Yeah, Amazon did a shitty thing. What are you gonna do about it? Nothing. Because the only reason you (an indie bookstore) are angry in the first place is because you have no control or leverage in the first place and you feed on the crumbs that Amazon happens to miss by vacuuming up the rest of the market by being so much better than you at actually being a store— like a entity that holds stuff and distributes it.
The value as a 3rd spaces inde bookstores provide to their communities are so crazy disconnected with their revenue model I'm amazed they've lasted this long. Your average inde bookstore isn't actually good (meaning core competency in a market) at anything they try to charge for. They're not good at being a store, they pay retail for logistics, they have no leverage with publishers, if they have food it's usually worse than the restaurant next door, if they have coffee it's usually worse than the starbucks across the street. The advantage of having boutique collection of books you can't get anywhere else evaporated when Amazon has every book in existence. Revenues for rare books evaporated thanks to ebay.
When making my pros and cons list of where to move to a few months ago, "has Amazon" was very high up my list (sorry Tblisi!) and "good independent book stores" was not on the list.
It’s like Amazon could fire their union-organizing employees on Labor Day and people would just be happy they can still their jelly beans delivered same day.
You are 100% correct and the downvoters don't want to admit that there is NOTHING uniquely better about small business/companies vs big business/companies. Often big companies pay better, have better WLB, better safety/compliance, etc.
There's a reason Marx calls them the petite-borgeious.
tqi|10 months ago
Spivak|10 months ago
The value as a 3rd spaces inde bookstores provide to their communities are so crazy disconnected with their revenue model I'm amazed they've lasted this long. Your average inde bookstore isn't actually good (meaning core competency in a market) at anything they try to charge for. They're not good at being a store, they pay retail for logistics, they have no leverage with publishers, if they have food it's usually worse than the restaurant next door, if they have coffee it's usually worse than the starbucks across the street. The advantage of having boutique collection of books you can't get anywhere else evaporated when Amazon has every book in existence. Revenues for rare books evaporated thanks to ebay.
pasc1878|10 months ago
petesergeant|10 months ago
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF|10 months ago
hackernoops|10 months ago
[deleted]
GolfPopper|10 months ago
voidfunc|10 months ago
Der_Einzige|10 months ago
There's a reason Marx calls them the petite-borgeious.