--Anna Lappe
$16.70. $17.84.
$27.99.
What would you pay for an item, given these three prices?
The cheapest one, right? The most inexpensive. The purchase
that lightens your wallet the least. That's how I usually decide and make a
logical consumer choice. Those prices, in order, are the cost for a hardcover
copy of the best-selling memoir "Hillbilly Elegy", on Amazon.com,
BarnesandNoble.com (shipped or in store) and from one of the last independent
bookstores in my part of the world, Wellesley Books, right on Central Street, in the village, as locals call it.
I faced that choice recently when folks from the community I
serve decided to read and study "...Elegy". I dutifully took everyone's
orders and then...well, where to buy? Online or local? Next door or from a far away warehouse? Cyber
purchase or an up close transaction?
Calculated capitalism tells me to always buy the least
expensive book, no questions, no doubts. Our bare knuckles marketplace always
rules and so I should reward the bookseller offering the lowest price with my
business. At a steep savings of $11.22 a copy at Amazon, the answer should be clear.
Sign on to the internet, order with a few keystrokes and two days later the
books arrive. No driving to the store. No hunting for a parking space. No scanning
the stacks searching for my title. No need to actually visit a bricks and
mortar address. It's true that online book sellers can go so cheap by taking a
financial loss on "...Elegy" and other best sellers, but who am I to
question such a deal?!
Pick. Click. Read.
I should have picked Amazon. It keeps with my usual book
buying habits: from the first of this year until now, I've already purchased 33
books from them! Yes: "My name's John and I am a book-aholic." Except,
as you might have guessed, this time I ordered the books from that local
bookstore.
It's the "local" in that sentence that finally
changed my mind. Local, as in nearby,
owned and operated by neighbors and maybe even friends. Local, as in a real
place to shop on a real "Main
Street": an actual storefront with a front door and
inside, folks who help customers find what they are looking for. Local, as in a place where authors come to
talk about their writing, where children plop down on the floor surrounded by
titles, while Mom or Dad or Grandma looks for a good read and bargain hunters scour the basement for used books. Local, as in sharing community with others,
fellow book lovers. And all right here,
not somewhere out "there".
This isn't an anti-Amazon rant. I will still buy lots of
stuff and some books, too, from Amazon. It is one of a score of companies that disrupt
old business models and have flourished in our new cyber economy in this new
century. Whether it is booking our own travel,
or buying anything, or hailing a cab, or connecting in community: every thing
about how we humans actually do things in the world is radically changing and
very fast too. To imagine we can turn
back this tide of social transformation is fallacy.
Yet still...every time we spend a dollar on a book or a pair
of jeans, on a hammer or new shoes online; every time we bypass the downtown
for a big box store; every time we dine at a generic chain restaurant, we, as
consumers shape the quality of the places, the real places we call home. Going
local reminded me I still need a local bookstore for a sacred hour to wander
through the books and touch their spines and see those tomes up close and then
imagine where these might take me. I need a local downtown cafe that sells
locally grown food from the farmer's market. I need a cramped family owned
diner where I can be with my brother face to face, and share life and stories
and eggs over easy, rye toast on the side.
I need a thrift store or a junk store or an antique store to linger over
musty records, used books and ancient posters. And I've actually found a nearby hardware
store that's smaller than the state of New
Jersey.
These hopes aren't just wistful nostalgia. I'll bet you wince too when you go to a downtown or walk a city street and see closed storefronts and
wonder just where the heck are all those local places we once loved, places that defined a place as a place. Even in
2017, there is something graceful and good we experience when we are connected
deeply to communal spaces: town greens and urban squares, places to walk and
shop and eat and connect and yes, to spend our dollars.
To get local, to be local, and to claim "local" as
home: that is still priceless.
No comments:
Post a Comment