terrific talk on the sad demise of Borders in prospect by Dan Raff, Wharton, at Penn History of Material Texts, this Monday, 5.15, VP 6th: This talk concerns the business history of Borders, the chain of retail bookstores active from 1971 until two years ago and in its day the poster child for the possibilities of book superstores. One generally thinks of bookstores as small, fusty, and perhaps even obscure; but Borders stores were large, unusually broadly merchandised, modern, and conspicuous. One also generally thinks of bookstores as being single-establishment firms. From the early 1980s that wasn’t true of Borders either: the company first made the Fortune 500 six years after its 1995 IPO and its stores were a familiar sight, and to voracious readers a welcome one, across the United States (and indeed, for a time, in a number of major cities abroad). On the other hand, the collapse, when it came in 2011, was complete. The company filed for a bankruptcy reorganization in February of that year but no credible reorganization plan or bidders emerged in the course of the springtime; and the firm’s remaining assets were sold off for whatever could be obtained in the late summer. It is popularly thought that the firm was fatally weakened by Internet competition, with the coup-de-grace coming from electronic reading devices. As an explanation, this lies somewhere between too simple and Whiggery of the first order. Economists have suggested at least since Mandeville and Smith that the virtues of capitalism lie in giving consumers what they want, and cheaply. I will argue that the problems of Borders lay in vices that were precisely the underside of capitalism’s classic virtues. I will also argue that you can’t understand this sort of history without taking the agency of individuals into consideration. I expect the talk will raise questions that go far beyond this one company’s eventually sad end. If those planning to attend wanted to put themselves into a particularly fruitful frame of mind, they might stroll quickly through the University Bookstore (which is operated by Barnes & Noble, the surviving book superstore chain) and the Penn Book Center on 34th Street on their way to the session.
Posted on: Tue, 24 Sep 2013 19:40:57 +0000
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