Although I freely admit my addiction to mind-numbing television programs, I still carve out a chunk of time to do some good old-fashioned reading.  Mrs. Lampsen is a voracious consumer of the written word and the Lampsen children have libraries that rival those of most small, private universities.

All of those pages stuffed with well-turned phrases don’t come free.  And even though I’d love it if we supplemented our burgeoning collection of books solely via deep-discount library sales, we apparently crave the new stuff too much to make that happen.

When you combine that demand for pages with my personal predilection for bargains, you end up being a Borders Rewards member.

Well, that’s how it did work.  You see, Borders used to have a crazy good customer loyalty program.  Borders Rewards, which was wildly popular, once worked like this:

Members were given Personal Shopping Days, which enabled those who had spent $50 in a month to apply a 10% discount on all purchases made on a specific day in the following month. Gift cards were the exception. Customers also received a credit equal to 5% of their store purchases made through Nov. 14 in a special Holiday Savings account. That credit could then be used on purchases made from Nov. 15 through Jan. 31. The only caveat was that customers had to have at least $10 in their account — which meant they had to have spent a minimum of $200 to qualify.

Then, the head honchos at the book giant decided that the economic downturn and the excessive popularity of the program made it untenable.  Basically, they were giving away too much and they didn’t feel as though a recession was the best time to continue to largesse.  The spot-tested a scaled-back program at a select group of stores and discovered that they could improve their numbers without being as generous with the Borders Rewards plan.

Of course they couldn’t get rid of the whole thing.  So, they scaled it back instead.  Borders Rewards is still alive and kicking, it just isn’t as great as it once was.  Here’s what they’re doing now:

For every $150 spent on qualifying purchases at Borders, Borders.com, Borders Express, or Waldenbooks, Borders Rewards members will earn $5 in Borders Bucks, issued the first week of the following month and valid until the end of that month. Plus, any amount you spend on qualifying purchases that exceeds $150 rolls over until you reach your next cumulative total of $150. There is no limit to how many Borders Bucks you can earn!

You can see the difference.  It’s actually pretty substantial.  You can still save some dough by being part of the club, but it isn’t quite as nice as it once was.

Now, I’m not saying that’s a reason to abandon the Borders’ ship.  If you liked the store when they were giving you more freebies, you’ll still like the store.  You’ll just spend a little more money.  And I’m not sure whether or not you’re really going to get a much better deal by taking it over to Barnes & Noble.  Besides, at least check you had to shell out $25 of your own cash to join the B&N program and if you’re like me you get a bit squeamish about paying for what’s supposed to be a customer loyalty program.

Who knows whether or not Borders will upgrade Rewards once we come out of this economic funk, but right now things aren’t what they used to be at the bookstore.

On the bright side, they still do their educator deals if you happen to be a teacher and their discount tables always seem stuffed with decent stuff at cut-rate prices.  There’s also a strong indication that they’re interested in re-improving the program.