Jon Johanning wrote:

>Does a book/record chain like Borders give a lot of autonomy to
>individual stores to order what the music department manager
>chooses, or.....

It depends on the chain's policies.  Obviously, if the individual store has
a "buyer" the store has great independence.  Even when the classical buyer
for the chain is regional, the store might have some latitude.

When I worked at a chain called "Sound Warehouse", the classical buyer
allowed the store to order up to a certain dollar amount on its own of
"particular" labels(not the major ones).  I did this order once in lieu of
the classical manager.  As I remember, I ordered about 50 titles for the
month.  Everything else came from the "parent" warehouse except for special
orders which were handled through a local distributor.  Some of the stuff
from the parent warehouse was a joke.  They would often dump 10 to 15
copies of a "loser" disc on the store; these copies would take up shelf
space for a few months, then get shipped back to the parent.

Don Satz
[log in to unmask]