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Originally Posted by Cinisajoy
I think this is a cultural thing. We don't have many independent book stores, except for specialty stores. Most of our B&M stores are ran by corporations. The individual store employees have to display whatever the corporate office decides.
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It's not a purely French thing. I was in Scotland last summer, and in a Waterstone's (probably not a huge brand, but still a name you'll find all across UK) some of the books came with written recommendations from the store employees on the shelves - signed, so if you bought a book on one's recommendation and liked it, you could try others recommended by the same person.
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I may be wrong but I think I read that France has very few big box stores. Please correct me if I am wrong.
I see you said books can't be discounted, does this apply to other things as well?
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It depends on what you'd call "big"
but bookstores larger than just the ground floor of a building are rare - you'd only find one in a major city, if that. Anything bigger is usually selling much more than books (like, CDs and DVDs, possibly computers, cameras - it's not just a bookstore, and usually books are only a small part of the business).
The law against discounting books is very specific to books. It was voted in the early '80s, intended as a way of protecting small bookshops from being driven out of business by, typically, supermarkets. That was way before ebooks or electronic distribution of anything, so I'm not sure whether it applies to, say, ebooks, and it certainly says nothing about music or movies. It worked reasonably well; small bookstores do still exist around here. I don't know if it influenced, say, the way the publishing industry evolved (we have lots of small publishing companies, but then, book publishing is hardly a global market - people will almost exclusively buy books in their own language).
I'm not even sure how this law applies to books published in other countries. Books published in France always have their price printed on the back cover, and bookstores are not allowed to discount it by more than 5%, or offer promotions like "buy 2 get one free".