Quote:
Reestablishing the Retail Relationship
Back when mom-and-pop retailers ruled the land, one-on-one relationships between purveyors and customers were easy to foster. Business owners knew their customers well — understood their tastes, how they shopped, and what they needed.
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This quote makes me wonder whether the author really remembers what most mom-and-pop retailers were like. In the smaller town (pop. 50,000) where I grew up, most mom-and-pop retailers had a poor selection and jacked up prices; they got away with this because you had no where else to go.
Until the chain stores came, we didn't have a proper bookstore; we had a book-and-card shop with a very small book selection. The person behind the counter could tell you where to find birthday cards, but she didn't know anything about science fiction, which was what I was looking for. (They only had maybe 50 sf titles).
When the chain stores opened (Waldenbooks and B.Dalton), things changed dramatically. They may not have known my personal tastes, but they carried *so many more books.* Quantity - as Stalin said - has a quality all its own. And the students and other people working at these mall bookstores knew a lot more about sf than the book-and-cards ladies did.
So I'm a little jaded on the whole mom-and-pop idea. I don't really need someone who knows my tastes. I'm not sure that I know my tastes; they seem to change. What I want is information and selection; I can usually go from there.
(I also don't find Amazon's suggestions to be that helpful; I suspect that their algorithms are off because they know that I liked a particular book, but don't understand what it was. I think that there is a lot of room for improvement.)