A Lament for Open Borders

More thoughts on the erstwhile bookstore, retail, and land use

As you’ve probably seen if you’ve been reading this newsletter for awhile, retail history is an interest of mine, related to but also distinct from urbanism. Brick-and-mortar retail has an obvious urbanist angle, because it takes place in the built environment, and also because we seem to be looking at a massive over-supply of brick-and-mortar retail space.

This is something that could be discerned long before the “retail apocalypse” and the rise of Amazon. Even as a kid looking out the window at mile after mile of commercial development along U.S. Route 22, I think I wondered if we needed it all. Maybe the customer isn’t always right; or maybe it didn’t have all that much to do with the market in the first place.

If you’re relatively new here, here’s a roundup of pieces I’ve written so far on this general area:

• For The Bulwark, I wrote about Toys ‘R’ Us and the unique history of Vornado, one of the firms which owned a major stake in it leading up to its demise.

• Here at the newsletter, I followed that up with a deep dive into Vornado’s tortuous and multifaceted history; I wrote about Bud’s Discount City, a short-lived experiment that once formed a third division in the Walmart/Sam’s Club retail portfolio; and I wrote a photo essay about Office Depot, as a sort of time capsule of bygone ways of shopping.

• In The Week, I wrote an appreciation for the “category-killer” segment of stores, which I like to call “medium-box stores,” and a piece wondering why brick-and-mortar liquidations don’t seem to have incredible deals anymore.

• And just recently, I wrote for The Bulwark again about Borders, and the fate of its large, 500-plus-location physical footprint. 

A couple of neat things about Borders didn’t make it into my final draft. One is that the two brothers who founded Borders sold the chain to K-Mart in the early 1990s, an arrangement that didn’t last very long. Who knew!

The other was this locally published article by an independent bookseller following Borders’ bankruptcy in 2011. He wrote of the chain’s demise:

Now they are gone and there are thousands of booksellers throughout the country who are unemployed.  Acres of empty parking lots, hundreds of missing venues for authors to get their books into the marketplace, publishers themselves cutting back due to the loss of bookstore space to sell their new releases.  In these hard times of civic contention and a hunger for serious answers to our cultural malaise, the loss of even one decent bookstore is a shame.  The loss of hundreds is a tragedy.  Books and bookstores are unspeakably valuable assets for a free society and the demise of so many is worse than just the inconvenience and loss of an entertaining venue that so many of us feel.  We are now more impoverished.

Borders took a lot of heat in its heyday for pushing out small, locally owned bookstores, much as Walmart did and still does for all sorts of mom-and-pop businesses. But the inventory/product differences between local bookstores and a Borders location were probably much greater than, say, a Main Street hardware store and Home Depot. It’s interesting that folks in the bookselling business had a sense of being in this together. I was also surprised in general by just how intensely people seemed to miss Borders. For whatever reason, neither public libraries nor Barnes & Noble stores seem to fill that gap.

I realized, after writing these pieces, that “category killer” is a retail term, while “medium-box” is a land-use or architecture term. I think that adds something to how we think about retail structures. Both the category-killer store and the basic physical footprint it takes up are falling on hard times. I found, according to an informal survey on Twitter, that over 20 percent of former Borders locations are no longer stores at all. And another 18 percent, roughly, are supermarkets rather than retail. In other words, 10 years out, close to half of the iconic category killer’s locations have become something other than a retail store. That’s really interesting. As I noted in the piece:

It’s clear that on the one hand, there are in fact many possibilities for these kinds of retail spaces, but on the other hand, their traditional options are dwindling.

Apropos of this, I recall an article from the late 1990s or early 2000s, which I unfortunately can’t find again, about how large superstores were becoming more common. I believe it was a New York Times article about the burgeoning number of superstores, again, along Route 22 in New Jersey. In some ways, the dominance of the category-killer segment was hegemonic while it lasted, but really quite brief. Similarly, I’ve discovered that neighborhood-sized supermarkets in downtown locations were still being built into the 1950s—like this former Acme supermarket below in Lambertville, New Jersey, right in the middle of the downtown business district. The era of large, spread-out, car-oriented shopping is really an anomaly, in a way.

And the predominance of small-ish supermarkets in old Borders locations is a suggestion that perhaps after a dominant but brief era of spread-out supersizing, we’re slowly finding our way back.

Photo credit Ben Schumin/Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0

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