a million middle fingers to Amazon’s Department of Promotions and Pantomime Villainy-

To get the $5 discount, you’re supposed to use Amazon’s “Price Check” iPhone and Android app to scan in the bar code of an item and then indicate what price the item is being sold at. This gives Amazon valuable intelligence on how various retailers are pricing various items. “We scour online and in-store advertisements from other retailers, every day, year-round,” an Amazon director said on All Things D. But now Amazon won’t have to work so hard in the future, since hordes of consumers will (theoretically) sell out the merchants who pump sales taxes into their localities with sales taxes, all to save a measly five bones.

http://gawker.com/5865612/amazon-launches-christmas-attack-on-local-shops

So basically what they’re saying is that you should go into the shops that actually stock books, use your fucking smartphone to scan one, then have it shipped out of Amazon’s human rights breaching warehouse for a discount that amounts to less than minimum wage. Fucking excellent idea everyone! Let’s go do it! 

WHY YOU ARE A FUCKING MUG IF YOU DO THIS:

• Amazon aren’t even paying you your petrol money to the shop. If you’re that fucked off at the people in the bookshop having jobs then you could just stay home for free.
• Why in the name of fuck would you want Amazon to have any more data on you, let alone anyone else; this is market research, pure and simple. Amazon want to strangle the bookshops to death so that they can up their prices in four years and you’re an idiot if you don’t think that’s their intention. They want to skim off the facts of what people will pay for something, so that they can maximise their profits more precisely. Look after the cents and the billion dollar business will beat up everyone who argues.
• If this makes you feel smart, I genuinely despair at you. You’re defeating the evil independent bookseller in preference for the massive global corporation who give 0 shits for their employees or customers. 

This is genuinely appalling, too; even Amazon have rarely been this out-and-out aggressive. Is it just like a supermarket price check? No, not really; this is something that used to happen a lot when I was a bookseller: the customer would come in, look for a book and then brazenly say they were going to buy it on Amazon. They would’ve wasted my time for five minutes, asked a lot of questions and annoyed the shit out of me by temporarily turning me into an Amazon employee.

You see, a lot of book purchases still involve a conversation; we’re in the four weeks of the year when bookshops make the majority of their profit, in fact, their only profit of the year. This is when shops break even, just about, in the current climate. It’s the case for Amazon, too but instead of breaking even they’re raking in an even more enormous profit for four weeks. 

All of this involves taking on more staff to handle the number of customers through the doors- I’ve been a Christmas temp, it’s not a glamorous life. The customers at this time of year, even if they are regular book buyers, are not buying for themselves. They want to know if the book is suitable for a 12 year old, they want to know what they could get their granny, they want to know what a Dickens autobiography their partner was talking about last week is, they want something that was on Radio 4 about crocodiles earlier this year. This is the sort of thing that Amazon’s stalker algorithms aren’t great at- they can’t pick out what someone who isn’t you has been browsing for (or well, they can but they’re not allowed to show you it, yet…) but they can’t guess what the ‘blue book’ is. 

All good booksellers, though, will give you an ISBN for a book they’ve tracked down, if they can- that’s the magic key to heading off to Amazon and buying it. Sometimes this is fair enough, if it’s out of print and you’re not working near the Espresso Machine (no, not the coffee shop, the magic book printing machine) but if not then you’ve essentially just freelance employed me as an Amazon advisor and I want my fucking commission.

Every time this happened, I felt like asking the customer if I looked like a fucking mug and only restrained myself by the fact I probably did. They’d just taken advantage of my bookseller training (oh yes, we are trained) and the years I’d spent honing my mind to be able to find that blue book about a boy in the fifties so that they could spend slightly less on a robot. There’s no way to avoid this, though, if you’re a bookseller- if a customer comes in with a question, you answer it. Aside from anything else, I quite enjoyed it; the more deranged the ask, the better. In 2009 we had a game of ‘Turns Out To Be Twilight’ for the most obscure description of something their daughter had been asking for. 

I’m not really sure what Amazon’s plan is to buy up thousands of units of high street shops in order to advertise books, games and DVDs once it finally kills conventional retail. Presumably it could set up promotional warehouses in them, with some helpful staff to let people find things, so that people actually see there’s a new Jamie Oliver book (the opening rate on Amazon emails can’t be <i>that</i> amazing that it replaces walking past a window display twice a day every day) and then they could also have these amazing ‘instant purchase’ units, whereby you don’t even have to wait for your order to arrive!

I don’t want Amazon to have that. To be quite honest with you I’d rather they didn’t have anything, parodically evil company that they are but for god’s sake don’t make us all work for them without them even bothering to employ someone to sort out the fucking payroll. 

Here’s something I wrote about why Waterstones should be too big to fail some months ago: Stand By The Man I would still have to have a serious think about what to do if they offered me a job tomorrow, three years and a few hefty pay rises after my Christmas temp contract ended.