Godfrey DiGiorgi wrote:
On Aug 14, 2005, at 10:02 AM, Bob W wrote:
That's why there'll be no more bricks & mortar bookstores in a few
years.
Amazon will charge whatever they want, and we will have lost the
pleasure of
browsing for books. You won't be able to talk to knowledgable staff
about
the books. The town centres will become dustbowls and the
unemployment rate
will keep on rising. There'll be fighting in the streets, with our
children
at our feet...
Well, perhaps not that bad. But what you're doing is what happened
to all
the little photo shops, and so many other small shops. It all
contributes to
the break-up of local communities and a fall in the quality of the
goods and
the quality of living.
I've bought an awful lot from Amazon over the years, but almost only
when I
haven't been able to get the book locally (which includes the West
End of
London).
Support your local shops.
All the good bookstores near me are either big chains (Barnes & Noble
or Borders Books) already, with the exception of the four used
bookstores and two small bookshops which I frequent and buy from
quite often. Since B&N and BB are on the same order of commercial
scale in business as Amazon.com, what the heck? Why pay a 40% added
markup to B&N when Amazon has the same thing?
Camera shops ... The two good ones nearby I frequent often, and they
usually offer prices quite close to what I can buy from B&H Photo,
and I buy locally whenever it's sensible to. All the little older Mom
& Pa shops ... well, Mom and Pa already retired and nobody picked up
the business. Not much choice there.
The world has changed.
Godfrey
The biggest camera store in my city can't be bothered to carry Pentax
any more, and the other one has only the low-end bodies. (We also have
some Ritzwolves around but they are, as far as I can tell, small
electronics stores that carry a few cameras.) I bought, or my husband
bought for me, five Pentax cameras from the big store in the past eleven
years. There's not much more we, personally, could have done to
encourage them. So now my choices for Pentax gear are: buy sight unseen
mail-order or take a half-day to drive to Austin to find a decent,
Pentax-carrying camera store (which I did for both my Optio and *istD.)
