I wonder what those Borders employees are going to do (and wonder when I'm going to be in the same position)

by Ken

Of course I remembered about the Borders bankruptcy. I'm not a total chump. Still, when I found myself yesterday in sudden need of a decent map or maybe even a street atlas for those neighbor cities just across the Hudson from Lower Manhattan, Jersey City and Hoboken, my first thought was the Borders more or less right around the corner from my office.

Now that store, and certainly not the whole chain, wasn't going to stay in business from my business. Like a lot of readers, I suspect, I've mostly switched away from bust-out retail for as much of my book-buying as I can manage, either to online sources or to discount outlets (where possible). Still, every now and then I need something and I need it now, and I'm psyched to pay full freight, and for convenience I wander around the block to the Borders outlet. Of course, notwithstanding the zillions of books there (and I really do understand the wildly unproductive investment in inventory such a store requires), they hardly ever had the particular thing I needed. Nevertheless, in the two and a half years I've been "in the neighborhood," I've probably bought three or four books there. Once I even bought some sort of pastry at the food outlet nestled inside. Oh sure, it was way overpriced and really not that good. Still, I bought it. That counts for something, maybe?

To my relief the store was there, and I even hard to cram my way in with a bunch of tourists who apparently don't have "doors" where they come from. We all got inside, though, eventually, and while the store stock somehow didn't seem quite right, somehow meager, I was more concerned with finding the section of local maps and guides, which I thought I remembered being right over there, not far from the entrance.

I did find a section of "New York" stuff, which even included some map coverage for that part of the NYC metropolitan area which lies within NYS -- Long Island, Westchester. Back in the day I would have expected to find the near areas of New Jersey as well, like Hudson and Bergen and Counties. I mean, from Lower Manhattan, Hoboken and Jersey City seem so close, you can practically spit at them. But no, apparently when they say "New York," they mean "New York."

However, there was a section of picture books, which I noticed was marked "30% OFF," and in it I found slim volumes of grainy, blurry photos of both Hoboken and Jersey City. But at 30 percent off $22 (yes, apiece), and still not giving me the map I needed, those books really didn't do much for me.

It was only about then that I notice the signs plastered all over the store, which I'd managed to miss before in my tight focus. Most everything was 30& OFF, because, as the signs explained: STORE CLOSING, and EVERYTHING MUST GO. And the rest of the time I spent in the store, I kept thinking how that meant that all the employees must go too. I wondered briefly if Borders would manage to transfer many of them to other outlets. Then I came to my senses. I assume all those people knew their date of final employment. And in this job market, all I could think of was, what the hell are those poor folks going to do?

Lately it's been occurring to me that -- while I haven't heard even murmurings at my job -- it may be just a matter of time before I'm in that situation. Over the last couple of decades we've already witnessed major restructurings of the U.S. economy, and as this "recovery" has made abundantly clear, we ain't seen nothin' yet.

Let me quote again from the Harold Meyerson column I directed attention to earlier this week, "Where's the economic recovery?," the one in which Meyerson noted, "It's one thing for a nation to be downwardly mobile during a recession. It's quite another to be downwardly mobile during a recovery -- but that looks to be precisely what's happening."

We didn't arrive at this predicament accidentally. Since the early 1980s, when General Electric's widely admired chief executive, Jack Welch, declared that the primary goal of the corporation was to increase shareholder value, America's corporate managers have been faithfully rewarded for treating their employees as necessary - or unnecessary - evils, to be shed whenever possible, or replaced by foreign or temporary workers, and most certainly not allowed to form unions or receive wage increases. Thirty years later, this form of shareholder capitalism has swept the field of nearly all opposition, with results - chiefly, the eclipse of the decent-paying job - that grow more glaring with each passing day.

POSTSCRIPT: MISSION ACCOMPLISHED,

MORE OR LESS

Although I did briefly fondle a laminated large-type edition of a NYC street atlas, at 30 percent off $60 (when I have a laminated edition of the regular-size version of an earlier-models NYC street atlas, and I've got the unlaminated pocket-size edition of the current one) I couldn't see it. After work I managed to shoehorn a Barnes & Noble outlet (I always hate being inside Barnes & Noble stores, where you're surrounded by books but the books seem somehow incidental; they can't even be bothered to post store directories) into a tight itinerary, and there I did find a serviceable map of Hudson County.

I haven't stopped thinking about those Borders employees' employment situation, though. Or mine.

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