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Yep, protectionism doesn't work.
I also find it amusing that people presume that small business owners are somehow paragons of virtue, but a sufficiently large organization (usually defined as "bigger than anyone else) is utterly devoid of ethics.
That said, I do think that some smaller stores have a positive role to play, especially those that specialize in a particular field or genre -- travel or mystery, for example. The operators are much more likely to have a beneficial depth of knowledge than a website. Unfortunately, you do need to have a community of a certain size in order to sustain a business along those lines.
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