Steven Martin wrote;

>There is one crucial difference between the two, Tower actually does have
>a classical buyer at their stores.  At Borders, this does not seem to be
>the case.  There is one Borders near where I work that rivals the Towers in
>the area.  I suspect that they must have a few staff members who can keep
>on top of things and not file a Bernstein performance of Beethoven under
>Bernstein for instance.

I am curious about something.  Does a book/record chain like Borders give
a lot of autonomy to individual stores to order what the music department
manager chooses, or do they handle CDs the way they do books (which I
gather involves stocking all the stores with pretty much the same titles,
computed by a mainframe in Iowa or someplace so as to yield the maximum
profit per inch of shelf space)? Does the relative quality of one Borders
music department over another one just depend on which ones happen to have
hired more knowledgeable sales people?

There are two Borders in my general neighborhood, one older than the other,
and I can't see any appreciable difference in what they carry except that
the newer one has a smaller space for its CD department, so you usually can
find a bit more unusual stuff at the older one.

Jon Johanning // [log in to unmask]