Ask for It by Name!

It sounds like a good name for a Tex-Mex restaurant, but Borders is, of course, a national chain of bookstores and Barnes & Noble’s chief competitor.

Borders was founded in 1971 when Tom and Louis Borders, brothers living in Ann Arbor, Michigan, started a small used book shop. Early on, the brothers Borders instituted an inventory control system that, when they opened several more stores, allowed them to customize each store’s offerings to the tastes of the surrounding community. Today there are 348 Borders superstores across the United States, but only half the inventory in any store is standard to the chain. The rest is stocked to match the store’s clientèle.

In 1994, Borders was acquired by Kmart, which also bought Waldenbooks, a chain of mall bookstores founded in 1933 in Bridgeport, CT (and named after Henry David Thoreau’s classic Walden). But just a year later Borders bought itself and Waldenbooks back from Kmart and now operates both chains.