It is 830am on a Thursday morning and I just drove to a Borders Book Store to buy a book. I am a self-proclaimed Amazon junkie. I have not purchased a book in a book store for years. Everything gets sent to my doorstep with no shipping fees in two days or less by the post-office via my Amazon Prime membership. I order from Amazon at 5am, 10pm, it doesn’t matter. I received a Borders gift card as a Christmas present years ago and recently discovered this unused prize in an old envelope. I love found money. There is a book I wanted to buy for a friend so I decided to use my new found wealth today. Unfortunately, the store opens at 10am. Wow. 10am. Do they sell coffee? Or Newspapers? Or Books? Apparently only between 10am and 9pm and people that drink coffee, read the paper and buy books don’t do so until 10am.

It made me think. The world is changing. At 830 am, my expectation was that I could buy my book without even the thought of a time issue existing. It had been so long since trying to buy something from the book store that hours never occurred to me as being an issue. In the day of Amazon, 24×7 stores and very cool technology advancements, Borders is doomed to failure. How do you communicate with your customers? What are your office hours? Will you suffer the same fate that Borders eventually will?