Yesterday, after watching the mediocre comedy Due Date at the local Century Theater, which is one big company deaf to local tastes, I went into Borders Book Store to look around for a few minutes. This is in Boulder, CO. Not one of the outlying towns, Boulder. The People's Republic of Boulder. A town so smart and educated that 84% of us voted to oust Bush in 2004.
And what greeted me when I walked in the door? A display table proudly promoting the new books by George W. Bush, which for some reason is not called "How I Fucked Up the World", and Sarah Palin, whose book ought to be called "Just Because I Don't Know Shit Doesn't Mean I Can't Tell Everyone What to Do".
Malaria is more popular in Boulder than either of these two people, yet Borders was proudly displaying their books out front. After I stopped laughing, I went over to the counter and asked the staff "You guys know you are in Boulder, right? What's with the Bush/Palin display?". As I expected, it was a dictate from corporate. IN fact, they said they had been shipped a huge pile of the both books that they had no chance of selling. Great work Corporate! In a politically polarized country, you greet locals with the 2 books most likely to send them shopping somewhere else. Was there no room on the table for Glenn Beck's book?
This is a really bad example of management from above. I am sure that those 2 books are selling well in certain parts of the country, but how stupid can you be, to make a decision like that for every store. Wouldn't it make more sense to trust your local management to put out something more enticing to local consumers, which in this case would include a bowl of fresh excrement.
Borders is owned by K-Mart. Might want to short that stock!
1 comment:
One of the interesting things about the book business -- publishers pay Borders to display their books in prime position. (Didn't know that until a few years ago.) So you can bet that Bush and Palin's publishers had to come up with some good-sized coin to get that prime position.
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