Decline of Local Bookstores
Aug 5th, 2008 by Graham Booker
Today I went to a local Barnes & Noble to purchase some books. The books aren’t the current best sellers, but they are quite well known, so the store should have had them. Since they were science and religious in nature, I looked in both sections. After 30 minutes, I found numerous books on the same topics, but none of the ones I wanted. This was frustrating to the point that I wished for a card catalog like a library just so I could figure out where the store would put them. Eventually I gave up, walked out and decided to just look online.
Time spent finding them on Amazon: 10 seconds. So here’s the question: Why go to to local bookstore to purchase a book unless it is a current best seller, or you need it immediately when instead you can purchase it online, for a lower price (without sales tax) and spend less of your time trying to find it?
so very true, that goes for many products these days, and now you can text msg amazon the bar code of any product to get amazon’s price
-Noah on cell phone
fwiw, Borders stores have net-kiosks with catalogs of in-stock and otherwise, including shelving directories.