the changes that buried the store, and were allowed to unspool without governmental interference, will be cheaper and more readily available books.

The story of Borders has been repeated again and again by all the countless American companies that have risen to prominence only to disappear. It started with an inspired innovation only to be overtaken by subsequent innovations. It had an advantage that, in new conditions, became a liability. It lost its footing on the free market's ceaseless wheel of change.

Read about Borders circa 1995 and it is lauded as "a chain that seems as attuned to the new world of technology as the refined old world of literary society." It had a state-of-the-art inventory system. It stocked its enormous stores with tens of thousands of titles. Borders thrived by providing choice and convenience, two of the pillars of the consumer economy.

Then it didn't recognize quickly enough the new ways of delivering them. It had to rely on Amazon to sell its books online, a boost to the online retailer that would do so much to make the Borders model obsolete. It branched out into sales of CDs and DVDs, an initially profitable move that backfired when the music industry went digital. It missed out on e-books. Locked into leases at uneconomical locations, its voluminous real estate began to weigh it down.

Barnes & Noble, in contrast, developed a website to sell its books online itself and marketed its own e-book reader, the Nook. It secured a prized partnership with Starbucks for the coffee at its cafes. It lost $59 million last quarter, but it's still standing.

In the late 1990s, the romantic comedy "You've Got Mail" was built around the heartlessness of a mega-bookstore moving into a New York neighborhood and killing off a small family bookshop. Now, it's the turn of the mega-bookstores to be eaten, with delivery of a $9.99 e-book just a few clicks away. In a free economy, the top dog always has to run scared.

Does anyone fear Microsoft anymore, the behemoth that government spent so much time and energy trying to cut down to size in the late 1990s? The same thing, eventually, will befall Google and, yes, even Facebook.

Government exists in an entirely different plane, characterized by stasis and the lack of market or any other kind of discipline. USA Today reports that "federal employees' job security is so great that workers in many agencies are more likely to die of natural causes than get laid off or fired." Washington is locked in a debate over whether health-care programs designed in the 1960s can ever be reformed to account for new realities.

If Borders were a government agency, its budget would have been fattened up during the past few years, and it'd survive in perpetuity, whatever its merits.

comments.lowry@ nationalreview.com

Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/ope...P#ixzz1SwD23KZQ

My daughter went to the local Borders today. She said it was crowded, but only 10% off. Booooooo.

Now it's up to 20% off on most items, 40% on a few. I get an extra 10% off with their membership card but that ends next week. Probably next week they'll be up to 30-40% on most items and in 2-3 weeks to 50-60% off. Not much I really want anyway..