An op-ed in The New York Times discusses Amazon’s holiday assault on brick-and-mortar bookstores. It’s a Scrooge left hook, followed by a Grinch uppercut, leading to a Mr. Potter TKO.
I first heard of Amazon’s new “promotion” from my bookseller daughter, Emily, in an e-mail with the subject line “Can You Hear Me Screaming in Brooklyn?” According to a link Emily supplied, Amazon was encouraging customers to go into brick-and-mortar bookstores on Saturday, and use its price-check app (which allows shoppers in physical stores to see, by scanning a bar code, if they can get a better price online) to earn a 5 percent credit on Amazon purchases (up to $5 per item, and up to three items).
This promotion has received a good deal of negative press. Chamber of Commerce of Eastern Connecticut President Tony Sheridan called it a “new low” and a “slap in the face to all small business owners.” Sam Hall at Amazon disagreed.
“We are enabling customers to use the Price Check app to share in-store prices while they search for the best deals,” (Hall said). “This is a powerful opportunity for customers to get involved and ensures Amazon customers get the best possible prices.”
It’s not new for a store to offer to match or even beat the price offered at a competitor, but those are usually fairer battles. Small retailers aren’t in the same weight class as Amazon, which like Wal-Mart can afford to lower prices for the time it takes to crush the competition.
Another example of the app in action:
Valerie Lewis opened the slender book, cradled it lovingly in her hands and began to read a story about a bear who lost his hat. As co-owner of Hicklebee’s Books in Willow Glen, she has done this a thousand times.
Then Lewis turned the book over and allowed a visitor with an iPhone to scan the bar code using Amazon’s Price Check app. Within seconds, the Amazon price popped up: $9.59. “Let’s see what Hicklebee’s has it for,” Lewis said, then pointed to the amount imprinted on the book jacket: $15.99.
A clerk standing nearby was unable to resist mentioning the obvious — that Amazon would probably ship the book free and not charge any sales tax, further increasing its $6.40 price advantage over the venerable San Jose children’s bookstore.
Complaints in the press and on Facebook status message aside, I’m sure Amazon’s promotion wil be a succes. The U.S. consumer is the ultimate mob wife: She knows something’s up — it’s all a little suspicious — but she doesn’t ask questions.
I’m a Kindle user — I even read comics on an app these days — but in my younger and more vulnerable days, I haunted physical bookstores. My favorite was Gotham Books in Manhattan, which Katharine Hepburn described as the “greatest bookstore in New York and thus the world” (I think… the exact quote is on the bookmark you got when you bought a book there and all my books are currently in storage). I watched as my homes from home slowly closed one by one. Their replacements were the mammoth Barnes & Noble, Waldenbooks, Books-A-Million, Book Hut, and so on. They had a wider selection but were antiseptic with employees who either didn’t have the time or the ablity to talk to you about a book you might want to purchase. There was little passion in those stores. Once we accepted that, we were bound to embrace Amazon, which is now intent on wiping out the remaining bookstores with the same cold ruthlessness as Michael Corleone eliminating the competing families in “The Godfather.”
This might be the path of the future but I guess I wonder what’s the rush? Amazon reminds me of the loathsome heir to a family fortune standing over his mother on her death bed, silently willing her to croak sooner rather than later. With its price-check app, Amazon now goes as far as to smother smaller retailers with a pillow.
serhasacomplaint 
“Charlie Said It Would!”…
Twenty years ago, my old archnemesis, Charlie Gertz, retired from WYFF, the local NBC affiliate in Greenville, SC. We had a complex relationship. He was the station’s meteorologist — a fancy title for weatherman some might argue, but it does require more of a scientific aptitude than Nicholas Cage movies might have you believe.
Gertz’s slogan was “Charlie Said It Would,” which referred to his accurate predictions of the weather, but his record involving the occasional rainstorm meant nothing to me. All that mattered was whether it snowed when he said it was going to snow.
The man who was out-"Meteorologisted" by my mother.
Snow Days are magical events for kids. They are less joyous for adults who have to work, especially in the South where it snows rarely and the public reaction to it is overblown. The roads are clogged prior to potential snowfalls with residents desperate to clear the grocery store shelves of milk and bread. Snow in Greenville, if it stuck to the ground at all, lasted about eight minutes but people still feared that they might resort to cannibalism if they did not adequately stock up before the “blizzard.”
The best scenario was for the “winter storm warning” to be so dire that they closed schools the night before. That’s when your Monday turned into Friday night. If they closed the schools in the morning, my father just wouldn’t wake me, and the sound of him leaving indicated my freedom.
My father woke me for school each morning at exactly 6:45 a.m. This was without fail. My father never took sick days. And he never had Snow Days. Those mornings were not easy for my father — curled up in bed, I could hear him scraping the ice off his crap car’s windshield. Then came the painful death rattle of this piece of junk trying to turn over in the cold — “bruda, bruda, bruda,” it wheezed. My father was undaunted and tried again. “Bruda, bruda, bruda,” it croaked. I pulled my pillow closer to me, rolled over on my side, and thought, “That’s a damn shame.”
Somehow, after mutliple attempts, my father would get his 1972 Plymouth Scamp running (no, really) and head off in the snow. Until its eventual collapse in the mid-80s, that insult to automobiles everywhere is what my father took to and from work each day. My mother drove the family car, which had modern conveniences such as air conditoning, a tape player, and brakes. The parking lot at my father’s job looked like “Sanford and Son” with all the men in their jalopies.
One night I recall quite vividly, Charlie Gertz announced an oncoming snowstorm that would level Greenville with up to a foot of snow. He looked directly at me through the TV set and said, “There’s nothing to do tomorrow but just watch the snow fall. ‘Cause it’s gonna!” Then he winked at the camera, and that wink said, “Hey, Stephen, screw your homework! Stay up late! Enjoy tomorrow’s ‘Young and the Restless.’ I don’t know what your father was thinking, getting married, having kids, driving a car Fred Flintstone would consider beneath him. But you can’t worry about him. Life is for the living!”
I was escastic. My mother was less so.
“That’s nonsense,” she proclaimed. “It only ever snows here if it the storm comes through Georgia. If it comes from North Carolina, the mountains will stop it. You’re going to have school tomorrow.”
“Whatever, Dr. Robinson,” I replied dismissively. “Charlie said it would, so if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to shoot some heroin and dance with strippers, tomorrow’s a Snow Day! Actually, I’m probably just going to stay up late reading comics and listening to Madonna and the Eurythmics, but my point holds: Snow Day, baby!”
The next morning, at exactly 6:45 a.m., my father knocked on my door.
“Time to get up, son.”
Clearly, the old man had gone mad. Didn’t he know it was a Snow Day? I was already wearing the fake Victor Newman mustache I’d received as a Secret Society member of the “Young and the Restless” fan club.
I rushed to the window, expecting to see a carpet of white on the ground, but there was only green grass.
Falling to my knees, I vowed revenge against Charlie Gertz for his treachery. He was probably taking kickbacks from the grocery stores. I also swore that once I was out of school, I’d never get up at 6:45 a.m. again.
Gertz retired in 1992 — through only minor machinations on my part. I graduated high school the same year and proceeded to spend my late teens and most of my 20s making good on my second vow. I took afternoon classes in college and worked nights during my first few years in New York. Sometime around my 30th birthday, though, I started rising at 6:45 a.m. without an alarm. You can’t escape heredity, I suppose.
Posted by Stephen Robinson on December 12, 2011 in Pop Life, Social Commentary
Tags: Charlie Gertz, Greenville, SC, Snow Days