Borders Westwood

I just updated a blog post about bookstores that are set to close, and as promised I wanted to talk a little more about the Westwood Borders.

This was one of the very first Borders to open in Southern California, store #56, and one of the very first Borders I'd ever visited on the West Coast. That would have been in 1996 when I went out for the WorldCon in Anaheim, and made the rounds of what was then a relatively small selection of stores in the earlier days of the book superstore era. If memory serves, Borders in Westwood, West Hollywood, South Bay/Torrance and Brea would have been on the list.

It wasn't a great store for sf/fantasy, but it was a major location. I mean, you didn't have a lot of superstores then, they were big news, and this one was huge. Lots of room for books, for music, for videos, for everything. A United Artists movie theatre triplex was on the next block. Godawful underground parking garage, personified why I've enjoyed LA more now that I'm not renting a car.

But oh, how times have changed.

How many 1980s era sloped floor multiplexes are still around? They sucked, most of them. The screens weren't that big, you could hardly see over anyone in the next row. That UA multiplex next door to the Borders is long since a drugstore. A few miles south on Westwood Blvd. there's a fancy new Landmark Cinemas. I'm sure the loss of the movie theatre hurt traffic at the Borders.

There were three times as many Borders in southern CA in summer 2008 than in summer 1996. And B&N as well. Guess what's next to that spiffy new Landmark Cinemas a few blocks down Westwood Blvd? A spiffy newer B&N!

And then there's that whole Borders: Books Music Movies kind of thing that you had going when the Borders in Westwood opened up many many years ago. That's why the store was so big, after all. Because it had a really big book section, a really big music section, a really big movie section. In a 25,000 square foot store as Borders has been downsizing the music and movies sections at most locations in the past five years, they could put in a little toy/game stuff and a bigger bargain books section and kind of fill out the space. There was no possible way to do that in Westwood. You can't justify expanding the book section when people are migrating to e-books, this store was made for 1995 and now its 2010, and Borders had no idea how to fill the space in Westwood. So they didn't. The last renovation they just took some bookshelves, blocked off a big section of the upstairs, at least 1/8 maybe even 1/6 of the total square footage of the store, and called it an "events area." Where they really didn't have very many events.

Well, you can't run a business too well when you're renting 35,000 square feet of space for something you can do comfortably in 25,000 square feet of space.

And in the mid to late 1990s, Borders built a lot of very big boxes. With their same store sales drops in recent years, some of those big boxes could be doing two-thirds the sales per square foot of five or eight years ago.

I'm extremely saddened to see the Westwood Borders closing. It has been a part of my life for fifteen years, not a big part but a kind of comfort to knowing that it was there waiting for me.

But if Borders is going to be around five years from now, they've got to find ways to downsize large chunks of their real estate portfolio, or they've got to hope a whole lot of people have a deep and abiding urge to build their bears at their local Borders, because there is no way there's a viable business in five years selling books, music and movies in a lot of these stores at their current square footage. Many of the Borders which are confirmed as closing I haven't been to, but the Thousand Oaks store was another big and uneconomical box certainly.

B&N hasn't been hit quite as badly by this because their movie and music sections in stores that had were generally much smaller. They are now hoping to fill some of these sections with expanded toy and game boutiques. A B&N in Manchester CT that I will see during Thanksgiving week is one of the test stores for this section, and I'm looking forward to checking it out. And I've devoted most of this post to the problems at Borders, but don't think that B&N, even with the Nook, is immune. Does your local B&N look like it did last year? No way! They've added their Nook boutique, and more toys and games are on the way. Borders has bigger problems and more vulnerability, but if bookstores are going to be around in 2015 they can't look like they did in 1995.

It is a little bit frightening to think in a capitalist world just how quickly things can change. In the 1980s, the sloped floor six-screen cinema was really quite the big deal. Ten years later, the Borders in Westwood was quite the big deal. I hope the book superstore will have a bigger, longer, better run than the sloped floor multiplex, but there are no guarantees.

You can read here the latest earnings release from Books a Million. Same store sales down 5.8%, a small loss in the pre-holiday quarter, as weak hardcover sales don't compensate for strength in areas like bargain books. I've posted here about the declining hardcover sales we're seeing on many books, and the uncertainty of just how many are lost and how many are just migrating to e-books.

closing time

News is trickling out here and there of bookstores that are set to close after the holidays or even before.

Here in New York, there's a big flagship Barnes & Noble by Lincoln Center that will be closing after a 15-year run with the expiration of its lease. A fashion discounter called Century 21 quickly leased the entire space.

Joseph Beth booksellers has filed Chapter 11, and will be closing half its stores. They owe millions of dollars to Ingram, hundreds of thousands of dollars to Random House, and more. This is a real shame. I went to Pittsburgh a few years ago when Brandon Sanderson did a signing at their store in Pittsburgh that will be closing. It was a great store with great staff.

Joseph Beth shares some lineage with Borders. In the dawn of time at Borders in the 1980s, Borders licensed its inventory system and may have even done warehouse fulfillment for some independent bookstores in the midwest, and if memory serves Davis-Kiss was among the chains they were doing this for. Joseph Beth purchased Davis Kidd several years ago and a DK location is among those closing as a result of the bankruptcy filing.

And in Charlotte, NC both a Joseph Beth and a Borders will be closing.

Besides Charlotte, I'm sad to see that the Thousand Oaks, CA Borders which was my 200th visited is closing down. Word is also coming out of store closings in West Windsor/Princeton Junction NJ and Bloomington IN. Their store on Chicago's Michigan Ave. will close, but this is one year later than originally planned after a last-minute lease extension. One write-up in Publishers Marketplace said Borders may be closing two dozen stores, but I'm not finding that many with the news already out.

The early and mid 1990s were peak times for opening superstores, so with 15 year leases from 1996 and years of declining sales, no real surprise Borders has real estate that it can't justify keeping. But it's sad.

On a happier Borders note, Borders does have 25 "pop-up" Borders Express stores in place for the holidays, full list in their press release here. This is a very good idea, to take advantage of the peak holiday shopping season and empty space at the local mall to broaden reach profitably.

With the Thousand Oaks Borders closing, good news that a nearby Barnes & Noble in Calabasas, CA that had been threatened with closure ended up having a new lease agreed upon. That has the same landlord as the B&N in Encino, CA, where the neighborhood protested its replacement by a CVS. This may be the B&N where Alan Ball found a copy of DEAD UNTIL DARK while waiting for a dentist appointment, so I'm particularly saddened that a historic site may be going. There's a store in southern Ft. Worth that appears to be on the way out. Will that help the Borders that's up the street a bit, i.e., can some of these store closings help those that remain or are we all doomed? And also a B&N in Hobart, IN, and one in Fremont, CA that is across the street from a Borders that could no doubt use a business boost.

And updating this on November 19 2010, thanks to a report in Publishers Marketplace, they have gotten confirmation from Borders that approximately 17 stores will be closing. They don't yet have details on all, but have confirmed additional locations in Marlton, NJ; Westwood, Santa Barbara and Carlsbad, CA; and Overland Park, KS. According to the Borders website, the Overland Park store was #23 and had been around for over 17 years, so likely similar for Marlton (#26). The Santa Barbara store was #123, so that would also have been around quite a while. I'm going to do a separate post about the Borders in Westwood.

News of the day

So a few things to comment upon from Thursday's Wall St. Journal. I'm not going to provide links since so much of their content is behind a pay wall that I may not be able to access the articles, who knows about you.

First, Walter Mossberg reviews another entrant in the e-book reader wars, the Irex. He wasn't thrilled with it. I wouldn't be since it doesn't have a note-taking feature. The one aspect of it which really intrigued me was that it's tied in with Newspaper Direct, which offers facsimile editions of tons of newspapers from all over. Talk about love! That's the kind of site where I wonder if I had an iPad to access a facsimile subscription to the Washington Post just how close to heaven that might be.

Second, there's a little article about an arrangement in Norway to arrange electronic copying of all of the books in the national library. All of the publishers are signed on, all of the author's groups, if you're a Norwegian author you are included, though you can opt out. This sounds like --- The Google Settlement !!! I'll continue to advocate for that to go through in some form, with the continued caveat that I wish Google would supply authors with a digitized copies of their scanned books. In the US, we're terribly unlikely to get a non-profit government arranged thing like was worked out in Norway, but we need something like this.

A couple other publishing news items. Books a Million had a 1.3% drop in sales for last year but increased profits by $700K thru tight inventory management. And bookstore sales in January were up 2% according to the Census Bureau statistics. Both of these were reported in the Publishers Weekly news daily, and you can enjoy the Books a Million conference call by clicking here. You can't find a better way to spend ten minutes. The 4th quarter was worse than the year as a whole, which they blame in part because of tough comparisons against the Twilight books a year ago.