Saturday, March 24, 2012

A gift

A farmer once told me that buying an apple at the farmers market is different from buying one at a big chain supermarket, but buying a book at an indie bookstore is no different from getting one on Amazon. "A book is a book," he said, "there's no difference in quality."

So begins the post of a Facebook friend this morning. It seems that in the wake of stories like the one published a few weeks back on the ruthless tactics employed in the large warehouses where people are exploited to pick our books and CDs and iPad covers and ear buds, a few people are reconsidering online purchases. It certainly affected me, an avowed online shopper.

When I lived in Portland, it was a lovely way to spend a rainy afternoon (and there are plenty of those), meandering through Powell’s City of Books. Back in the 70s, you could still smell the motor-y smell of the car dealership that had once occupied the space, and walk over the plywood that covered the erstwhile grease pits.

The habit stayed with me: college book lists meant a day trip Powell’s, both at the beginning of the semester (to buy) and the end (to sell). It was there that I fondled my first fine French Pléiades tomes, clad in calfskin, while my brother stocked up on Chilton manuals for his fleet. When I moved away, I found a local bookstore, Puss n’ Books, a place where you could lose yourself and your child for hours. Predictably, it could not bear the competition from the new kid on the block, Amazon, and so was no more.

So, I tried Amazon—who hasn’t? But I missed the used books, knowing that I was giving old books new life, and somehow connecting with other readers. When Powell’s went online, it regained its status as my go-to bookstore; it was as they say, a no-brainer. (You can see a link to Powell's on the left.)

But music was harder. My husband prefers a physical CD, so I had to go elsewhere when the local CD exchange emporium shuttered: the automated emails, the huge box and bubble wrap for the small item, the tracking number letting me follow its path across the country, the impenetrable customer service.

Then came another personal perfect storm: Mac McClelland’s warehouse wage slave article, and a post by my Irish fiddle teacher that he had a CD out—all about the time I was looking for the perfect something to mark Darling Husband’s birthday. With the CD located across the pond, I had to rule out buying it in person, so online it was. I clicked the link, expecting the slick automated shopping cart and checkout, and hoping against hope that it wasn’t a big warehouse with a sore-backed minimum wage slave.

It wasn’t. It was Walti, a friendly German fellow, who just happened to live in the village next to the one I had lived in Germany, and his website was refreshing: we’ll send your CD with an invoice, and we depend on your honesty to pay promptly. An exchange of emails between two people—no auto-reply bots—and CD and payment were both on their way.

The CD is lovely, familiar and new voices combined on familiar tunes, and Darling Husband likes it. I appreciate that the transaction was on a human scale. It is here that I must disagree with the farmer above: what I bought may be a commodity in the sense that CDs are manufactured (though in this case, Walti is selling his own voice), but buying from a person instead of a corporation meant that my experience was authentic and positive, something the big box folks will never be able to commoditize, as hard as they may try.