Borders Gave Amazon Its Online Business — Then Amazon Killed Borders

In April 2001, Borders — then the second-largest bookstore chain in America — shut down its own website and handed its entire online bookselling business to a smaller, unprofitable startup called Amazon.com. Amazon would run the technology, the warehouses, and the customer relationships. Borders would put Amazon's name in its store windows and collect a fee. For seven years, that seemed like a reasonable cost-saving decision. By the time Borders tried to take its website back in 2008, Amazon had grown into the company that would define online retail — partly by learning how to serve Borders' own customers. Borders never recovered the ground it gave away. It arrived years late to e-readers, missing the window that Amazon's Kindle (2007) and Barnes & Noble's Nook (2009) had already claimed. On February 16, 2011, Borders filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Seven months later, all 399 remaining stores closed for good, and roughly 10,700 people lost their jobs. This is the full story of Borders Group — from the innovative inventory algorithm that built a superstore empire out of a single Ann Arbor bookshop, to the deal that built its biggest competitor, to the last store closing in September 2011. Subscribe to Bankrupt Ledger for more true stories of how billion-dollar companies collapsed. #BankruptLedger #Borders #CorporateCollapse #BusinessDocumentary #WhyCompaniesFail