Thoughts on books, bookstores and stuff

Many years ago, in the days of albums and cassettes, my father told me that copying a song from someone else's record instead of buying my own was stealing a nickle or dime from the performer - somehow the same principle applies when I read Fran's blog about indie bookstores closing. If we don't support local businesses, how will our local economy survive.
I know, it's hard, but it is a matter of priorities like everything else. I buy at Costco, yes I do, because it is local and my kids went to school with one of the owner's kids. I buy at the local Top Foods because the company started in Bellingham and I shopped at their first store (trained to be a cashier there too). I do shop at other places, but I really try to prioritize the local guys.

I prefer local booksellers to big boxes, I can find things that big boxes don't carry, and there is an ambience that is lost in the order and precision of B&N or B. Daltons. Probably because the biggest treat in my young life was a trip to the used bookstore owned by a realtive in Vancouver BC. We would get 50 cents or so, a lot for kids who got a nickle a week for allowances, and could pick out what we wanted. Somehow that translated into a grocery bag of books each, comics were severely limited but we usually managed the Classic Comics and a few Marvels, and she made sure we had the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, all of Walter Farley, etc., even the latest Mad Magazine. I love the smell of books in one of the stores that specializes in something (usually mysteries) and has used books as well as the latest thing, the crush of the stacks of books overflowing shelves, the chair stuck in a corner that isn't quite out of the way, but everyone respects the reader, the clerks who not only know what they sell, but can recommend authors based on who I usually read.
That's service isn't it? Almost a totally lost art. In writing this I realize that I shop places because of the service I get. We recently changed pharmacies because one of the pharmacists was rude for the last time (no, I don't know how many times that was, but I recongnized the last one). I actually buy gas at Costco partly because I watched the attendant do a fill up for woman who was probably 90 and he was so sweet and solicitous to her - of course I can get the same price at AM/PM, but they charge extra if I use a debit card (not service?) and I'm at Costco to get the best, biggest $5 rotissourie chicken in town anyway.