An article came out today on Time.com entitled "5 Reasons Borders Went Out of Business." Here is the article below. Under each point I make some commentary on how Borders' problems in some ways are paralleled in the church. My comments are in italics.


Forty years ago, when Borders opened its first store in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the book industry was a different place. But for years, Borders acted like it wasn’t, culminating in the announcement this week that it would liquidate its remaining 399 stores.

Borders has been on the verge of insolvency throughout the recession, briefly flirted with a bid to buy Barnes & Noble (a move most analysts saw as desparate, wrong-headed and financially impossible) and filed to restructure under bankruptcy protection in February, when it began closing a third of its then 659 stores.

What was it that forced Borders to write its final chapter? Here are five explanations:

1. It was too late to the Web

For years, Borders outsourced its online book-selling to Amazon.com. So anytime you visited borders.com, you were redirected. While at the time it may have seemed like a smart decision to jump on the coattails of the Amazon juggernaut, relinquishing control to another company hurt Borders’ branding strategies and cut into its customer base.

Most churches have been late to the web as well. When I went to the Liberty Church of Christ, it had no website--and it was 2002! When I came to the High Pointe Church of Christ, it had only a single page website--and this was 2008 in an 800 member church. Unbelievable. And still, most churches websites are pretty pathetic in terms of site design, SEO (search engine optimization), and the like.

2. It was too late to e-books

In a similar vein, Borders didn’t foresee the rise of e-books like Amazon and later Barnes & Noble did. It didn’t develop its own e-reader to compete with the Kindle or the Nook, and Borders only opened an online e-book store a year ago. And when you walked into a Borders, you barely knew that they sold e-books for devices like the Kobo and Cruz. (Have you even heard of those?) By contrast, Barnes & Noble went all out with the Nook when it was released in 2009 — when you walk into a B&N now, the Nook kiosk stares you right in the face.

Has the church developed a lot of e-books? Its own e-book reader? Put a kiosk right as you walk in with the church's website, online content, e-books, etc.? No, not really. Barnes & Noble was smart about putting its online reader front and center to the store's entrance, recognizing that if it did not capture people on the web, it would die. Has the church realized the danger it faces from people defecting to merely online spiritual experiences? Why not do as B & N did--keep the physical presence, but make the online spiritual experience front and center as they walk in the church building doors?

3. It opened too many stores

Borders just got too big – so big in fact that many of its stores (an estimated 70 percent) were competing with a local Barnes & Noble’s, offering a glut of book stores even as people were shifting to online shopping.

This point says that it opened too many stores--but then that it got too big. I would say that in the church, there is the problem of not opening enough "stores"--or rather, not enough planting of new churches. I think the point in this piece is that Borders expanded its location numbers, but did not expand its customer base. In fact, it began to compete with B & N for an increasingly smaller and smaller market share. This is often what churches do--compete for the ever-shrinking population of Christians in the culture.

4. It had too much debt

When the recession hit in 2008-09, Borders was already carrying a huge debt load. It had restructured twice since 2008 in an attempt to pay down some $350 million owed. But Borders could never get out of the hole that its inefficient business practices had put itself in.

Need I say more about this? Churches should avoid burdening themselves with monstrous building debts. Something upexpected will always happen to set a family--and a church--over the edge financially if they get the highest mortgage they can afford. Large debts in churches can cause a church to make make unspiritual decisions out of fear, losing track of their mission. Again, a building can be a blessing, just like a house. Overly large debt is just something to be careful about.

5. It over-invested in music sales

Borders was a bookstore, but over the years it morphed into a multipurpose entertainment retailer. In the 1990s, it invested heavily in CD sales. Bad move: Around then, people stopped buying CDs as they began buying iPods instead. And when it finally reduced music inventories, Borders found itself with more expensive retail space than it needed, putting additional pressure on its business model.

Most churches are overly invested in buildings, just at the time when people are less and less impressed with going to church buildings. I'm not against buildings--they can be a great tool--but the unchurched are not necessarily clamoring to go to a church building. So if a church is limited in funds, rather than overbuild, why not just build, say, a worship area and an extra couple of rooms, and hold everything else out in the community, where people already are and may be more willing to go. Or buy a building in a shopping strip, where people already frequent. Use the extra funds to fund things that people who are searching tend to value, such as ministry to the poor, hurting, and hopeless.

What do you think of these parallels between the church and Borders? Is the church as we know it endanger of "going out of business" in the US?

Read more: http://moneyland.time.com/2011/07/19/5-reasons-borders-went-out-of-...