BilmBlog500

I'm going to follow up yesterday's Borders post mortem with some numbers. For the year ending Jan. 30 2010, Borders had 508 superstores at year-end, with average sales of 4.5M at each of those superstores. Jan 2008, same # of stores, average sales more like $5.6M. B&N thru early May 2010, average store $6M in sales, more like $6.5 three years earlier. So, Borders had a 20% loss in average per store sales over two years, and dropping from being 15% off your average competitor's average store to being 25% off the pace of the competition. We go back far enough, we will find a day when sales Borders vs B&N were near parity for the average superstore. To achieve this, Borders has invested considerable sums in remodels. I have been in some that have gone through each of these three rounds:. 1. 2000/2001, the ones where the diagonal lines were taken out and Kohls-like central "racetrack" aisles added to make the stores more shoppable. Not a big expense, m...

To celebrate St. Patrick's Day, I visited Borders #40 in Bohemia, Long Island. Well, no, that would be crazy. Really, I celebrated St. Patrick's Day by travelling out to Long Island for the Grand Opening of the Whole Foods Market in Lake Grove, NY. Not as crazy, right! And the Borders was on the way. Like, go to a totally different line on the Long Island Rail Road and have a two-mile walk to the Borders but then the Suffolk County bus goes from directly in front of the Borders pretty much right to the Whole Foods along the way, not crazy at all. I took this picture as I approached the Borders because you're looking at a little piece of American corporate history that I don't think you can see too many other places right now. In fact, this may be just about the only place in the country where you can see it. For in the early 1990s, K-Mart decided that the future was in diversification. It acquired Sports Authority, it acquired Office Max, it acquired Borders to pa...

Maybe I need to get out of town more. In around 33 hours actually in the Washington DC area over the weekend, I managed to see 3 plays, visit 1 B. Dalton, 4 B&Ns, 4 Borders, chow down at 2 Whole Foods and a Pizzeria Uno, do the Saturday NY Times puzzle, two from Sunday, a regular and a cryptic, read 70% of the new Violette Malan book and get started on Tanya Huff's next. I'll talk more about the plays later, but just a few idle observations. I've sung the praises of Georgetown Cupcake before, no doubt I'll do so again, they're some of the only overpriced cupcakes that at least taste really, really, really good. But what is the world coming to when I pop by their new expanded flagship location in Georgetown and see over 30 people curled around in the store waiting to buy cupcakes. It's just a cupcake. It's not worth waiting, sorry, no possible way unless it's your child's bar mitzvah and the caterer's truck with the viennese table pastries...

In many ways, Boston is where it all began for me. February 1979, my parents and my younger brother are staying at the Sheraton Boston the same weekend as Boskone, we're allowed into the dealer's room even though we don't have a membership, somebody's pimping free samples of Omni Magazine, before you know it I'm reading stories by Orson Scott Card and George R. R. Martin, getting hooked on the stuff, and some 31 years later I'm one of the leading literary agents for sf/fantasy. There's also the six weeks I spent at Harvard in the summer of 1981 overshooting my allowance on movies, comic books and fantasy and sf novels. So whenever I go to an sf-y something in Boston, it always has a nice extra bit of resonance for me. With not too much lead time, I decided to take a break from NYC and head up to Boskone this year. So what's up in Beantown? Since my last visit a few years ago, the good news is that Pandemonium Books in Cambridge survived a scare a f...

For the first time in a long time, much longer than I can remember and this is probably not a good thing, I took four days off where I did not once check e-mail and tried to minimize the amount of time I even spent thinking about the job. I did have around 100 e-mails waiting when I got back, but the world and JABberwocky seem to have survived. This was to Connecticut to visit with my family. My parents came up for a few days, and the entire family (less one niece in Israel) got together Saturday afternoon for a seven-week preemie celebration of my mother's 80th birthday. I got her the 40th birthday card I neglected to obtain for her the first time around; that's the kind of guy I am. My mode of transport to CT is usually Metro-North Commuter Railroad to New Haven then Amtrak to Hartford. I could take Amtrak from Penn Station in NY, but Penn Station is such a pit of existence while the New Haven train station is so nice that I'd rather have time to kill in New Haven if ...