Another reason to hold onto your library card

Having absolutely nothing better to do, I stopped by Borders in my little corner of the world over the weekend. As you no doubt know by now, the company is on life support and has only a few weeks to live.

The place was filled with bargain shoppers, all scrambling about looking for deals. The problem is that the vast majority of stock in the store was selling for higher prices than a week earlier when news of the company’s demise was first announced.

Apparently, when companies belly up and liquidators take control, the initial plan is to strip away any previous discounts, market everything at its list price and offer small deductions to anyone foolish enough to bite. As the deadline nears for closing the doors one final time, additional discounts are offered – that’s when it’s time to strike!

Last week, a day or so before all the dismal details became public, the lovely Miss Wendy and I stopped by Borders to feed my addiction for anything written by Daniel Silva. His latest spy thriller, Portrait of a Spy, became available on Wednesday. The list price is $26.99 – a huge sum for any book; but I was jonesing for a fun, fast read and, well, Miss Wendy had a gift card!

Borders was offering a whopping 30 percent discount – 40 percent if you were a member of its super-duper exclusive I-Love-Borders book club. After taxes, the book ended up costing $20 and change. If I had waited to purchase it over the weekend, now that HUGE discounts were being offered, the thriller would have actually cost me a few bucks more. Go figure!

BTW, Portrait of a Spy can be purchased online at Amazon for $14.05. Tack on another $10 for something else and shipping is free; and that pretty much sums up why the retail book industry is in free fall!

But I digress. I did mention that the store was packed with bargain hunters, right? They stayed busy grabbing up the few items – magazines, greeting cards, calendars, pens and other tchotchkes – that were deeply discounted.

I’ll probably return in a few weeks, if for no other reason than to say bye-bye. Guess it’s time that I start thinking seriously about purchasing some sort of e-reader. Meanwhile, glad I still have a library card.