Jul 10, 2009
I went to Borders tonight with a coupon for 25% off my purchase, not expecting to find much. After all, I hadn't found anything the week before when I had a similar coupon. Borders is definitely in decline. Whatever section you go into, they have tons of books facing outward to cover up the fact that they do not have a lot of selection. I've seen them try to conceal this in different ways at different stores. One got shorter bookcases and arranged them in U shapes instead of straight rows to give the illusion of taking up more space. It's just so sad. Until the past year or so, Borders had a better selection of books that Barnes&Noble. I would hardly ever go to Barnes. But lately, the situation has reversed. It's really apparent in the manga section. You might see a couple of rows on each shelf with almost all the books facing outward instead of just showing the spine. To me, if they went out of business, it wouldn't make much difference.
So when I go to the manga section tonight, there's a cart there filled with manga, and I'm thinking "Cool, they must be new titles", but then I see that almost all of the manga on the shelves are gone, and that there are more carts of manga sitting there as well. I ask this older dude "What's up with the manga?" He tells me they're moving it upstairs. "To the kids section?" I ask. He almost seems ashamed of it, because he's a manga fan and he thinks it's kinda degrading the genre. A younger employee that's helping him move the manga feels the same way (He's cool. He actually gave me a discount before on some manga I was buying just because I had on a Ghost in the Shell shirt!). He too seems to feel bad about putting them in the kids section.
I thought it was at least cool that the manager of the store got manga fans to be the pallbearers of the banishment. The manga are now gonna be right next to the "Independent Readers". So how is Gantz or MPD Psycho gonna mix with Old Yeller and Harry Potter? I think it could be a problem if some soccer mom picks up one of them. "Yes, dear, you can get this little comic...oh my! He got his head cut off! Oh, and that dog is licking her ****....Manager! Manager!" (soccer mom passes out and collapses in a senseless heap as young boy salivates over alien murder in Gantz). Or are they even gonna carry mature titles anymore? I don't really know how I feel about it. I think in a way it knocks down the medium in respectibility. The older guy acted like it was just a reality that kids are the ones buying it. It was kinda funny because even after I had walked away I could hear him speaking to other customers...."Don't worry, we're not getting rid of the manga, we're just moving it upstairs....Ha ha, surrounded by manga!"
In the end, what cosmic shift does this move represent? It means I'll have to walk up the stairs to look at manga. Since they never have anything anyway, I might not even go up there.