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, furious and brilliant idea to squeeze out its competition. Utilizing their Price burst tonic phone app, a customer would get a 5% give notice on a product that they initially s fuckingned in a sell descent before subsequently purchasing it on amazon. Nefarious, right? merely also quite savvy.virago is no stranger to taking receipts of its massive size and its low overheads to crush its competition. Its online nature has allowed it to skip rough state sales taxes, and the employment opportunities it brings serves as a deterrent to local anaesthetic 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 much high-priced or sending us on a race to the bottom.Amazon has already seen off one of its chief competitors the formerly-of-this-world Bo rders and has since diversified into selling everything. And so Amazons little price-right stunt hit nearly everyone crossways the board. Thankfully for them, it was a one-day-only event but the fact that Amazon can now, at any time, declare any day as promotion Day is vaguely monopolistic and scary for Amazons real-world competitors.Amazons brick and mortar competitors still have that one crucial wages that the company lacks people. It sounds hokey, but human interaction having a salesperson order you just exactly why you need the iGizmo4 instead of the Sprocketizer makes a difference. besides given how easy it is to shop online, coupled with Amazons discount, fair consumer Joe might just take his air online. And AC Joe just mindless 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 chronically impatient who need the i t-thing now. 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 closely be (nearly) complete. But I believe that Amazons oldest resister go out yet linger, no matter how diminished the self-supporting bookstore.It is a no-count time for the local, independent, college-student staffed bookstore. So many of its comrades have gone under(a) as the public migrated to Amazon-like entities. Independent bookstores were more expensive given their curb 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 speak of the good old days when one 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, armed service as a focal point for discussion and as artsy-craftsy as this sounds intellectualism. The people who will keep these bookstores unrecorded are the uniform 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 survive 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 culture for some of you who remember the good old days (was it only a decade ago?) where the indepe ndent bookstore thrived 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 leaf through bound pages, to waltz through shelves of books we will never read, and to spend on that heady sensation to our children and friends. Call us the last survivors of the great(p) bookstore apocalypse kooky and crazy, but we will keep these institutions alive just as we kill and devour a native dolly species in November and just as we blow up quantities of explosives in the nighttime sky in the 7th month of the solar calendar. These are cultural things that we do to preserve who we are.