"So imagine my surprise when, a year later, I spotted the familiar red Borders sign across the atrium of a huge shopping mall in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia," Nathalie Lagerfeld wrote in an Atlas Obscura piece headlined "Why There are Still Borders Bookstores in Malaysia, or the Strange Case of the Zombie Chain."
The answer, she discovered, was that "to bring a bankrupt chain back as a zombie, you didn't need a voodoo ritual or a reading from the Necronomicon. All you needed was a franchise agreement. A legal spell to raise the retail dead."
In Malaysia, Borders is a franchise operated by Berjaya Books, a subsidiary of a large local conglomerate. "At bankruptcy auction in 2011, it narrowly outbid Barnes & Noble to acquire Borders' trademarks, country-specific domain name and intellectual property in Malaysia for $825,000," Lagerfield noted, adding: "Borders Malaysia is still going strong, with nine locations across the country, four in Kuala Lumpur alone."
