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Something the "buy local" protectionists are missing out on, badly:
Buying locally also means selling locally, naturally. If everybody bought locally, as the protectionists demand, then the markets for the producers would be devastated. Take, say, a Maine lobsterman. Instead of shipping his lobsters nationwide, even worldwide, he'd be limited to the customers who came to his lobster pound to pick one up. It's been done. There's a reason that the father and grandfather and great-grandfather of our hypothetical lobsterman were eager to embrace cold storage and long-distance shipping: they could sell more lobsters, and sell lobsters for more -- and hence make better lives for themselves and their families -- if they weren't limited to local sales.
Let's look at in terms of the bookstore: Aside from the rather strange concept that an international super-chain is "local", let's look at what it sells. Bookstores, naturally, sell books (no, despite porkupan's opinion, they really don't exist to let us use their merchandise for free). Those books come from all over. If we were going to "buy locally" we'd buy only books by local authors. Isn't a Stephen King book the same thing as a Maine lobster in that sense? They're both items provided by a person who lives in Maine and sold elsewhere. Why should a person living in California refuse to buy the lobster because it's not "local", but buy the book, even though Stephen King is no more local than the man who caught that lobster?
The idealized cozy bookstore where the owner knows all the customers by name is badly lacking in a number of areas that one tends to gloss over in that rosy memory. For example, there's the matter of selection. That store can't have a wide selection of books because there just isn't space to put them. The owner has to be very selective, which usually means focusing on their own interests. If your local bookstore specializes in mystery novels, for instance, and you need a book about woodworking, you have to wait for a special order to come in -- and pay not only full price but shipping, and possibly a special order fee as well -- and, of course, have to know that the book exists in the first place. You can't just browse through a shelf of books that meet your interest because there is no such shelf; if there was, not just for you but for all the other people who live in your town, the store would look like -- and require the space of -- a superstore. This kind of defeats the whole purpose. Also, for the owner to know most of the customers by name, the customer base has to be small. One person can't learn the names of tens of thousands of people, nor singlehandedly operate a superstore. Economies of scale are not your friend at that level.
And, of course, we're assuming a sweet, lovable bookstore owner here, and a customer as well. What if it's someone who doesn't like people like you? What if it's someone who doesn't like you -- your ex-girlfriend, maybe? What if you just don't make friends easily? Your ability to complete a commercial transaction shouldn't be dependent on the vendor's personal charm or your own, but that's how the "cozy neighborhood bookstore" scenario works out. You don't get along with the owner, so you don't want to go in their store ... tough luck, you don't get any books.
I still keep going back to the whole "local" thing. It's interesting how upset people get when a factory in their town closes ... losing jobs! ... yet that factory's customers are not local. That factory depends on shipping its products elsewhere. So does Amazon. Its jobs don't happen to be where I live, but the people who draw pay from Amazon can spend their money on things that are built where I live. It would be a dismal place if we could only buy locally ... I wouldn't even have this computer to type on, and of course I couldn't use MobileRead, since it's not local either. And my job -- website designer -- wouldn't even exist.
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