Since childhood I have always been a big fan of music. Two of the companies I have purchased music from have been Amazon.com and Borders Book Stores. Before the big wave of internet retailing started Borders seemed to always have the hard to find CDs that my local Best Buy didn’t carry, which was basically the only store in my town that had a decent selection of music. Now that I am able to browse the internet on my smart-phone just about anywhere I go an online retailer, such as Amazon.com, is much more suitable for me.
Borders was a chain of stores that specialized in the sale of books and music in a wide variety. The first store started in 1971 by two brothers, Tom and Louis Borders, while studying at the University of Michigan. It was an 800 square foot store located at 211 South State Street in downtown Ann Arbor, Michigan. The store specialized in mostly used book sales at the time. In the 1970’s, Louis Borders created an innovative software to keep track of inventory and project future sales accurately (Bomey, 2011).
In 1988 the company hires Robert DiRomualdo to try to improve the leadership of the company. With the addition of Robert DiRomualdo the company wanted to try to have him lead the planned expansion the company had in mind. Later on, DiRomualdo is coined with the success that Borders had in going national in the 1990’s. He was later appointed the positions of Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of The Borders Company (Bomey, 2011).
The 1990’s were a great time for Borders. The company merged with Kmart Corporation in 1992. Kmart Corporation had recently picked up the mall-based book store chain Walden-Books. The merger created the Border-Walden Group. The stores also started incorporating music sales into the stores too. At the time of the merger, Borders had around 21 stores and had a worth around 190 million dollars. In 1995, Borders broke away from the Kmar
