NEWS: Wil Wheaton's Geek In Review: Save the Friendly Locals!

This is a great article and I fully support buying from local community stores. The problem I recently had was that I couldn't find any board I was seeking at the local snowboard shop. I eventually bought one online. I feel bad about that as I really wanted to buy locally and support my retail community. I think the bigger problem made apparent by this article is that smaller, local communities are disappearing. The world gets smaller as technology advances. That's not a bad thing, but we sacrifice our individual communities in the process, which I think is a bad thing. It is a sad and odd thing that as we become more connected to the world around us we become less connected to the people around us. Thx Wil for a great article!

it'll be a sad sad day if/when "my" cd shop closes.. because i was a loyal customer and put up a little plaque advertising their store when i started dj-ing i got a decent discount on practically everything.. i refused discounts on new releases as they had to cut their margins to basically breaking even to keep pace with the "big box" stores in the neighbourhood..

i think i look forward to wil's articles more than rob's on tuesdays..

and we wonder why kids these days are such assholes...

I visit local stores whenever I have the chance, but only because I have a crippling fear of polo shirts.

Great article Wil.

The ones in Northampton, Coventry and Rugby have closed, and only the one at The Stables in Milton Keynes remains

The Northampton store is the one I used to visit, I miss it.

I would contend that it is less about "helping your local shop" (altruistic) and paying a little extra to do "business as a conversation" (enhanced business relationship) as espoused by Doc Searls and others. Wil's example of the chain bookstore is a jarring example of a command and control producer/consumer relationship. The smaller stores take the time to know their customers and build relationships. The big ones treat the customer as a portable gullet - consume product and crap cash.

If you are sure you want a WidgetMaster5000 buing on-line isn't a bad deal at all. If you don't have a local store it makes sense. If you want to build a business relationship that can find things you didn't know about you shop locally at a small outlet.

I have much the same situation as a ham radio operator. I can buy most things on-line and I often do. If I know generally what I want, but need some ideas and help picking out the best version of a product I'm headed to a ham store. In the last couple places I've lived that was a 2-4hr round trip. Oh, and when I buy on-line other than Ebay, I shop the on-line site of my favorite ham store.

Portable gullet or conversation, it is our choice to make.

I'm surprised at your experience in the big-box book store. The ones I've been to seem to almost encourage people to sit in the store and read whatever they want - I've always figured it's because they make a pretty sizable profit margin on the coffee drinks they sell.

I think one of the best reasons to shop locally is that it's part of what makes our communities interesting. The individual shops have character; the lay out, the decor, etc. reflect someone's personality, rather than at a big-box store where the lay out, advertising, color schemes, etc. are carefully considered to maximize spending. I feel like there's a certain emptiness to a place like Target. The sum of local stores makes a community more interesting, too - I'd rather walk down a classic main street with a dozen individual store fronts than pull into the SuperStore-GroceryStore-BookStore plaza.

I don't think that's a necessary outcome of technological advances, though. I think it's an unfortunate outcome of the "bigger, better, more" mind-set and larger failures in the political and economic arenas.

I also think people are eventually going to discover what a horrible mistake it was to give up their communities for McMansions and seas of asphalt. I don't think that in the long term, that lifestyle scales well in a world that has to move away from oil by necessity.

Haha, I've never seen any volume of Transmetropolitan at a chain store. It's hard enough to keep them on the shelves at an independent comic shop.

too true, too true. So sad.

Good article. Thanks

Unfortunately, it's not really a matter of paying "a little" extra. I would cheerfully pay that in most cases for the improved service and personal relationships developed. For example, the recent expanded rerelease of Junji Ito's earlier horror manga, Museum of Terror 1-3. 12 bucks each on Amazon, 14 at my local comic store (list price). Bought them at the comic store. Why quibble about two bucks (unless, I suppose, the item is only a few dollars to begin with)? But once you start getting up into the five-to-ten dollar differences, or $40, like the New X-Men Omnibus (or Absolute Sandman, when it actually *was* discounted)...can't do it. Like the store, but I have a small budget and I can't afford to be tossing money away simply because I appreciate the store's existence. I'm sure the threshold is probably higher for people with a larger income, but alas, I am not one of them.

Totally agree with ya there, man. Chicago has laws to help out the local business, but every time I visit home it feels filled with chain stores.

My best friend's father owned one of the best(and seemingly only) viable music stores in Atlanta when I was growing up. Sure, there were other places to buy guitars, but they were mostly acoustic for some reason. In that atmosphere, I met great bands, and really interesting people like Michael Style of R.E.M. He is now nearly out of business thanks to one of those many "discount" stores like Guitar Center, etc.

It just feels like the "Walmarts" of the world are making it so the individual cannot compete in the market anymore. Without quaint and off the beaten path places, where are those of us that are 'different' supposed to find havens where we can feel somewhat "normal" amongst our peers.

Yeah but anyone, including Friendly Local Stores, can and do sell through Amazon which opens their tiny store to a global marketplace and allows them to utilize all the features of Amazon's site to promote their own products. A merchant seller can even add items to Amazon's database that Amazon doesn't already sell. Having access to Amazon's huge advertising machine can be a positive thing.

nope, that was Borders all the way!

who are closing nearly all of their small stores (borders express, aka stores they absorbed years ago...walden's, brentano's, etc..)

i am with the chorus of 'amazon's to blame', to paraphrase...Net shopping has taken some biz away...for every retailer...

saving the couple bucks, for me, isn't work it as much as going to a smaller store and being able to chill out there, whilst digging for treasure...

I love the fact that you mentioned Black Hole, I just finished reading the whole series. Freaking great. Anyway where I'm from we have a movement with small local businesses to boost their sales and keep them in business called Keep Louisville Weird. For the most part they do a great job. Something like this may be what your city needs.

I think for many of us, that ten bucks is is what lets us buy the product at all.

I agree with that. I've never had an unpleasant shopping experience like that (as far as the store/personnel was concerned) at a Borders or Target or Best Buy. They've never given me "bad" customer service. I generally don't get the exceptional attention I do at Mac's Paperbacks or Music Saves, but they've never been rude to me or been unable to show me to what I was looking for.

If I'm looking for a specific book, generally I have to go to the chain or the internet to find it. They just have the square footage to stock a lot of stuff. It's a fact. The only place I'm going to find Zumpano's first album in my area is the internet.

It's a different story, of course, when I go out to buy a book or cd, any ol' book or cd, rather than a specific one, when the knowledge of the staff will be of value to me.

I must say that bookstore manager is a complete moron ... A great local shop is worth its weight in gold .. for me it was the Princeton Record Exchange in Princeton, NJ... which is still a great store ...

Strangely with Sam Goody out of business a block down the road the store got worse by adding more DVDs.

I was also lucky enough to get tons of great LPs in the early 90s when many, many people were selling off their collection.

A great shop is worth its weight in gold and that includes bars, coffee shops, etc.

There is also this group in Portland, ME near where I live now ... Porland Buy Local ...

http://www.portlandbuylocal.org/

Amen to that there used to be 3 record stores in my home town(I'm counting Sam Goody cause I was a regular there and well know as a result) now there all gone. granted one moved to a bigger store a few towns over but now my home town is realy lame no music,game or comic shops my only option for all of em is either the mall or the big chains

Wil,

I manage a liquor store in Englewood, Colorado. When I started there they were about to have a competitor open two blocks down the road, and the store I work at had been there for 30 years. The first thing I did was make sure that turnover in the staff went to nothing so the whole neighborhood would learn my staff. Then I made sure my staff learned my customers. Now every night I work over half of the customers are greeted by name as they enter the store. They always ask us for recommendations and any time we bring in a new product they will trust us to try it on our word with no other questioning. We're more busy than ever now, because we became the Friendly Local Liquor Store. People sure do appreciate it nowdays after all of the Wal*Mart's and Target's and Borders have destroyed us. The problem is getting people to go into them.

One of my friends owned a Local Friendly Game Store, and it was so good everybody who ever walked in was a loyal customer for life. Unfortunately that meant about 50 people and you've covered what makes Cheapass Games great, we (gamers) are generally broke. So he closed.

I guess, thanks for the essay encouraging people to go into their Local Friendly X Stores. They will definitely appreciate the difference, once they see it.