Shocked by the H&M trashgate story? Contrast H&M's quick reaction and public promise to donate unsold merchandise to that of Borders, who are still dragging their feet, refusing to pledge to donate any of the books being destroyed RIGHT NOW while the stores close.
(Borders employee) Meghan Arnold (West Virginia): Actually, we box up the stripped books and recycle them now. This is a very recent development. (January 8 at 11:02am)Donate, Not Dumpster: Meghan, scroll down and read all posts from the past few days. Borders has instructed employees to keep stripping covers and sending them, along with the rest of the stripped books, back to the publishers in separate boxes. To be trashed as usual. So the company is still ordering employees to destroy books, but hiding their disposal from public view (where the books might be found by TV news crews or pesky grad students like Cynthia Magnus in store dumpsters).
Furthermore, they're putting a real burden on the already overworked employees of the closing Waldenbooks stores, creating enormous pressure on them to dumpster some books anyway to save time and labor ("I dumpstered 400 mass markets Monday night. Has anyone been boxing up and returning them, and how much space/time/materials does it eat up?" – 1/7 post from Borders employee on the iworkatborders LiveJournal blog).
http://community.livejournal.com/iworkatborders/577181.html?thread=12718237#t12718237
So much for Borders using this opportunity to take a stand against its own industry's wasteful practices, and working something out so that the unsold books could be donated instead. (January 8 at 11:23am)
well then, i really hope borders books do go out of business because we don't need a company that doesn't give a damn about my child's earth.
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