…and so does the rest of Bridgeport Village (with a few exceptions) but more on that on Mondays broad/podcast. If you were following my hellaciously torturous tweets on Friday you’d know that I was doing a solid for someone and found myself bored out of my fucking pea-sized brain for a couple of hours at Bridgeport. Normally not a big deal really but I didn’t realize at the time that it was spring break. What to do? What to do? Head to Borders Books ‘n Music of course! After all, I was hoping to avoid the endless sea of children and let’s face it, kids don’t read anymore anyway.
So let’s start with the book selection. The Borders at Bridgeport Village is no slouch in this area and I even found a few things that I wanted. Did I buy them? No, but I snapped some iPhone photos of them so that I could go home later and buy them for my Sony eBook Reader thing. So thanks Borders, you score a point there – you ain’t Powell’s but that’s not even a fair comparison.
No, the real tragedy of Borders is the “& Music” part. Are there really people out there paying the full MSRP for CD’s anymore? If so, who are these people? I passed racks upon racks of CD’s priced at around $20. $20!! For a fuckin’ CD? I hate to say this (and I hate the store) but there’s a Best Buy not more than a mile away that has ten times the selection for half the price. And the movies? DVD’s for upward of $30 and those shitball Blu-Ray things that no one buys for $39.95. It’s no surprise that the dust on these things is as thick as my cock – NO ONE IS BUYING THEM. Expensive retail, not exactly worth getting my nuts all bound up over. No, it wasn’t until I made a “purchase” at the built-in Seattle’s Best Coffee that I flipped my fucking lid baby, totally flipped my fucking lid.
I just wanted a large 4 shot mocha. What I ended up with tasted like boiling burnt popcorn. Last time I checked (and I check at least once every day) a “mocha” had chocolate in it. Not this one, there’s no fucking way. It was brown-ish, sure, but it tasted more like dirty dishwater than anything else. And what’s with the SBC there anyway? Why is SBC trying to get me to sign up for a Borders Rewards Card? What’s rewarding about this place? Fucking nothing. In fact, I already have one but I don’t want to admit it. I get shit in my inbox almost daily with “Borders Savings” – yeah right – Borders Savings just means that they’ve slashed the prices on a few items so that they now cost everyone else’s regular price. Did she stop with just one Borders Rewards inquiry? Oh hell no, she asked me three times – practically badgering me into it. What do you get if you sell me one honey? Do they send you to Barista school to learn how to make fucking coffee if you sell enough of them? God knows you need it.
Nope. Chalk me up for another “store I will never fucking walk into again” – it can sit on that list right next to Best Buy. Fuck Borders.
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{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
dont know which is worse between borders and b&n but they both suck..why anyone would go to either place instead of powell’s is beyond me though anyway. i cant do electronic books myself but i dont think borders could even keep up with my reading. their movie department is a joke though no doubt. and sbc dude? yuckers!!! got to be stumptown!!
Stumptown Coffee blows. Over rated by miles. Call me a corporate coffee whore but I still prefer Tully’s.
O.k. “corporate coffee whore”. Happy?
wow, what stores do you like since you are so pissed off at everything you encounter? I find it ironic that you spout off about the Borders Rewards card being pushed yet somehow you “have their emails in your inbox almost each day” – guess what – unless Borders has turned into a psychic entity that means you voluntarily gave them your e-addy at some point. So you must not hate them that much. And why the heck would you expect quality coffeee (much less a fancy one) to be sold at a bookstore of all places? Do you hang around the gas station complaining about the quality and price of their merchandise as well?
Like I said, at one time I shopped there quite frequently so yes, I’m already a card carrying member of the elite and proud Borders Secret Bookshopper Society. It would seem that, after the Borders news yesterday, I’m not alone and they’re having a very difficult time selling their wares at a 30% markup.
A better question: Why the heck would you come to a blog with the word “sucks” in the title and expect to find me clicking my heels together in happy sunshine abandon about anything that I liked?
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect a $5 coffee drink to taste better than gas station piss water. Your comparison doesn’t make sense there Frostypants.
You asked for four shots of mocha and were surprised when it tasted burnt? News flash for ya: espresso is BITTER, and four shots of espresso in ANYTHING will kill the flavor. Switch to decaf – sounds like you may benefit from a decrease in stimulants.
This morning I got a forty percent-off coupon from Borders, good for blu-ray or DVD box sets. So like an idiot I jump onto their website and add the Lord of the Rings Trilogy Blu Ray box-set to my cart. I hadn’t shopped at the B&M locations in years, and haven’t ever used the website, so in my naivity, I thought that forty percent off what I vaguely remembered from my past experiences shopping at the store to be their higher-than-average prices ought to bring the set down to somewhere near an affordable amount. Nope.
See, it turns out that Borders sells it for 106 bucks, or so they say, and that they’ve “generously” applied a discount to bring the price down to 69.99. which is more in line with what most other retailers (both online and B&M) are selling it for, though still several bucks more than the average retail price for the set. Now while I’m thinking that I could really get a good deal on it with the forty percent-off coupon they sent me, it turns out that their coupons are just bullshit meant to entice you to visit the site. And here’s why.
See, that “discount” that Borders applied, the one that brought it down from 106 bucks to somewhere approaching the price that everyone else sells it for? Well, that alleged discount nullified the coupon. Borders only allows you to apply a discount if another, better discount hasn’t already been applied to the item. This includes those blatantly bullshit eye-catcher discounts too. The ones meant to give you the illusion that they’re not fucking you in the ass with their huge markups.
Of course everything on the site has had varying “discounts” applied to it, so chances are good that you’re not going to find much of anything you can apply the coupon they sent you to, and when you do, it only stacks in addition to whatever percentage off that Borders claims they’ve already discounted the item. So if the coupon is good for forty percent off, and Borders claims that the item that you’re interested in has already been discounted at say, 37 percent (which of course coincidentally brings the price within range of, but still higher than, your average retailer’s price for the same item…), you’re only going to get an actual three percent off the item. In the case of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, I would have paid more for it buying it from Borders with the “forty percent off” coupon than I would have if I bought it outright, sans discount, from Amazon.
Of course the main point of contention is that Borders sells their shit for way more than everyone else, but they can’t be sending out forty percent coupons that nobody can ever really take full advantage of. That’s not exactly bait-and-switch, but it’s definitely shady as all get-out, and it’s exactly the sort of thing that ensures that I’ll never set foot in one of their stores. They just blatantly don’t give a fuck about their customers.
By the way, I figured that I could use the coupon at their store. Turns out that, yeah, they really do sell the box set at 106 bucks in-store. What does that mean? It means that if I apply the coupon in-store, I could get it for….drum-roll, please….exactly what I could get it for if I apply my alleged forty percent discount to the price of the set on their website! Amusing how that works, no?
Seems to me that while the in-store “discount” might seem pretty nifty if you never bothered to check the website, and were unaware of the fact that you could get the box-set for substantially less than 106 bucks from just about every other retailer under the sun, it’s all just a load of bullshit all-around.
They manufacture these coupons in order to confuse stupid people into believing that they’re getting real discounts, which buys them good will at no real cost to them. After all, a forty percent off coupon looks mighty enticing, right? And what retailer really offers that large a discount these days?
It’s all well and good, at least until you realize that you can’t actually use the coupon and expect to get the full forty percent off, and that the five percent off that you’ll more realistically get for using it only serves to bring the cost of the item in-line with what you’d pay elsewhere. But still more expensive, mind you! Just more in line with what you’d pay if you weren’t an idiot, and too enamored with the promise of a coupon that Borders will never, ever, really make good on to realize that you do indeed have alternatives available to you after all.