Borders to Close Chicago Flagship
by Claire Kirch -- Publishers Weekly, 2/26/2009 3:33:00 PM
Borders stunned the Chicago bookselling community Thursday afternoon by announcing the ailing company’s plans to close the Windy City’s flagship Borders store, located on a heavily trafficked street corner on Chicago’s prime “Magnificent Mile,” in January 2010. The Michigan Avenue Borders store, which opened in 1995, is, at 49,881 square feet of retail space, not only the largest Borders store in Chicago, it’s the largest store in the chain (the average Borders store contains 27,000 square feet of retail space).
The store is one of 20 Borders stores in the region, including seven inside the city itself. Borders representatives maintain that the 19 other Chicagoland outlets will remain open, and that, as the time approaches to close the Michigan Avenue store, its 100 employees will be transferred to other Chicagoland Borders stores whenever possible.
In a statement released by Borders, Steve Davis, Borders Group senior v-p, stated, “It’s a difficult decision to close a store and we’ve done all that we can to keep this location open, but like a handful of other stores we have recently closed in cities ranging from Cincinnati to Santa Monica, this store has not met our profit objectives for some time now. Therefore, we have no choice but to close the store in 2010.”
Linda Bubon, co-owner of Chicago’s Women & Children First bookstore, who, with several other independent businesses, lobbied three years ago against a Borders store opening within a mile of her own store in the Andersonville neighborhood, was surprised that a store that once had been described as one of Borders’ top-performing stores nationally was closing its doors. But she’s also not surprised that Borders is closing down stores, since she believes the chain opened too many new stores while keeping underperforming stores. Bubon fears for the impact of Borders’s “overborrowing, overinvesting, overbuilding and then failing” upon the entire industry.
“Ten years ago, I would have hooted and hollered,” Bubon said. “Today, I think it’s a real tragedy for the bookselling industry. Publishers will want their money sooner, contracts will be canceled, and print runs will be reduced. I fear for publishers that might be brought down by this.”
