EDIT: changed "them" to "Amazon" for clarity.
It doesn't appear you are responding to anything at all related to the article.
Relatedly: Amazon doesn't provide a way for you and I to report price gouging.
It does, but they don't actually do anything about it. Hundreds of people have been reporting people selling Ring Fit Adventure for hundreds of dollars, but Amazon is still letting them do it.
But FWIW, you click 'Report incorrect product information', then 'Other product details' and 'price issue'.
It makes me really uncomfortable. Bookstores are businesses, subject to the market, they should be able to make money by their own merit.
I can only see these solutions:
- They will disappear, not a pleasant outcome, but it is not the first time such a thing happen. Movie rental stores suffered this fate for instance.
- They become public or subsidized in some way. I don't expect this to happen in the USA.
- They find some way of staying competitive. The way it is usually done is by creating local communities and events. Maybe host a variety of nerdy activities, like tabletop roleplaying. But they can also focus on the used market, or partner with schools to offer convenient "school year" packages, which could possibly also include used books.
While I think suffering in order to support local businesses is a noble thing to do, it is not sustainable, "pissing in the ocean" as you say. I am curious to know if there are local bookstores that managed to be successful against Amazon, and how they did it.
To me, it doesn't sound like the OP is suffering much at all, and they see the increased monetary cost and inconvenience as a worthwhile trade off to avoid dealing with a company that they don't like.
Of course, by spending way too long in bookstores, I often ended up actually buying books. I used it essentially like a library, except I bought books to bring them back home instead of borrowing them.
They support local and independent bookstores
Two arrived, but took three weeks. A third arrived in the fourth week. A fourth is nowhere to be found. bn.com won't talk to me without an order number, and I don't have an order number because I recently learned that an iPhone X will not stand up to sitting in a puddle of Lysol on the kitchen counter overnight.
Ten days after ordering from Barnes and Noble, I ordered the next nine books in the series from Abe Books. The sellers have been really quick. Most arrived in under a week. A few took ten days. But for $1-$5 apiece, I'm OK with that. More importantly, none got lost.
For the past 3 years, I've been buying all my books from a local shop. They're ~$5 more expensive and they arrive in about a week. The clerk (Stacy) calls me personally to tell me I can drop by to pick it up. There was only one instance in which the book was ordered but the distributor dropped the order and the book came 2 weeks later.
When I travel, I load up on books when I see booksellers. But in this case, I can't travel because of the aforementioned quarantine, so BN and Abe were all I could do.
I even tried contacting the last bookstore I shopped in, Tome on the Range in Las Vegas, New Mexico. I knew it would have the books because I saw the the last time I was there. But it doesn't have a web site, hasn't updated its Facebook page since 2017, and doesn't answer its phone. So it was back to the web.
1. No timestamps on chat. Returning a product can require multiple chat sessions over the course of a week, where each representative swears on their mother's grave that in the next 48 hours we'll get an email and everything will be sorted out. They leave out timestamps so you can't clearly see that they've left you hanging for 15-20 minutes between each message.
2. Switching back to the recurring (vs. one-time) purchase option for some products each time you make a change to the order.
Numerous other issues, many of which are features that sellers exploit (mostly around reviews) and that Amazon isn't interested in fixing because they profit from those sales.
Constantly trying to get you to sign up for prime it their credit card. They show you the prime free 2 day shipping even when you don't have prime to trick you into signing up. They also do something similar where they show you the price if you were to sign up for their credit card.
They try to get you to add a pointless warrantee whenever they can. The button to accept looks like the one you should click.
You can't actually sort by relevance when searching anymore. Every time you search it defaults you back to sorting by "featured". Let's through the game "Amazon's choice" flair in there also.
It's a lot harder to tell you're buying from a third party than it was before.
They tell you that you are purchasing an ebook. Try deleting your account and you'll learn real fast you didn't buy the books.
They have an option to export your data but it has never worked for me.
They list "items often purchased with this item" when clearly they wouldn't be.
They replace items with different items and keep the same reviews.
"Best seller" is not a best seller for what you searched for; it could be a best seller for a specific query for that model.
"Editorial recommendations" are just ads
"Videos about this product" are just ads
The star rating (4.2 out of 5) is not an actual average of ratings. Amazon creates that number.
Touting "Free Shipping w/ Prime" when most Prime products have free shipping already.