I Hate People: Borders Edition

I’m at Borders, in their cafe section. I’m reading a book I ordered years ago at Amazon while I wait for my Jeep to get repaired up the road. On my table are three books I bought and a ColdBrewed latte. There’s a couple next to me reading through a stack of seven magazines apiece, with no drink or food in sight.

What the fuck?!

I have no idea why Borders allows themselves to be a customer funded library, but I do know this just pisses me off. Especially when I think about how often I buy stuff here… I have to wonder how many times I paid full price for books that were actually pre-read – used merchandise sold fruadulently as new!

In every sense: campers, leechers, and r0dents are t3h suck.


10 thoughts on “I Hate People: Borders Edition”

  1. Dude, lighten up. The books and magazines are not shrinkwrapped, and they’re gonna get looked at. It doesn’t reduce the value to you unless somebody really messes it up, and you can tell at a glance whether that’s happened.

    I’ve done exactly the same thing lots of times, and generally I’ll buy at least some of the magazines. If I bought every single magazine that caught my eye it’d be ridiculous, but Borders still gets a good chunk of my change. The other day I sat down with a stack of ten books, browsed through them for a couple hours, and bought three of them. It’s to Borders’ advantage to let me do this; it’s the only advantage they have over Amazon.

    If I’m hungry or thirsty, I might buy something from the cafe, but Borders has gotten so many thousands of my hard-earned dollars over the years that I certainly don’t feel an obligation to do so.

  2. And then this doesn’t apply to you – the people with the magazines didn’t buy a damned thing. Most peopel with manga don’t either – and in fact some of those books ARE shrink wrapped because of their adult content yet I’ve seen many ppl open the package and read them anyway.

  3. I hate these people as well! Work at a Borders and you learn to hate them! Especially when you are doing recovery and ask if they’re finished with theit pile of 50 magazines and they grab them defensivley. AND THEN LEAVE THEM WHERE THEY ARE WHEN THEY LEAVE!

  4. I hate the Borders policy. Borders customers are obnoxious. I have worked at Borders. Customers and managers alike have no regard for maintaining the integrity of items. Borders is not motivated, or extant, because of a love of literature. Hey, ninety percent of their management is sub-literate. A passion for books is not a criterion when selecting staff. Management believes that the hands-off policy encourages customers to buy at least something from that fity-kilo stack of shrink-wrapped art books that they have just unsealed, scattering crumbs throughout every book’s spine. Customers are invariably insolent, lazy and miserly–often asking to receive a discount for the book they themselves just damaged, or becuase the book is to be a gift? What?

    The staggering majority of customers are poorly read and seem to be unable to navigate a shelf arranged alphabetically by author. Jejune mothers flock to Borders a plenty so that they may allow their hideous vanity-project-of-a child to rampage through the childern’s section pulling out every book at toddler height and dog-earring them all why mother asks the ‘girl’ to find a long list of insipid books for her possible perusal. The remaining customers are haughty and hackneyed insisting on spelling out FOUCAULT or HOUELLEBEQC or redundantly advising you on the need to put an article before a noun on the sub-standard database. One customer approached me requesting a book about a ‘courtesan’ C-O-U-R-T-E-S-A-N, do YOU know what a courtesan is?’. Another pedigree breed of noisome customer delights in telling you that they ‘loathe Borders, oh, yes, i much prefer independents…You’re[as if I myself were Borders] ruining small business’. They say this as they purchase five brainless novels and then continue to prowl about the store for another thirty minutes.

    Borders has absolutelty lax security measures within its stores and allows its customers to damage books rendering them unsaleable, yet readily bag-checks each staff memeber upon the completion of each shift for suspected theft.

    Borders is simply grotesque: the people who manage it and the customers who are attracted to such a store.

  5. I give ya props… if someone came to me asking about a courtesan and was THAT patronizing, I woulda replied with something like “isn’t that what your mother did for a living before she had you?”

  6. I work at Borders, and this pissed me off so bad. I think it happened 2 days ago. I work at a borders express and this idiot woman come in and wants to return a HD dvd toa borders express rather then to the borders thats just down the road. Why you would try to return something to a store you didnt it from doesnt really make that much sense to me, so I ask my manager what to do becuase I couldnt scan it in. he says she has to take it there. So i tell her and she sstarts whining like a bitch with a rash andkciks up a fuss. I dont reeally care abotu her so I say well theres nothign else I can do. And so she says Give me your managers Name so I can complain to the other borders when I get there. My manager Has a foreign Name and I myself have a Foreign Mother and a white father. My skin is darker than a white persons and so is my hair. I write down his name for her. and she looks at it and then looks at me and goes, I said HIS name not YOURS! Like I was some sort of fucking idiot That was so messed up in so many ways. First off assuming that I was obviously called muhammad or khaled or something. Secondly assuming that a manager would obviously be a white man and be caled brad or chalres instead of something, Assuming I couldnt understand what she was saying. probably becuase she didnt think I could pass my TOEFL exam or whatever its called. anyways Ive never really had anybody be racist to me like that, Its was an eye opener. But yeah, just wanted to say Becuase it pissed me off.

  7. I worked at my local store for about 3 years, and I can relate to every one of these stories. I guess a lot of it comes down to management. Shit rolls downhill, you know?

    As for the patronizing customers, my god. I have an English degree, and I was by far more intelligent than most of the morons who stepped through those doors. Often, when taking down a customer’s name for a hold, they would painstakingly spell out their last name of “Brown” or “Jones,” but on more unusual names, or names with multiple spellings, they would glare at you like you were a dunderhead when you just wanted to get their name right! I don’t give a shit if you get your book, but I’ll bet that you do!

  8. I am a manager for Borders and I totaly relate to all your stories except for that Nancy person whom I assume is just a book snob and not a real book lover. I find myself to not be the most read manager but I truly love books and have my own intrests in the material i love to read. I dont have to read some random shit no one has ever heard of just so I can turn around and feel superior to my customers. Yes, most of the customers suck! However, there are a good deal that don’t. Yes, we have some crappy policies that allow people to ruin our books but just as the first guy points out people can easily go online and buuy the books cheaper, there is a give and take in the book world and if someone need to browse 10 books so I can make 60$ then so be it. All we have to do is reshelve. So, insted of bitching about people who make piles of mags, just do what i do, walk over to them and say someone needs this mag and since you have not bought i am needing to take it. Or go into the kids section and let the people know either they control thier children or you will ask them to leave. Its not hard to keep a store clean, its just how you approach the people “without a superiority complex!”

  9. As a more recent borders employee I look over the comments here and laugh as these issues are 2 or 3 years old and nothing has changed, if anything most have gotten worse. We find 20 empty keepers and broken CD cases and the security is still tighter on us employees then on the customers. I work in a place where the culture dictates that people have to be pigs, leave everything lying around, spill coffee on books and magazines, people sitting on books in the bargain section, and whenever you say anything they get pissed and bitch about it. I have seen very good employees get fired for being on the wrong side of a stupid customer dispute. The borders culture SUCK’s, customers do with the store w/e they want and then they want us to recover the whole store with 3 people in an hour. WTF? And dont even make me start on the Ron Marshall solution… GREAT… instead of making me watch 5 minute videos and answer a quiz that insults my intelligence, give me a training session you morons!!! Management bitches about there employees, but if you dont give your newbies training there gonna learn things there way… the day i came in, we had an artist in the store, and the SM just gave me a paper to read on how to use the register and told me to go learn at the register… what type of bullshit training is that ??? sooooooo when the company goes down the pipehole completely .. we definetly know who to blame and its definatly not us the “associate”… especially when your store has a huge employee turnaround and a year in the store means your a veteran even by service manager standards, and youve been there more then 80 % of the other employees.


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