Borders bookstore fictional pricing

I am happy to pay Borders prices simply due to the fact that I also do a lot of freebee reading there. I haven’t seen another bookshop where you can plonk yourself down with a mediocre coffee and read lots of books. I support them and their higher prices while they are happy for me to read their books.

Go to Amozon.com much cheaper

Felix the Cat said :

Problem with ordering multiple books from Amazon is they charge you multiple postage too, no discounts. So if it’s say $5 postage for one book and then you want to buy five books they charge $25 postage.

Fortunately that works both ways- for larger items (in my case things like the Battlestar Galactica blu ray box set) shipping works out to be a bargain!

Anyway, for those who don’t know, Dymocks have a 20% off sale on at the moment (I think it ends sooner rather than later), meaning they’re even better value than Borders. I bought about a hundred bucks worth of books the other day after double-checking the prices against the Amazon mobile site on my phone.

Shop at Smiths Alternative Bookstore instead – Alinga St Civic.

In India they do it slightly differently. Instead of recommended retail price they have Maximum retail price allowed. Thats on all their grocery items not sure about books.

Well before you whinge too much at the retailer, you should take into account the percentage of what you pay Borders that goes straight to QIC in the form of rental at the Canberra Centre, I think you would be a little less ferocious in your condemnation. That’s the price you pay for the luxury side of shopping it seems.

I am amazed that people use RRP as a guide to what they ‘should’ be paying instead of using it as baseline and trying to find better prices by shopping with your feet…
Its a number, plucked from the air by the publishers themselves, and is non-enforcable.

In the end, Borders can charge whatever their market will bear, and evidently the people buying books from a high-traffic profile, high-traffic, retail-space either don’t see the increased opportunity for being taken advantage of or just don’t bare, so Borders jack up their prices beyond RRP just because they can, and you let them get away with it.
If you aren’t buying from Borders because of the prices, maybe mention it to the managers?

Large-volume retailers should already be negotiating with suppliers to recieve stock at reduced cost (through bulk purchasing), so having customers paying RRP (or higher) is just an opportunity for a wider profit margin, instead of bringing consumer prices down to meet lower overheads.
Downside is that large entities then leverage their size to compete the littler ones with higher overheads out of existence, but consumers get cheap books so long as sellers are interested in competing with each other.

G’day Guys,

Hadn’t really paid much attention to the placement of this price sticker over the printed RRP until this post, though was acutely aware of the steep price that Borders charges for a lot of its stuff. Interestingly I’ve noticed Dymocks (at least in part) have done this as well, and perhaps other book retailers have too.

I agree with wherever possible supporting the smaller Canberra book retailers, that academic remainders place in town isn’t bad.

Snarky, thanks for the info about book depository in the UK – great site! Great to see ‘Riotact’ being used to share information as well as opinions!

Fiona22 – your post at #6 is spot on. I stopped buying US Men’s Fitness because the price at Borders has just about doubled (and now there’s an Oz version). Does the magazine you read post direct to Aus? A select few will do cheap subscriptions and even with their freight, leaves many of the newsagencies / book stores for dead.

I thought the attraction of shopping at Borders was that they had a bigger range of harder-to-fine titles than other book shops. But I went in there a few months ago for a couple of magazines whose only Canberra stockist was Borders, and they seemed to be always out of stock. So I figured, screw that, and started stocking them at my own shop. I wonder if Borders have dropped the ball a bit now that they’re well established?

As for prices being above RRP, it happens more often in high-rent areas, or in remote areas where freight is genuinely a big factor in the cost of running a business. Although I would have thought Borders got a good deal on rent from the Canberra Centre, so surely that’s not the reason.

Then they want to charge us 10c for a plastic bag too! Ripoff merchants!! [/tongue-in-cheek]

I agree that Book Depository in the UK are great for selling cheaper books. Another one I use sometimes is Fishpond.com.au but beware the foreign currency charge on your credit card as they process payments in NZ. I also rely much more on the library now because book prices are so expensive.

Woody Mann-Caruso said :

I was in Borders today (don’t ask), and I’m always (a) amazed at their prices and (b) amazed that people will not only pay them, but will also order a book that isn’t in stock and wait six weeks for it to arrive. If my Amazon orders take more than six days to arrive I raise an eyebrow.

I agree. And yet people shop there, thus they are able to behave the way they do.

Problem with ordering multiple books from Amazon is they charge you multiple postage too, no discounts. So if it’s say $5 postage for one book and then you want to buy five books they charge $25 postage. Like Tooks says though, it still usually works out cheaper than buying the book(s) locally (especially from Borders!).

Borders routinely charge about 10% more for books than other book shops – I haven’t bought anything from them without a discount docket for about a year as a result.

I usually wait until I want a few books, then just order them from Amazon. It’s usually cheaper (depending on the strength of the Aus dollar) to buy them from there, even with shipping costs.

With the frequency of which they hand out discount vouchers, I’m not surprised they rip people off normally.

I was in Borders today (don’t ask), and I’m always (a) amazed at their prices and (b) amazed that people will not only pay them, but will also order a book that isn’t in stock and wait six weeks for it to arrive. If my Amazon orders take more than six days to arrive I raise an eyebrow.

We can thank the federal Labor government for the parallel importation fiasco and the high price of books!

Mathman said :

I’ve found Booko (http://www.booko.com.au/) to be a great site for finding the best price from online book stores.

+1 for the Booko suggestion. Often it’ll point to the Book Depository (www.bookdepository.co.uk) for non-Australian books. The prices are similar to Amazon but they offer free shipping from the UK! No idea how they do it, but for Christmas I bought three books by Stieg Larsen from them. Each cost AUD$12.80 – including delivery to my letterbox. In Borders the same paperbacks were selling for $25.00. And if you’re after Australian books Booko will point out the best Australian source. Dad wanted to buy the latest Barry Humphries book for Mum – in the shops it was up to $50. On Booko it showed it could be bought at Big W Online (who knew that existed??) for $37, including postage.

Vote with your feet!

I had noticed that Border’s “normal” prices are often substantially above the recommended retail price. Their discount vouchers then bring their prices back towards the recommended retail price.

There are, though, other bookshops in Canberra, for example, Smiths, Dymocks, Electric Shadows and Paperchain. These bookshops were around before the Borders warehouse appeared. I think they sell at the actual recommended retail price and their discounts are then real discounts. So, if you don’t like Border’s book prices, have a look at the other local bookshops.

If you are going to purchase across the web, it is always worth looking at Better World Books. Their stock is not comprehensive but they sell second hand (e.g. ex library) as well as new books. Their postage on single books is much lower than Amazon’s. You can get some real bargains from Better World Books.

Kmart and Big W are always a good bet for getting books below RRP, they regularly advertise specials like 15% off etc. however only a limited range and generally better for best sellers.

emd said :

Perhaps they markup year-round? Some retailers have different pricing for their online vs in-store because they run them as two separate businesses (and therefore don’t subsidise their in-store prices with the higher profit margin of online sales).

I think they do, I bought a book from them earlier.. um.. last year which had a RRP of $22.95ish and the Borders sticker of $25.95 stuck over it. I only bought it as I had to use a gift voucher to get rid of it.

I’ve found Booko (http://www.booko.com.au/) to be a great site for finding the best price from online book stores.

“Booko is a site with a very simple goal – to find the cheapest place to buy books & DVDs in Australia.

Booko is not an online shop. It goes out to the Internet and looks up book & DVD prices for you and figures out the shipping costs. For the international sites like the Amazons (.com and .co.uk), the prices are converted into Aussie dollars.”

The only trap I found is that many online book shops report having a book in stock when they really mean that they will order it for you from the publisher, who may not have stock in the country and could take six weeks to get it to you.

emd said :

Perhaps they markup year-round?

Quite possibly. I generally buy my books online so I’m not that familiar with walk-in bookstore pricing.

Sadly enough, they are within their rights to do so as it is only the recommended price. I dont shop there purely because they keep everything in shithouse condition (can i say that?)

The graphic novel section (geeky i know, but a great example) is in a complete shambles with everything out of order or fallen behind the shelves. I expected this to be a one off but i went back 4 weeks later and the same stock was stuffed behind the shelf gathering dust and being damaged. The covers are torn and creased, and to top it off they charge $10 per item more than impact comics.

The staff dont seem to know or care what they are doing yet this place manages to stay open.

Vote with your feet people.

Perhaps they markup year-round? Some retailers have different pricing for their online vs in-store because they run them as two separate businesses (and therefore don’t subsidise their in-store prices with the higher profit margin of online sales).

i’m not surprised. to thwart borders you could consider investing in an amazon kindle, i acquired one a couple of months ago after they finally released an australian version. sure, the kindle library doesn’t contain every book in the world but it has in the region of half a million books and growing – you can download them direct to your kindle wirelessly anywhere in australia from a lowly $2 for a trashy through to about $16 for new releases like dan brown’s ‘lost symbol’. it is the future of reading!! i love it!!

That reminds me of a certain large supermarket chain’s habit of sticking “Reduced to clear” stickers on items which have actually had their price put up the day before the “best before” date. For example, a pre-marinated roast lamb package selling for $9/kg gets a sticker “Reduced to clear” on the same day the price of the roast goes up to $11/kg. The “reduced” price puts the roast back at the $9/kg mark.

As for the bookstores, a lot of them are engaging in behaviour that seems to be to be designed to kill the paper book.

You are right about Borders, I buy an American magazine that retails in paper shops for around $10. When I thought I would save time and pick it up at Borders it was over $20, supposedly because of the ‘air frieght’ cost. This was crazy the mag is available on the same dates for half the cost elsware.

They don’t just do it at Xmas time – they are regularly charging over RRP. They have a good range but crud pricing.

why does adding a markup to RRP in December deserve a special mention?

Clearly they’re a business who understand market forces and how to make a profit. This is good, because it means they’ll be around for a while, and the people woring there should have a reasonable level of job security.

I noticed this on a book about 3 months back. I questioned a staffer, who shrugged their shoulders. I promptly bought it online from amazon. Vote with your feet, the sooner these stores realise we are not mugs the better.

I am so fed up with book prices that I have stopped buying new books and now put them on the list at the library and sometimes I have to wait a while, but with some new releases (like Bryce Courtenay’s new one), I was number 2 on the list and had it in my hand 2 days after it was released. You just have to get in early.