Why do so many companies in Metro Detroit go bankrupt?

[mwilbert]

A high percentage of businesses everywhere go bankrupt. What I find unfortunate is the number of successful businesses which have been bought out and then hollowed out--all the banks [[except Comerica, which left all by itself), Hudsons, Motown, Cunningham's/Perry's, Stroh's. Not that that is unique to Detroit either.

[christos]

I used to work at Borders, and I work for the union that once organized store 1.

That being said, the downtown Ann Arbor store was briefly unionized- there was a CBA there for a couple of years, but when the CBA expired the workers never ratified a new one. Its a REALLY long story that I'd rather not get into as to why we never had a second contract, but its partly our fault.

As for management, I was the inventory supervisor in the Brighton store, and I couldn't believe the incredibly stupid things management would have us sell [[and actually INSIST on us trying to sell). I remember stocking things like pancake batter, meat rubs, and $6 little tins of "gourmet" Swedish fish- and getting pissed off because I knew I would be packing them up and shipping them back to the company [[which I did).

The other stupid thing corporate did was severely lower pay, fire experienced staffers, and go to an almost completely part time work force who knew little about literature. Once upon a time, you had to take a lit test to work there, but that has not been the case for years. Many of the older, more experienced staffers had regular customers who would recommend them books.

Due to our proximity to corporate, we got a lot of gossip as to what was going on there, and we heard that a bunch of former grocery CEO's took over Borders and had the mentality that "selling a book is just like selling a head of lettuce!" To date, I have never seen a book rot.

All that being said, Borders relied a lot on CD and DVD sales to fund its rapid expansion- and we all know what is happening to those industries. Between all that and the rise of eBooks, the industry in general is declining.

The question is then, why is BnN faring better than BInc? I think that in part, BnN's model was a lower skilled workforce that centered more on mass market/genre lit sales, where BInc was slightly [[and I emphasize SLIGHTLY) more "high brow" and had a clintele that wanted more service. It sounds weird, but trust me, I can back it up. When BInc adopted BnN's labor strategy, it hurt some of their base of customers, since service now became more or less equal in both retailers, what incentive was there to go to Borders? Also, BnN embraced eBooks much sooner than BInc did and I'm sure sales of its Nook are boding well for the company- though I'm sure its just prolonging the inevitable.

Just my 2 cents.