Things Change

The NYT today has an article lamenting Amazon's war on brick & mortar bookstores.

I sympathize with the brick & mortar stores to a degree. They're like buggy makers in a Model T world. the article states that "losing independent bookstores would be 'akin to editing ... a critical part of our culture out of American life.'"

Once upon a time, horses, buggies and wagons were a critical part of American culture. We lost something real when we lost that necessary relationship we had with our equine servants. That's not an argument for going back to horses.

Things are changing. The brick & mortar bookstore way of doing business won't work anymore. It doesn't make sense anymore. Yet, one day Amazon will have the same, quaint sepia-toned memories the old Sears Christmas Wish Book hold for me. Every years as a kid I'd build my Christmas list from the offerings in that catalog. In my simple world it didn't even occur to me that there were other stores besides Sears, or toys that Sears didn't carry. It was the Christmas Wish Book, and it ruled my Christmas list.

That world is gone, like the horse and buggy, and Sears the retail behemoth that dominated much of the 20th century, is a sad, little also-ran housing the anchor building in a nearby under-used shopping mall. That mall also until not logn ago also featured a Waldenbooks. Also an also-ran. Ford, that led the vanguard of the movement that killed the horse-and-buggy days, is also, increasingly, an also-ran -- bloated, unproductive, debt-ridden, far from its glory days.

One day, Amazon will be an also-ran. You might as well go out to the beach and fight the tide with a child's shovel and sand bucket.

Nobody makes millions of people shop at Amazon every day. It's giving people what they want, just like its predecessors did. Some day, someone else will figure out how to do that better.

Crediting it with the destruction of the personal and the enemy of artistic and literary development is more than a little absurd.