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In the mid -90's, you would read the exact same complaints as Russo makes - except it was about B&N and Borders crushing the independents. And you could hear the exact same response as xg4bx makes - that for 95% of the population, there never was a nearby independent bookstore that would foster local literacy. And I have never been particularly impressed by the local bookstores I've visited - while the staff may have known a lot about books in general, this didn't translate very well into a better experience for me.
It's not even a better experience than Amazon, where I can typically find out far more about a book than at any independent bookstore...and there are many other internet resources available.
In the pre-internet days, when information was a lot harder to come by, a good independent bookstore may have had access to information that I didn't know or couldn't have found out myself. But those days are long gone.
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