2009 Post-mortems, the second

Borders reported its holiday sales results and saw another large decrease in same store sales, around 10% excluding the large drop in media sales (the music/DVD footage was slashed at most stores from a year ag0), around twice the size of the same store sales drop at Barnes & Noble. The drop was similar at the Waldenbooks stores that are remaining open moving into 2010.

Some of this is self-inflicted. I noticed over the course of the holiday season that I was getting fewer coupons as a Borders Rewards member, for smaller discounts. This meant that the gross margin on sales increased by 130 basis points (i.e., 1.3%), which means that the sales were more profitable. Fewer people dashing in just to redeem a big 40% off coupon and not much else. But it would have been nice to have seen a nicer hold in sales than we did.

Comments

  1. Emma MichaelsJanuary 18, 2010 at 8:59 PM

    great post. I agree that other years I found these amazing coupons and discounts and last Christmas I hardly found anything that really made me was to take the extra time to go to Borders or Barnes&Noble instead of my local bookstore. Thanks for posting your thoughts!!!!

    Sincerely,
    Emma

    ReplyDelete
  2. MykeJanuary 19, 2010 at 5:43 PM

    I don't think that's the problem. I remember reading somewhere that the problem is that there isn't as much of a markup on ebooks, and this Christmas was the first season where ebooks outsold printed matter. Also, I'm fearing epiracy is beginning to make a serious dent. We have a generation of people who are growing up never having paid for music. With the advances in ereader tech, we'll soon have a generation that has never paid for books and won't understand why anyone ever would.

    ReplyDelete

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