One of the nights I was visiting in Ithaca, the friend I was staying with opened up a bag of coffee that she'd gotten on a project demo. She's in business school, studying marketing and brand management, and sometimes companies come in to do product demos for the b-school students, give them free samples. So she opened this bag of coffee (blueberry flavored, actually) that was given to her by an exec at an up-and-coming regional coffee producer who's trying to cut in to the Starbucks market, and while the coffee was brewing, she talked to me about why these guys are unlikely to ever take customers from Starbucks.
The recurring problem with big chain monsters like Starbucks (and I trust I'm not saying anything here that anyone will find too shocking) is that good community-minded people never want to support them over independent community-based business, but that it's hard to avoid the fact that the big chain monsters are often pretty good places to shop. In Berkeley, it's easy to stick to my principles, to choose Berkeley Espresso or Caffe Strada or Brewed Awakening over Starbucks, to choose Moe's or Cody's over Barnes and Noble. Back in my hometown, though? There's a Starbucks in the shopping center downtown, in the corner spot where my mother's seamstress used to own a drycleaner's, and it's been a godsend. There just wasn't anywhere else to buy coffee in town. There's a big Barnes and Noble out on Route Seventeen, and that's a godsend too--there aren't a lot of bookstores between my mother's house and the big B&N, and the ones that there are, they've got crap selection.
What got me thinking about it this morning, though, was the Avenue Victor Hugo closing announcement, along with the subsequent announcement (which I found somewhere in the Making Light discussion of the AVH closing) that Other Change of Hobbit is also going out of business. There's no significant connection between the announcements and the corporate-monster musing; contrary to what the AVH people have said, I don't think that encroachment from large chain stores is what did in either of these small bookstore.
Maybe I'll take that back. I can see a causal connection, but it's a loose one at best. Maybe large corporate-monster stores, in combination with internet shopping, have fostered the idea that one can (and should) go to a bookstore not to browse, but to find a particular book that you already know you're looking for. Avenue Victor Hugo was never that kind of bookstore. If you wanted to spend a while wandering around thematically-sorted shelves and seeing what looked interesting, Avenue Victor Hugo was your place. If you had a book in mind and wanted that book, AVH would be at best an exercise in frustration. Maybe people's expectations for bookstores have changed? I don't know.
The thing that I hear most often from independent bookstores is that people go to them to look at the books in person and decide which books to buy -- and then they go home and buy the books from Amazon at a discount. Customers are apparently very upfront about the fact that they're doing this; they don't see anything wrong with it. (Matt, does that jibe with your experience? I forget whether I've heard you talk about this or not.) I'm sure that's far from the only factor, but (anecdotally, at least) it does seem to be a factor.
There's been some further discussion of John Usher's "crepuscule" (from the AVH page) in comments in Vardibidian's journal -- http://www.kith.org/vardibidian/journal/show-entry.php?Entry_ID=1899 -- if you're interested.
(I wish I could create links in these comments, or, failing that, that the auto-linking feature understood not to include parentheses in URLs....)
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Well, I suppose I'm not exactly shocked, but I am saddened. I like shopping there a lot, and yes, I do buy books from them. It's one of my favorite places to get books.
Heather -- I think the instant gratification works the other way sometimes. When I hear or read about a book I want, it's easier and faster to order it on amazon than to find the time to get to a bookstore. Particularly since the bookstore rarely will have what I'm looking for.
Books I discover while browsing in a store: those I'm inclined to buy right there. But those aren't generally must-haves so much as interesting stuff I've just happened across. For instant gratification re: specific books I want, amazon wins. I love my small independent bookstores, but what I love about them are things other than convenience.
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