leahbobet | Currency Parity and Your Bookstore and You

Okay. So twice within the hour today I have seen posts on LJ and/or groups on Facebook* advocating not buying books at Canadian retailers who will not sell at the US cover price. Specifically, going in, demanding that the book be sold at the US price, and trying to pay in US funds at that price** or making other kinds of stink if the clerk says no, or informing them that because they will not accede to your demands, you will purchase at Amazon. Possibly when you had every intention of purchasing at Amazon.

I am here to tell you that there are two broad kinds of activism in this world: those that promote change and those that are an excuse to act like an asshole.

This is the latter.

People have explained this until they're blue in the face (typing fingers):

1) Publishers set prices.
2) The books are sold at a fixed discount from the publisher, through the distributor, to the bookseller. For most of our distributors at the bookstore, that is about 40%. Our profit margin as a business is defined by the rest of the distribution chain.
3) Bookstores, by and large, therefore do not exactly have a huge profit margin. Nobody's in this for the money, even Heather Reisman. She already has some.
4) If you, the customer, do this and were to get your way, the bookstore would be fucked. Its profit margin is set by outside forces, but those same forces don't set the rent it has to pay, staffing hours, hydro, the free food you get when you come to events, toiletpaper, and other necessities.
5) No clerk in Canada is going to say yes to that proposition and you know it.

Therefore?

This is not efficient activism, it's looking around to be nasty to people who can't hit back.

If your sensibilities as a customer are actually outraged at the lack of parity between Canadian and American prices on all kinds of goods at the moment (and yes, there is a degree to which they should be), here is what you should do to actually make a difference:

1) Write your MP a strongly worded letter saying that, as a constituent, you are not happy with how this government is enforcing your right to pay fair prices for product.
2) Write the publishers and say the same, as it is they who set the prices.
3) If you were planning on just buying online anyway? Just do it and that's all. Don't go into a store to pick on someone who you know has no say in the decision. If you held food in front of a cat and snatched it away, having never intended to feed it, they would pick you up for animal abuse. It's not okay for people behind counters either.
4) Consider, while this situation hopefully corrects, that there are things you get from a bookstore that you don't get online: the ability to browse, to be put on the trail of new authors or books. Expert opinion. That trick we do where you give me three authors you like and I find you something you've never heard of before, that you will like. Just as people fall down assuming that books are interchangeable commodity products (they aren't), methods of purchase for your books are not interchangeable either.

If you go into a business and pull that act and have not done any of the four above things? Well. You now know what I think of you.

So, in short?

Remember: Activist and Asshole both start with A, but that doesn't make them the same.

*Okay, I heard tell of that, I don't venture into Facebook.
**Won't work.