They can buy it somewhere else. And I'm not saying they can't - people can have whatever taste in music they want, surely? I'm responding to the musical tribalism of Moonie's post...

Well then bands trying to make up overly controversial album covers trying to be "edgy" should show a bit more commercial sense.

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Reclaiming "methinks" for the nation

Latest blog post - 2011 - a review (updated 07/10)

the last example i can think of was nothing of the sort.

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That's not how it works, often. Many I know are VERY good. But they cannot compete.

The world of music is 999999 times bigger than that shown in Asda. Same with books. If you don't give a toss about much outside their offerings, then fair enough.

A lot of other people do, and they don't necessarily want to shop on the net the whole time.

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But would you go to HMV for your potatoes?

"That's not how it works, often. Many I know are VERY good. But they cannot compete.

The world of music is 999999 times bigger than that shown in Asda. Same with books. If you don't give a toss about much outside their offerings, then fair enough.

A lot of other people do, and they don't necessarily want to shop on the net the whole time."

That *is* how it works, at least for books and classical music - I can't say anything about modern music because I don't know enough about it. But I assure you I buy a LOT of books, both as an academic and for leisure, and I buy them in lots of different places - supermarkets for new and popular, bookshops for general stuff, charity and secondhand shops for serendipity, online (Amazon, Abebooks) for out-of-print or hard-to-get stuff, or sometimes just because it's cheaper and more convenient than going to a bookshop. Bookshops are great to browse in, but if someone who buys as many books as I do finds them more expensive and less convenient, then a lot of people are going to feel that way as well. Same for classical music - there is a specialist CD shop in my city, but I only use it for limited-edition local orchestra CDs, that sort of thing. I mostly use the internet to pinpoint what I'm going to buy rather than getting titles by wandering around a shop, and that seems to serve me very well. Bottom line - bookshops and music shops are very nice as amusement, but they aren't going to survive if people like me don't buy a lot of stuff from them as well as browsing in them, and I don't any more, for several reasons. I'll be sad to lose them as places to go, but I understand exactly why they'll go and I don't feel it's my responsibility to preserve them at the cost of my own money, time and convenience.

I think you're missing the point. There are many music shops that offer a fantastic service and stock a lot of music that's difficult to find elsewhere, but because their audience is niche they might struggle to stay open. In the past, they would have benefited from passing trade and stocking music that would appeal to a more mainstream audience (in some places, Bristol to my knowledge but there must be others, this can still be the case to some extent). With the rise of the internet and supermarkets stocking the more mainstream things at prices that smaller shops can't usually afford this avenue is all-but-closed to them and without concerted effort on the part of the shopholder many close down. This is also the case in the world of books. It is very rare now to see a bookshop that isn't either a national chain or a charity shop. Where have all the independents gone? It's not just because 'they aren't good enough to compete'. Big chains can afford to offer low prices or silly deals because they also have massive profits; smaller retailers cannot compete with that level of turnover. When you get a Tesco or an Asda coming in and offering books at half-RRP or whatever, for a small bookseller it's a bit like facing down a tank with a musket. The fact that many such shops are also being gradually squeezed out of city centres by ever-increasing rents (often going hand-in-hand with the awful process of 'gentrification') doesn't help either. The 'fair competition' argument is regularly trotted out by the supermarkets and chains but the fact is that, unless the owner happens to be a multi-millionaire, independent shops cannot compete with the economic power of national and multinational corporations. How can they? So good shops close down because they can't afford to stay open and they get replaced by another bloody HMV.

You can't just blame the consumer, of course you can't, they've got every right to get the best deal they can. But it's still upsetting to see shops run by people who actually give a toss about what they're selling close down to be replaced by another homogeneous warehouse-stocked centrally-planned store selling the exact same crap at the exact same prices as every other store like it in the country. (Incidentally, I do find it rather ironic that the same people who would rail against central planning as an economic system in general tend to operate the most ruthlessly-centralised stocking systems for their stores I have ever known.) At the end of the day, though, how can an independent shop-owner compete unless consumers actively support them?

And many of those places that used to be a hangout for likeminded people or casual browsers are now replaced by an ebay store. I used to enjoy rummaging, but our local secondhand music shop was priced out of business by our 'progressive' local council...

I'm telling it as I see it, as I said. I don't know anything about modern music, as I also said, and I'm sure what you say about that is true. I'm saying that I, personally, am a prolific bookbuyer, and that I, personally, do not feel any need for independent bookshops. If I, as a prolific bookbuyer, feel that way, then a lot of less prolific buyers will feel exactly the same way, and that's why independent bookshops don't survive. That's all I'm saying, not that anyone else should feel as I do.

In any case I don't really understand your argument as it applies to books. Whether or not a shop owner cares about what they sell doesn't seem to me to matter very much if they have the book I want in stock. I buy the book, take it home and read it. I don't hang about chatting to the shop owner about how great it is. Why does it matter whether you buy a book from someone who knows about books or from Tesco, if it's the same book?

No, I think we appreciate your point in the sense that people will want cheaper stuff, more conveniently. Of course.

I was merely disputing that it's only down to how 'good' a shop is vis a vis its survival. In my eyes for music/books et al Tescos is atrocious, but it's 'good' at being successful overall, and that's what squeezes out the 'good' shops - not a matter of quality and variety all round, but a comprehensive nuclear demolition of competition via pressure and money.



I'm unaware of any purely economic reasoning about this, so I'll just argue it as a matter of taste. I prefer it, because I get the impression the person I'm buying from actually gives a fuck about the book, and consequently is like minded. I enjoy that.

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Where does Amazon stand, where advice from the interested shop owner is replaced by customer reviews? I find those very useful.

They're obviously very useful, up to a point. In my personal opinion it doesn't replace the face to face contact. And so on.

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Probably true. But our local bookshops are Smith's and Waterstone's, so a conversation with the staff (certainly at Smith's, increasingly at Waterstone's) about books tends to be unedifying. But this is suburbia, it's different in other places.

My son has/had a round of secondhand/import record shops where he could hang out, talk and buy, but they were all in more central areas of London, where a shop like that could be viable. The one nearby to where I live went out of business.

surely it all depends what kind of books you want, if it's jeffrey archole, dan brown or harry potter than you may as well get it at tesco where it'll be heavily discounted, if it's something touch more academic then chances are tesco won't sell it so you go to your local bookstore, if there's any left, and they'll order it for you.