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Okay, so it’s time for a little rant! Or a big rant. Whatever you want to define it is.
So there has bee a lot of news in relation to Amazon as of late because they recently purchased Whole Foods for a disgusting amount of money. However, this is not the only thing they are doing!
For a company who has been busy buying up lots of smaller stores and making everything online, they are opening quite a lot of real bookstores now. There’s been quite a few articles in relation to this talking about what the stores are like. The first one that opened, I believe, was in Washington and now they are popping up all over!
According to the articles that I have been reading, these stores are quite cold with the staff just doing their job, wearing headsets, and not going above and beyond. I, personally, go into a bookstore to connect with the people who work there, get good recommendations, and talk to people who know a lot about books. In these stores, it’s just people who need a job; not people who actually love books (that’s a big issue to me!).
Also, I love going into bookstores were the books are cramped in and they are stacked all the way up to the ceiling and almost falling out of the bookshelves. Apparently in these Amazon bookstores, the books are all facing out so that you can see the cover and you buy based on what you see. Kind of like when you are scrolling through the book options on the Amazon website.
Amazon has just opened a store near me and I’ll be trying to visit next week to actually experience one of these places and see what people are talking about, and of course write about my experience. I don’t have high hopes personally. I love going into these small little bookshops and will, quite literally, pull the car over to stop and go into one and just be with the books.
To me, all of this kind of bothers me. But I know some people love it.
What are you thoughts on all of this? Do you think these big bookstores are a good idea, or do you prefer the smaller places that are much more personalized, small but so much more home-like?
