Yesterday, 10 minutes before the doors opened, I waited outside the Borders Bookstore in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. A handful of people were there, chatting about the impending closure, sharing a few facts--gleaned from local news outlets that had gleaned them from AP reports--but skewing their interpretations with a dose of imagination 
and misunderstanding about the book trade in general. Books are their avocation, after all, not their vocation.
Then they stopped talking, shuffled their feet in the cold morning air as traffic passed by on Broadway. Peering through the plate glass windows, I could see only that it was dark and quiet inside, showing no signs--literal or figurative--that anything had changed during the past 24 hours. Perhaps the staff was sharing retail war stories and talking about their uncertain future in the back somewhere. Maybe books were being shelved. Probably coffee was brewing in the café.
The uneasy anticipation made me think, for no logical reason, about old black-and-white World War II movies, particularly the inevitable scene in which two GIs wait in a foxhole and one says, "You hear that?" His buddy replies, "I don't hear nothing." To which the first soldier responds ominously, "That's what I mean."
I'd only visited this Borders three
times since moving to Saratoga last summer. It's located in a prime, high-rent downtown location on Broadway, with 25,000 square feet of floor space spread over a two-story, open floor plan. Borders customers here may be mourning the fate of their store, but Saratoga's prospects for filling the vacant space are quite positive compared with many of the other doomed locations nationwide.
"I'm optimistic given the flexibility of the building itself, the parking lot and the location we're going to be pretty successful in finding new uses in a pretty short amount of time," Todd Shimkus, president of the Saratoga Chamber of Commerce, told the Glens Falls Post-Star.
The Albany Times Union noted that even the owners of the city's only independent, which sells used and rare volumes, expressed disappointment at the loss of the chain bookshop around the corner. "We feel for the people who love new books because that was their downtown bookstore," said Janice DeMarco of Lyrical Ballad Bookstore. "It's going to leave a void."
Her husband, John, told Fox-23 News: "We're very sorry to see people lose their jobs; we're very sorry to see the hole in Saratoga Springs. My wife and I have been in the forefront of trying to keep downtown Saratoga active and alive. It's not good to see."
DeMarco added that "it would be great to see an independent new bookstore on a smaller scale, which the big chains drove out for years. We used to have a smaller independent bookstore in Saratoga, but they couldn't compete, so they left."
The overall impact of Borders departure may not be quite as extreme here as in other communities. For unreformed chainiacs, a Barnes & Noble is located just a few miles outside the city in Wilton. And within a half-hour's drive, there are some excellent indie options: to the south, the Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza in Albany and Market Block Books in Troy; to the north, Red Fox Books in Glens Falls; and to the east, Battenkill Books in Cambridge. 
But this Borders was the local community bookshop for a lot of people in this city. Yesterday, I sat in the café for a while, sipping my cup of Seattle's Best, watching and listening. Customers asked the usual morning questions, which seemed loaded--How are you? What's new?--and then expressed sympathy and occasionally surprise. Staff members explained, patiently, the situation as well as they could under the circumstances. There were still many things they didn't know.
Customers browsed the stacks as if the day was like any other. An older man in the café joked: "People won't know where to find me in the morning now." And then, within minutes, the conversation turned to gossip and sports and local politics, which reminded me of Tip O'Neill's line that "all politics is local." Sometimes all corporate decisions is local, too.
If you still have a great indie in your city, you're fine. If you're a Borders fan and your
store dodged the executioner's axe, you're also fine... for now. It's about perspective. Although indie bookseller blood runs in my veins, I understood the mood in that bookstore yesterday. They were not fine. I remembered my favorite perspective example: an imaginary headline in the April 15, 1912, issue of Parrot's Weekly Magazine: "Titanic Sinks! No Parrots Hurt!"--Robert Gray (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)