Economic roadkill.

Walk into any Borders location today and you will experience a very special blend of awkwardness and discomfort.

An atmosphere of doom and neglect hangs over the premises, and you can't help but feel as though you're intruding on a kind of tragic farce that must going on in the lives of each of the ill-starred employees.

I imagine it's like attending the funeral of a person you didn't know. And it being very obvious that you didn't know them. Because they and everyone they knew were Tasmanian aborigines still living in hunter-gatherer bands in the most isolated regions of their island nation, and you are, well, not. Visibly not.

On the bright side, this "Store Closing!" sign shop sprang up in the location almost immediately!

Whether this experience sounds appealing to you will probably say a lot about you as a person. Myself, I found it downright surreal.

Every other customer at the cafe wanted to console the workers and strike up a conversation about their prospects. It was like a really long, extra depressing version of "Up in the Air", only without George Clooney's cheekbones to help you pull through.

I never really liked Borders all that much, but would often end up there anyway just because they have a lot of locations and were usually open late. Today marks the first and only time that no one asked me if I had a Borders card, which is good, because I would have had trouble suppressing the urge to say "Honestly, does it even matter at this point?", which would almost certainly not be helpful.

Not that Borders is going out of business altogether. They filed the special kind of bankruptcy that means you still get to stay open. But they are closing hundreds of stores, including two seemingly popular locations in San Francisco. So the company is more maimed than dead. I would keep that phrase out of the office memos though.

Certain commentators reactions to this story have been less than sympathetic. Go to any news site and you will find the comments section (also known as "the internet's septic tank") teeming with smug jibes from pompous assholes who put down their copy of "The Fountainhead" and balanced their hi-ball on top of a stack of Forbes back issues long enough to tap out some drivel along the lines of:

"Well, it's a tough market out there, this is what happens when you don't adapt and keep up!"

Right. Why oh why didn't Jenny the barista or Bob in the stockroom innovate harder? This could all have been avoided if only they had prioritized the company's primary action items to account for the fundamental shift in the dynamics of the market over the last three quarters! Bob, dude, what the fuck, where were you on that?

It's certainly true that any company that goes through four CEOs in five years can hardly be called well-managed. And yet, the thousands of people losing their jobs this week had little to do with the big picture executive decisions that engendered their march to the jobless rolls.

That's the way of the world, but I can't help but notice that capitalism has language for those who run their companies into the ground ("loser", generally), but no language for the little people crushed under their toppled mass.

Tragically, the entire staff was carried off by a crowd who interpreted this
sign in the most literal sense.

I mean, the rules tell us that those entrepreneurs who are smart, hard working, and innovative will get ahead, and those who are not will flounder That's a tough system, but it seems fair; there's a sense of justness, of everyone getting what they earn.

But what about those people who are smart, hard working, and innovative, but fail anyway because their bosses are pinheads? What does the system have to say about that? What's even the terminology for that? "Collateral damage," something to that effect? Or just nothing at all?

Usually if you rail against chain stores or conglomerate corporations, people write it off as a bunch of hippie nonsense. But there's a very good reason not to like such world-spanning business institutions: it puts a lot of eggs in one basket.

A bad businessman in charge of a small company is risking only a few jobs, one of them his own, but a bad businessman at the head of an enormous national or international chain has thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of jobs in his hands, and it's entirely possible than an enormous fuck-up on his part may still leave him inexplicably employed.

I guess this means lots of store-liquidation sales in the next few weeks. And boy, if you think going to Borders is uncomfortable now, just wait. Going-out-of-business sales are always one of the most awkward experiences for me. "Hi, I didn't patronize your store when it counted, but I'm happy to show up now to pick the carcass clean!"

Admittedly, I'm not helping matters when I show up dressed like this.

Getting rung up is always an ordeal. It seems inappropriate to make small talk with this person who probably only bothered to show up that morning because the coin landed on heads. They're out of a job, what the fuck do they care what you have to say?

But cold, mechanical transactions without any hint of human interaction only make the occasion seem that much more somber, so it seems like you ought to acknowledge them in some way, right?

Me, I go with the creepy, consoling shoulder pat: one hand, two taps on the left shoulder just after they hand you the bag. It's best if you just completely blindside them with it, I mean get right up in their personal space for three seconds. If you do it correctly, they're so startled by this sudden and inexplicable violation that they won't even be able to react until you're already out the door.

And, as a bonus, the inane small talk of the guy in line behind you will now seem to that cashier like sweet manna from heaven by comparison. See, everybody wins!

Next update Monday.