Apparently, last Thursday was “Black Thursday” for employees at Borders stores around the country. As a Publishers Weekly report by Jim Milliot details, “expected cuts in the store workforce at Borders began last week in what employees on various blogs are calling ‘Black Thursday.’ The number of cuts its unclear, and the retailer had only a vague response when asked for clarification of how many jobs were eliminated. ‘Borders is always looking for opportunities to improve performance and profitability. Any recent changes are a continuation of our efforts,’ a Borders statement read.”

A report on Publishers Lunch yesterday (subscription only) reported “Many individual posts have been made by people who held training supervisor and inventory supervisor positions who say they were let go.” Publishers Lunch also cited a quote “said to be taken from an internal announcement”:

We made the decision to eliminate the training supervisor position so that we could allocate more hours to the sales floor. Training remains an important function in our stores, and the responsibilities of the training supervisor will be redistributed among the leadership positions. Additional supervisor- and manager-level positions were eliminated in some stores to align with the appropriate structure based on sales volume, and a few BSR stores made changes to align their leadership structure with their volume levels as well.

As a previous MobyLives story reported, Borders laid off 10% of its corporate workforce barely a month ago.