(no subject)

[lapsedmodernist]

This is weird. A woman makes a joke about Shrub's chicken legs in a Borders store and gets banned from the store. The thing is, it's strange, because Borders is by far one of the better large-evil-conglomerate companies. I worked for Borders on and off for three years, and they are a company that got started in Ann Arbor, they are pretty fucking liberal for a big corporation, at least in Chicago they sponsored a large part of the Gay Pride Parade every year, they try to display and promote books with good politics, and their unofficial policy is that they like hiring the artistic, pierced and queer contingent, among whom they encourage creative expression in dress code. Very different from Barnes & Noble, where there is a mandatory "uniform" and, of course, Starbucks. so I really hope that this incident will get some redneck regional manager canned. C'mon, Borders, we don't live in Das Vaterland yet, even if it seems like it more and more on a daily basis, we can make fun of The Fuhrer's Chicken Legs if we so desire, and a knee-jerk violently disproportionate reaction to an ad hominim is doing nothing to dispel the sense that the geist of the Fourth Reich is in the air.

Comments

[elgoose.livejournal.com]

Keep in mind that Borders is staunchly anti-union in the face of organizing that has been tried for years. They have screwed a lot of workers over. The anti-chicken-lega manager sounds exactly like a typical member of the Borders management cadre.

Take a look here:

http://www.bordersunion.org/ (http://www.bordersunion.org/)

[lifenxcess.livejournal.com]

Liberal, perhaps. But then they still have books segregated into queer literature and African American literature. I'm sure an author like E. Lynn Harris causes them a great shelving dilemma. Do not get me wrong, I too worked for a Boarders on one of my very long summer vacations and I recall an edifying industrial film about the threat of unionization to the Boarders "family" environment.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

I knew this was going to happen if I wrote about Borders. I hate straw men arguments. I am, in fact, familiar with Borders' union-busting policies, and I don't believe that anywhere in my entry I said that Borders is a paragon of how a company should be run in my ideal utopian society. Both of the replies took a piece of my argument about Borders being more liberal than, say, B&N and proceeded to explain in which ways Borders is bad. That has nothing to do with what I was trying to say about that incident. Yes, Borders is a huge corporation with bad record with unions and it is probably guilty of many other evils. I am not defending them. However, if we accept that as a base line, in sheerly quantitative terms, of taking certain PR/image/store policies and being able to stick them into "positive" or "negative" column, a place like Borders is better than a place like B&N, both in terms of an ethos they promote in their actual, physical stores (for whatver greedy capitalist, targeting-demographic reason) and in terms of what that means for the employees. For example, at Borders, employees get to do displays of their "picks" which are then promoted within the store and marked down 30% off. Because of the kind of employees Borders attracts (for their image as more granola or hippie than the uber-yuppie B&N), the books that end up being displayed are likely to be ones that will stimulate the mind, or be interesting politically, or promote cultural awareness. Now, yes, in the more global discourse of capitalism, it could all be construed as undifferentiatedly bad, but in terms of praxis, in terms of what goes on from day to day, both Borders and B&N are anti-union (BAD), but Borders, out of whatever motivations, promotes certain policies that are better than the uber-homogenous, heteronormative "proper" ethos of "cultural capital" (in the Bourdeu sense) that B&N promotes and sustains. So, my whole original point was, that Borders, despite their (irrelevant here) union-busting shenanigans, is invested in maintaining a public image of being the more liberal bookstore chain (which in my opinion is better than a chain where kicking a songwriter our of the store is explicitly IN LINE with the corporate policy, because, despite the hypocricy of Borders policies in some larger ethical sense, on a practical level, they do provide forums for people to come and hear the songwriters), they should do something about it, because THIS IS NOT WHAT THEY WANT TO PRESENT THEMSELVES AS BEING ABOUT, which, at this point, can have practical results that would please me, because in light of the current state of affairs in the country, I don't care if someone's stance that is polemical to censorship comes from a place of genuine ideology or market research, I just care that this manager's behavior gets censored, and I think at Borders that has the potential to happen, whereas at some other places it would get reified as Adherence to Company Values or whatever. that's all.