On the Competition Between an Online Bookstore and a Physical Bookstore Essay

Most of you have no doubt been made aware of viragos latest thuggish, brutal and brilliant idea to squeeze turn up its competition. Utilizing their Price Check smart phone app, a customer would get a 5% discount on a product that they initially scanned in a retail store before subsequently purchasing it on virago. Nefarious, right? But also quite savvy.Amazon is no stranger to victorious advantage of its massive size and its low overheads to crush its competition. Its online nature has allowed it to skip around state sales taxes, and the employment opportunities it brings serves as a deterrent to local legislators who wish to take Amazon down. Hey, if you dont want us in your state, there are 49 others that do.Like Wal-Mart before it, Amazon is, depending on your point of view, either making the consumer market to a corkinger extent efficient or sending us on a race to the bottom.Amazon has already seen transfer one of its chief competitors the formerly-of-this-world Borders and has since diversified into selling everything. And so Amazons little price-right stunt hit nearly everyone across the board. Thankfully for them, it was a one-day-only shell but the fact that Amazon can now, at any time, declare any day as Promotion Day is vaguely monopolistic and shuddery for Amazons real-world competitors.Amazons brick and mortar competitors still have that one crucial advantage that the company lacks mass. It sounds hokey, but human interaction having a salesperson tell you just exactly why you need the iGizmo4 instead of the Sprocketizer makes a difference. But given how easy it is to shop online, coupled with Amazons discount, average consumer Joe might just take his business online. And AC Joe just wasted the sales reps time, inadvertently making up for Amazons lack of human interaction with the real world stores service.If Amazons online comparative advantage takes off, their only customers would be the inveterate impatient who need the it-thing n ow. Amazons Price Check bets on the fact that anything anyone else sells, Amazon has for cheaper you just have to wait the 4-7 business days for shipping.Amazons victory may very well be (nearly) complete. But I believe that Amazons oldest adversary will yet linger, no matter how diminished the independent bookstore.It is a sad time for the local, independent, college-student staffed bookstore. So many of its comrades have gone under as the public migrated to Amazon-like entities. self-governing bookstores were to a greater extent than expensive given their limited stock and logistical capacity but they (often) boasted an intelligent and engaged staff who gave personalized recommendations and presentations on the differences between Dostoevsky translations.Yes, many more independent bookstores will (probably) die in the coming years. Obituaries have been written blaming either Amazon or the rise of e-publishing and there are those who already handle of the good old days when on e could thumb through copies of esoterica.But I believe weve already hit the bottom. There are no more independent bookstores to cull because the market fat has been eliminated. The places that still have independent bookstores want independent bookstores despite the pricing advantages of the Big Box or the internet.Independent bookstores foster a sense of literary community among costumers, serving as a focal point for discussion and as pretentious as this sounds intellectualism. The people who will keep these bookstores alive are the same people who would continue to donate to NPR or become members of museums. It is, of course, a sad fact that bookstores like these cannot inhabit in the free-market wild with an Amazonian predator on the loose, but the independent bookstore has found its ecological niche as a curated cultural object.This may be a depressing conclusion for some of you who remember the good old days (was it only a decade ago?) where the independent bookstore thriv ed in this America. But if you want to keep the independent bookstore alive, we will all have to do our part to treasure the luscious feel of running a finger through bound pages, to waltz through shelves of books we will never read, and to pass on that heady sensation to our children and friends. Call us the last survivors of the great bookstore apocalypse kooky and crazy, but we will keep these institutions alive just as we kill and devour a native bird species in November and just as we blow up quantities of explosives in the night sky in the 7th month of the solar calendar. These are cultural things that we do to asseverate who we are.