Blah blah blah. Text book on Amazon for 10 bux cheaper than PCC. Sry PCC. Also MLA handbook for $20 bux at Powell's. Fuck you.

Everyone should know by now that they vote with their dollars. And if you keep voting for a single company and put the others out of business, then you are giving that company all of the power and market control.

But people, collectively, are stupid, and want their cheap plastic shit.

It would make me SUPER HAPPY if the Merc could also mention how book returns from large stores such as Amazon (and Wal Mart) damage publishers and put small publishers out of business:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.p…

(Companies like Amazon buy large numbers of books at a steep discount so that they can then sell those books at a steep discount, which is why they are so cheap. But the unsold books are often returned to the publisher, which costs the publishers money and leads to them putting out fewer titles and sometimes even going out of business.)

I've read none of your links, but imma still talk:

I have a 20% rule: if I can find something in a local store, I'll buy it there if the price is within 20% of the full online price (i.e. includes taxes/shipping/handling).

I have no such rule for online retailers, I don't care where they are based. I can't think of any persuasive reason to treat local middlemen any differently than behemoth middlemen. Can anyone else?

@4: if you're down for smaller local businesses, why does it matter whether they have a storefront or are just a web/mail-order retailer? Buying from Powells.com still helps the local economy, helps Powells at a time when they're struggling a bit, and postpones the day when Amazon is a complete monopoly. I don't mean to make Powells out to be saintly or anything, but I'll definitely support them more willingly than Amazon. I don't really shop at their site much, but when I do I often find used stock that's only in their warehouses. Then it's a choice between ordering it on the site or having them transfer it to the Burnside store for pickup.

@ geyser, we buy 99% of our books at Powells, in person, and often buy our gifty things from used-to-have-a-brick-and-morter Elsa & Sam (www.elsasam.com), etc.

I guess I have two issues a) I usually only buy things online around the holiday season, and thats specifically so Amazon will ship everything wherever I want it to go and I don't have to go to a dozen different sites, and b) how the hell do I know which e-tailers are based in Portland?

Should I just trust they're "local" to somewhere just because they aren't householdname.com, and that's good enough? It seems like the issue is less about locality (since most local booksellers would probably say Powell's is the Amazon of Portland), and more just about "mom and pop" vs. behemoths.

@ Commenty Colin: Makes sense. Powell's is definitely the local equivalent of Amazon. I like to go to places like St. Johns Booksellers (and not out of guilt, like Emily Powell suggests) but going there is definitely a different from Powell's in every sense of the word.

a different *experience

there is a huge difference between shopping local and shopping online!