With the holidays right around the corner, all retail stores are preparing for the onslaught of rampant consumerism, even with the poor economy. The bookstore is really getting into it. The owner has come up with Holidays on the Harbor, filled with holiday cheer, carolers, and enough pine-scented candles to create sinus problems that’ll last until Valentine’s Day.

During the speech she gave to the employees, the owner started saying how the bookstore was really the only one doing anything Christmas-y. (I’m pretty sure there are some storefronts laced with holly and garland, but that’s not the point.) Then she pointed out how the bookstore is the retail anchorage for the entire town, and how the customers are the reason for the store’s existence. She points the latter out to nearly every customer and thanks them profusely for shopping local.

Later that day, one of the employees showed me an article in the November/December ‘09 issue of Poets & Writers. This magazine deals mostly with literary stuff, so I’m not interested in it, but I took a gander at an article titled Learning the Trade by Jeremiah Chamberlin. He’d worked in a bookstore out of college and learned about the business side of books: selling, returning, promoting. The stuff book lovers rarely, if ever, think about.

But it was the first paragraph that gave me pause:

Every few months, it seems, another landmark independent bookstore closes its doors–Harry Schwartz Bookshops in Milwaukee; Shaman Drum Bookshop in Ann Arbor, Michigan; and, more recently, Trover Shop in Washington, D.C. Each time, the dirge follows a familiar pattern: the bookshop is hailed as an anchor of the community, its importance as a literary hub is extolled, employees praise the working environment and their long-standing relationships with their customers, and the local citizenry is reminded ever so briefly that if you don’t spend your money at local businesses, those businesses disappear.

Needless to say, I’m kind of worried.